
Microsoft Teams breaks daily record with 2.7B meeting minutes, tops high by 200% - benryon
https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/09/microsoft-teams-breaks-daily-record-with-2-7-billion-meeting-minutes-tops-mid-march-high-by-200/
======
Someone1234
Because it is free with Office 365.

That's the whole problem with Teams, because they get to ride O365's coattails
they don't really /try/. The fact it is better than Skype for Business is more
an indictment of how bad S4B was, not an actual defense of Teams as a stand-
alone product/app.

Let's look at the popular things they haven't done:

\- Show video for all people in Video meeting: Created 2016. 37K votes. "In
the backlog."

\- Multi-window for chats and more: Created 2016. 17K votes. "Internal
testing."

\- Compact mode: Created 2016. 16K votes. "Not even in the backlog, we cannot
figure it out" (in spite of multiple third party CSS hacks that accomplish it
convincingly).

\- Move a project (channel) from one team to another: Created 2016. 15K votes.
"In the backlog."

But don't take my word for it, review what they have actually accomplished
from their own UserVoice here:

[https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public](https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public)

But it is popular because it is free and bundled with something successful, so
the Teams team can sit around for four years with little to show for it.

When will Teams actually be good when measured against the market rather than
the [worse] thing it replaced?

~~~
jlack
My problem with it is that Teams fails to do what Skype/Lync did do well,
while trying to mimic slack and not achieving that very well either.

For instance you can't break out individual chat windows to take up less
space. Dial-in numbers for meetings aren't there by default either, you need
individual licenses - which is probably why it's 'free'.

------
BiteCode_dev
Is it me or are there a lot of articles indirectly promoting Microsoft on HN
these days?

It's getting harder and harder to tell if those are genuine news or a PR firm
at work, but "MS breaks a records in meeting minutes" feels even more like
advertising than "Azur is getting 10 times more traffic".

If this is advertising, is there a way to prevent them from staying on the
front page?

~~~
derefr
Some companies (like today’s Microsoft, apparently) have PR arms that are
actually good at their jobs—writing articles that are, independent of their
ability to advertise their company, actually intellectually gratifying in some
way.

People who post things to HN, independent of being shills for any given
company, like to post intellectually gratifying things. Sometimes those things
happen to also be PR pieces. I don’t think the people who post these things
really think about them as being PR pieces; or, if they do, they post them
_despite_ that, because in the balance, the piece still works out to be worth
reading (in their opinion) even after giving it a demerit for being PR.

I’m not denying that there are shills on HN, mind you. I’m sure there are many
of them. But I would say that even those shills probably have some sort of
“standards”—only posting the PR pieces available to them if they think they’ll
do well here (which means, only posting the pieces someone else who wasn’t a
shill would have posted anyway.) To do otherwise might get them banned as
spammers (which I do believe does happen—mods want to chime in on that?)

And then we still have the filter of some amount of upvoting being required to
get things to the front page, plus (I assume) some sort of behind-the-scenes
voting-ring detection. So the upvote signal is likely to express genuine
community interest, and therefore to signal that the piece _does_ have value
independent of its PR-power.

~~~
BiteCode_dev
Good PR is not doing the post yourself, but creating a post that is passable
enough to be posted by a regular user on your behalf.

Just because it is well done does not mean it has good value as news.

Indeed, even if it's an ok read, it's giving a lot of attention to a company
just because it has the money to attract said attention, no matter the quality
of their service. Since the reader's time and energy is limited, it's taking
the place of another possible read.

In the same way, by allowing this to happen, this lets a company create a
fantastic image of itself, that is independent from it's real quality, just
because it has the budget to do it. Cumulatively, this can, after years, end
up rewriting history, and lead even educated people to make altered judgements
and decisions in the future.

I'm not saying that as an anti-microsoft attack, I dislike the concept of such
powerful PR in general, MS is just here a potential example for this.

As an HN reader, I wish there would be a policy about this. But I have no idea
what it would look like, or how one could enforce it.

So maybe I'm just making a lot of noise for nothing.

------
crazygringo
Man this is a... boring article.

Anybody who upvoted this, why? It feels very weird to be on the front page
with 27 votes so far.

~~~
derefr
Probably they found the title an interesting fact on its own, with the article
itself being kind of vestigial.

I’m guessing people are _hoping_ there’ll be interesting tangential discussion
in the comments re: the infrastructural challenges imposed on IT departments
(and especially cloud vendors) due to WFH. People expecting the title to have
high “comment potential” seems to be a theme where “trivial” things being
upvoted are concerned.

------
derefr
Some tangential conversations from this otherwise-boring lede:

• Has any Slack-based org tried actually using Slack’s now-integrated video
calling for your meetings?

• Has anyone tried using _Discord_ for meetings? It seems to have the required
infrastructure...

• Is anyone here at an org that’s skipping integrated video chat, where
they’re just doing regular company-PBX audio-only conference-call dial-in?
(I’ve always thought there’d be nothing lost by just emailing everyone a link
to a presentation, and then looking at it together over a conference-call via
“now turn to page 3”-like instructions. Maybe together with a freely-editable
Google Doc that serves as a “whiteboard” for the people in the conversation.)

• Is anyone here having synchronous meetings as regular group-chat text
exchanges, where everyone is supposed to “synchronously” attend? (I’ve always
felt like this would be the best approach for enabling accessibility to
differently-abled employees; and, coincidentally, would enable machine-
searchability later without anyone needing to transcribe anything.)

~~~
Hawxy
> Has any Slack-based org tried actually using Slack for your meetings?

Most of my work's teams use slack for their daily calls. Seems OK in testing
with up to 10 people. Anything bigger usually moves to GoToMeeting.

> Has anyone tried Discord for meetings?

I use Discord for my team, since it allows you drop in & out of voice chat
during the day so peeps can float in & out of chat as they go to other
meetings/lunch etc. Lot more convenient than doing a call, and results in the
entire team closely collaborating for most of the day.

The voice chat latency & screen sharing quality is also equal or better to
other options due to Discord's gaming-focused optimisations.

I'd note that it isn't really suitable for the wider business as mass-meetings
with webcams would require a manually created, private DM group (rather than
just a an invite link as with zoom/goto).

------
tracker1
For what it's worth, I like MS Teams... I'm not even a big Windows guy at this
point... most of my dev at least targets linux, and most of my time is in VS
Code with an ssh or wsl remote session. I use Linux directly, but not as much
this past few weeks as a couple projects I'm on don't work in Linux.

I think that Teams is better than most at most of what it does... That's kind
of hard to quantify, but like most things from MS Office, it's not that it's
the best at any given one thing.. it's that it does many things good enough
and things the competition doesn't.

~~~
sebazzz
Teams is however _weird_ when it comes to files. Apparently a Teams team has a
shadow sharepoint site behind it. The attachments from teams are stored there.
However, when I want to embed an Excel sheet from the _actual_ Sharepoint site
of my team, I have no way to do that.

~~~
WorldMaker
It's not meant to be a "shadow" SharePoint site from what I gather, it is
meant to be the same O365 SharePoint site as every thing else for the Team. My
impression is that it may be really easy for O365 admins to misconfigure,
though, especially in (likely) scenarios of migrating (or avoiding migrating)
on-premises SharePoint sites to O365.

Microsoft products are sometimes loved by IT departments because they have
lots of configuration options; Microsoft is just really bad about leaving tons
of footguns lying around in those configuration options, and IT departments
apparently love footguns.

------
pavanagrawal123
The source of this article has better info: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/0...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/09/remote-work-trend-report-
meetings/#.Xo8gHhj7jh4.twitter)

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I know in my company Webex is slowly being replaced by MS Teams. From my
experience, neither is great, but they mostly just work, which helps since our
team has a big spread when it comes to basic computer skills. Even them, why
MS Teams? I don't see any real advantage between the two.

~~~
tracker1
It does better than most with meetings, especially outlook integration. Beyond
this, outlook calendar in teams... along with a better interface for
documents/files (sharepoint on the backend, but mostly don't need to know) ..
those same files can be accessed via OneDrive .. not to mention the wiki and
other extension (devops feeds into channels).

There are bits and pieces better in other apps, but it does all of these
things good enough, and as a whole, I find it better as a collaboration suite.

------
fnord77
2.7B billion minutes of work not being done :)

~~~
input_sh
Quite a lot more if you include more than just calls.

I feel like I'm on a lower end of this with 2h 43m of my time this week, 36m
58s of which were yesterday.

------
Stierlitz
It's well known that ones productivity increases in proportion to the number
of meetings one attends.

