
Microsoft Teams is now officially bigger than Slack - Sgt_Apone
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/07/microsoft-teams-is-now-officially-bigger-than-slack/
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techdragon
The Microsoft Teams client on the Mac is the worst program I have to deal with
on a routine basis. While Teams + 365 + SharePoint, overall is a good set of
functionality brought together as a product... I frequently find those pieces
of functionality that belong to Teams, have been assembled in a way that I
find totally incomprehensible.

Like how the Mac desktop client implemented their own pop up notifications
windows. They don’t correctly pop to the foreground, they don’t work when your
in a full screen app, and to add insult to injury, the presence of the
“window” that shows notifications frequently breaks the ability to command-tab
over into the Teams application because it will have taken focus to ostensibly
show a popup, but not returned it so when I’m eventually asked to check
something in Teams I have to head to the dock to manually pick the real Teams
client window.

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BostonEnginerd
The only thing worse is Skype for Business on the Mac. It's the worst business
software that I need to use.

~~~
cosmie
And the only thing worse than _that_ is throwing interop/coexistence
mode[1][2] into the mix. It's basically a force multiplier on the hell of
using Skype for Business with a Mac.

It takes the already gimped Skype for Business on the Mac, and adds a
multiplier effect.

[1] Interop mode is designed for a progressive rollout/migration from Skype
for Business to Teams. On an all-Windows deployment it generally works well
enough to get by with a few annoying UX-related hassles getting passed between
the two apps. But throw Mac machines into the mix, with already gimped client
functionality, and interop mode just sort of breaks you to the point of having
an aversion to any work that involves calls/meetings/chats with coworkers.

[2] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/MicrosoftTeams/coexistence-...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/MicrosoftTeams/coexistence-chat-calls-presence)

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joeblubaugh
> It plans to roll out channel moderation and priority notifications, which
> will ping a recipient every two minutes until a response is made.

Oh my god

~~~
skinnymuch
I’m usually pretty staunchly against the seemingly vocal majority of HN on
topics like this (in this case, shitting on Teams a ton. And shitting on Slack
a good amt too). But that priority notification is ridiculous and hilarious.

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mikece
Which means the number of people who will complain loudly and pull shadow-IT
setups of Slack will skyrocket. Last year my employer MANDATED we switch from
free Slack to a full-featured trial of Teams... and within 72 hours that
mandate was dropped because __executives__ were not getting messages that they
knew had been sent. Slack, on the other hand, Just Works.

~~~
zxcvbn4038
I think we need to differentiate between just works and barely works. With
Slack I think someone decided to go full dot-com and throw away everything
known about human communication so they could learn it again by trial and
error. You can’t mute bots, you can’t mute plugins, can’t add someone to a
private conversation, anyone can auto-join you to any channel, api is full of
typemorphic elements that encode their type within themselves, don’t get me
started about Slack threads.

~~~
HomeDeLaPot
When using Slack I was always impressed by how clunky and buggy the post
editor was. Had to reload it a time or two almost every time I used it, and
their method for making sure your changes weren't lost was to tell you to copy
and paste it.

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hellothereyo
In other news, Microsoft makes the Teams app a mandatory extra install as part
of their most recent software update ballooning their userbase to a couple of
billion users.

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thejenk
I would love to know what they classify as a daily active user. My expectation
would be someone who sends or receives a message, but I would never have
expected the numbers to be so high. Maybe they're counting everyone who signs
into their O365 account who has a Teams subscription.

~~~
Stranger43
More likely anyone who have an active O365 subscription that includes teams
even if they only have that subscription because thats the only way MS is
selling access to the traditional desktop office application that they need
for some decade old workflow.

While the press have been blinded by MS's nonsense "we L..... Linux" campaign
nobody seams to have noticed that their office department is playing the same
dirty games MS got fined over a decade ago in forcing every office user to
obtain a O365 subscription and putting a tremendeous amount a presure on their
SME customers to obtain the full O365 stack which include teams(which MS
insists is replacing skype for business).

Remember also that MS marketing is almost 110% tailored to the now aging set
of SME admins that entered the market doing the transition from big iron to
winNT networks in the 90ies and who depend on MS Certified courses and books
for all of their formal IT training and that SME market where those Teams
deployments comes from, if you have an Teams subscription and a "i only know
the MS stack" mindset you are not going to deploy stack no matter how much
more your users prefer it to Teams.

And the "We love linux on Azure" marketing is exactly that narrow, the same
day it was announced MS killed of any feature they ever had that made it
easier to integrate Linux* into wintel networks, making it clear to all but
the clueless that it's only about headless linux guest running comodity web
frameworks running inside azure or hyperV then any change in MS attitude
towards competitors and that was forced on them by the fact that the webdev
market was/is dominated by OSX clients and linux servers.

*SFU and RFC2307 support was dropped along with the teams/skype clients for linux the same week they started raving about linux CLI's being usable from windows clients.

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TrinaryWorksToo
Is this about as interesting as the fact that calc.exe is bigger than slack in
terms of installs?

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wcoenen
The second sentence of the article says that this is comparing active users,
not installs.

