Microsoft unbundling Teams is to appease regulators, not give customers a better deal If you're planning to save money by cutting out the unbundled Teams product from your Microsoft 365 subscription, the decision might not be as straightforward as you'd think. Earlier this week, Microsoft confirmed that it would be introducing new commercial terms for Teams, including offering Office 365/ Microsoft 365 without …
Is there one? I've used Gchat, WebEx, Slack, and probably some others... They all suck in their own ways. GChat seems designed to make corporate counsel buying pepto bismal in bulk the way it routinely deletes things, the less said about WebEx the better IMO, Slack is just IRC but as an electron app... Teams is better than the rest in some ways, worse in others. Unless you want to create a bespoke system and assume all the responsibilities that come with it, it's basically a game of picking your poison. Do you want a slow agonizing death of a thousand cuts, do you want to die peacefully in your sleep, do you want to violently puke up your internal organs... whichever you choose, death is inevitable.
Speaking as a Linux guy, forced to use Windows at work, Teams seems to be the least shite.
Most everything freezes your machine (especially Skype) when you share your screen. Teams doesn't. Skype has the extra feature of freezing EVERYBODY'S machine.
As a lot of my day is "ok, share the screen and show me how it shit the bed" this makes a difference.
Teams also seems to be the only one where remote-controlling the other guy's PC actually works.
The only really decent chat UI I've ever used was Pidgin. But it never did screen-sharing.
We use Teams every day, all day, we are a global workforce where people are either remote to a city halfway across America, or in the UK. 50% of our office workforce is now work from home.
Do you know how many support calls we get because of Teams? ZERO!
Maybe you people should look at the state of you PCs before pointing fingers!
Work adopted Teams having previously inflicted Lync and its Skype for (ruining your) Business remix on us.
Teams was a great improvement for me, because there was a Linux version. Lync I had to run in a Windows VM, and the sound never worked properly.
There continues to be an unofficial Linux version, but no longer supplied by MS.
It looks like it's on its way to the great bit bucket in the sky. Recently it has been poking me in the face with annoying messages about how "classic" Teams is being replaced by new Coke, and that my "browser" (actually Electron) won't support it. It seems that New Teams will require Edge. Here we go again. It seems they're unable to learn from history.
-A.
Microsoft said they dropped Teams on Linux as they had something like 1% of their userbase on Linux and it wasn't worth the effort. As the Teams client is just a web browser (so the desktop experience is much closer to the web interface - they're around 99% the same) MS tell Linux users to just use the web interface.
My favourite part of 'new coke' is how it defaults to using edge as the browser to open links with - not your specified system default, oh no, why in heavens would you want to use the browser you've indicated and updated a setting to say you want, no, no, we've added another setting hidden deep down in the teams menu for you to have to find and update which browser teams will use... can't think why this is default behaviour - they should be slapped with whatever antitrust fines were on the cards prior to them making the browser option available.
It's quite funny as Microsoft popped up with one of those little surveys right in the middle of the red midst teams had evoked so I wrote a fairly detailed response, including the lines "we only use teams as it's built in, given the option, I don't think anyone would voluntarily pay for it" - couple of weeks later and here we are, let's see if I'm right.
Sadly we're not in the EEA (almost as far as you can get away from it), but I live in hope the decision comes over here and we can move to slack, which is slightly less aggravating for the features we utilise.
Oh, look, a downvote with no actual reply. I get it: you don't like Teams, but when put to the question, you can't actually think of a better alternative. Maybe Teams isn't the problem, and you just don't like the nature of instant messaging/conferencing applications in general. Or maybe you just have knee-jerk Microsoft hatred.
Either way, die mad, bro.
Not the one that down voted you, but slack is a better communications platform than teams, the mashed together lync/Skype for business, sharepoint and one drive interface.
I have both at work, teams as its provided by our office 365 subscription and used for meetings as that's what everyone in the company has, slack is used for most text chats and small file transfers.
Teams isn't used for chats that much as its awful to find conversations, files shared and history in it,
Also teams is so damn slow at times, crashes, none windows clients are awful / missing features, unlike slack.
Slack - and discord, which is slack for young people - has significant usability benefits for many users.
I often use Slack ‘huddle’, google meet, and Ms Teams for work. Have also used Facebook messenger, FaceTime and Jitsi meet.
While there are many differences, the deciding factor isn’t what is ‘better’, it is the need to talk to someone means using the platform they are stuck with.
It's the "least worst of". Hate Webex and Zoom, it pains me greatly to say it, but Teams actually beats them both hands down in terms of actual business use. Most of my company is still WFH and being able to simply click the phone button and also "add person to call" just works, screen sharing, device selection for camera or headset, just works.
After 35 years of using MS stuff I don't have a very high opinion of much of it but Teams as a comms tool actually works, can't say the same for the built in wiki or most of the other plugins as they're just filler and complete and utter shite but the comms part does work.
The "do blah and it just works" seems to describe Skype which as anyone with an eye on the IT world will know was not written by MS. We still have it at ${large_gov_dept}, I think because of some contractual issues that means something would break if we turned it off before the contract is up and things can be moved. I thank ${deity} for that.
We also have Teams. I HATE THE PILE OF EXCREMENT. It seems to be a layer of lipstick, on more layers of lipstick, on a pile of gaffer tape that's holding together a few barely polished turds (cough, Sharepoint, cough). OK, perhaps my feelings are slightly coloured by having had to useendure it while still on Win 7 and having to use the web version which sucks even more than the native Win 10 version, but even allowing for that I still detest it.
All of the various chat apps share one thing in common..... they are all s**t.
For what are often professed as productivity apps, they couldn't be farther from the truth.
What they have done is murder productivity, and ironically, communication.
What could be achieved by walking to somebody at their desk, ask and answered inside of a minute, has been replaced by ...
1. Walk to desk
2. Ask question
3. I'm too busy can you Slack/Teams/etc me....
4. Hours of tumbleweed
5. Days of tumbleweed
6. Walk to desk
7. Sorry, I didn't think it was important/I forgot a.k.a I can't be arsed
What you didn't see is the 30 minutes (or more) of lost productivity caused by interrupting that person for "a minute".
Or the entire lost days caused by multiple such interruptions.
Human task switching is very slow and quite lossy.
When you interrupt someone who is deep in thought, it takes a very long time for them to get back "in the zone" - and they may never recover their train of thought at all.
Estimates vary, but it's at least 20-30 minutes.
Async communication allows the response to wait until you are at a natural break. Of course, having Teams go "bong" all the time is worse, but at least you can shut it up.
Logging in to a community in teams is painful. Invited into a community I can only access the shared area if I use the initial invite (even then it doesn't always work telling me I don't have permissions to access it), I can't even book mark the link. The idea is nice the result fails to meet the promise.
Why? What's so innately difficult about a video calling app that you need a manual? The only time I've ever got Teams to work is when it's someone else's account amd they send me a link. I have never yet been able to even get into it due to failing in a doom loop of trying to login in.
Ever thought that there is bascially just something wrong with your account which needs fixing?
We use it all the time for both internal and international client meetings.
I wouldn't say it is "wonderful", but it certainy works.
As others have said, it has it own oddities but then what doesn't. They all have them.
We don't need a "chat" app. We mainly just need video conferencing with the ability to share documents/presentations on the screen - not the document files themselves.
And for that, it does a reasonable job without having to shell out yet more money to yet another supplier.
The integration with the rest of MS Office is ok.
Maybe...
But without more specifics on EXACTLY what happens when they try "to get into" Teams, it is all just speculation.
"If Teams cannot deal with or clearly explain what needs to be done, Teams is at fault."
I've dealt with lots of software, much of which is NOT Microsoft's, where error handling/fault recovery is utterly dire.
One of the biggest bugbears I've had with Teams is Microsoft's inability to make, what should be, a simple thing like "sign out" work properly.
I mean, how hard can it be to make "sign out" work properly?
"Mr. Customer, I have this great product I want to sell you, and if you buy my product, I'll give you this other product for free!"
Seriously, if Riobe said "Buy my lawn mower and I'll give you this weed-whacker for free." Would Stiel sue them?
If you want to compete, sell a better product!
"But it's integrated with Microsoft 365! Microsoft won't give us the APIs!" Then create a product that competes with Microsoft 365!"
If this ends up making everyone pay more, how does that help the consumer, which is what these regulators are charged to do. They are not charged to help Google make more money!
Why does Europe always have to be the blistering boil of the world's ass!
That's not a fair comparison.
More like, if you use our lawn mower, then the lawn will become Riobe only and other manufacturer's kit will stop working properly with it. A Stihl weed-whacker will still "sort of" work but will leave strange artefacts because MS has now engineered that your lawn will be incompatible with it. The MS weed-wacker will work fine as they'll have access to "magic" interfaces known only to them.
And then, having capitulated and ditched Stihl, next week you find that your borders have also adapted, and your forks/trowels no longer work properly - but guess what, RiobeMS has ones that work fine with the new version of borders.
Next thing, you've been happy for years using your old lawnmower. It works fine, after all, what could you possibly want that your old lawnmower didn't do. Except, your drive got in on the act, and then the road. Sure, you can still use your faithful old Volvo, but for some reason, it's hard to keep it on the road as the road seems to have developed an ability to want to throw it off. Even worse, you find that suddenly you can't get your shopping to work with the non-MS car - the big shops have also gone down the MS route, and somehow the shopping bags are no longer compatible with a non-MS car.
Then just for the cherry on top, you find out that the faithful old tools you've been using for a while won't work at all if you move house - to one where the previous owner allowed newer versions of MS Lawnmower to convert their lawn and garden formats. So you have no choice but to upgrade - and then you find you can't buy a new lawnmower and use it for as long as you want to, you can only rent one.
Many years ago, back in the Big Iron Age, IBM was forced by a consent decree to unbundle its software from its hardware offerings.
My recollection (and others with better memories than mine might differ) is that IBM quickly discovered that unbundled software could be a source of great profit, the whole becoming the greater sum of its parts, if I may mangle a metaphor.
I use Google meet, slack's huddle, teams, we ex, Skype for business (well, not recently), zoom and any others clients force on me.
I'm on a Mac, and the *only* one that I have to allow 5 minutes to logo for a meeting. The link to the "app" invariably fails with a "classic" app, and a white screen.
The others just work, although I prefer the Google meet setup requiring just a browser.
Okay zoom usually works, but if your organisation requires you do the zoom update just before you have a call with $important_client_who_cannot_use_anything_else well then you're stuffed as the zoom install takes another five minutes. Great job
I'm a Mac user and have no problems with Zoom, Google or Teams.
Yeah, Zoom forcing you to upgrade before it lets you join a meeting is a bit of a PITA, but I've gotten into the habit of launching the Zoom app way before my first Zoom meeting just to make sure there are not surprise updates. (Teams beats Zoom here as Teams updates in the background and just asks you to restart when convenient)
Oh - and it's not your organisation that forces Zoom updates but Zoom itself.
This "event" is nothing new, just remember the older advice ...
Think twice before you answer, Think twice before you make a move, my brothers. When a Lion is sleeping, think before you wake him, because you never know what an angry Lion will do, so think twice before you answer. Think twice before you make a move, my brothers, cos if you don't think twice, you must think foolish. And you will find yourself at the other side of the fence. - Junior Murvin "Think Twice" on the great album MuGgErS iN tHe StReEt (that's the album cover characters).
Not a remote-meeting user. My wife's organization uses Zoom, and she hates Teams -- probably mostly through unfamiliarity, perhaps because she only gets to use the free client version of Teams.
I'm seeing a love-hate relationship here with Teams, but not much about Zoom. Doesn't anybody else use Zoom anymore? Why not?
There is a “sort-of” battle going on to finally kill Firefox browser by Microsoft and Google “Donald Trumping” the ecosystem by throwing up fake incompatibilities and “this don’t work on Seamonkey” baloney error messages. Seamonkey works just fine… it’s your corporation that’s defective. And dying.
I don’t use any of these garbage malware instant message “apps,” I share messages online exclusively on email, or some other FOSS technology, perhaps Jitsi, and what the hell is wrong with IRC?? Instead of wasting time playing Microsoft Apple Google B/S war battle, I BOYCOTT everything they do and are involved in. Those mega corps are 100% irrelevant to me, and have been for a couple years now.
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