I mean this without being tongue in cheek, but Teams itself is anti-competitive. It's a horrible product which is basically only in use because it's bundled into Office 365. Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for Business or plain old Skype.
Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are expecting from end-user chats like Telegram or WhatsApp or Messages. Even Google has fallen far behind with regards to Hangouts, and Allo is not a good answer either. From a business perspective, I get why businesses choose Teams or Allo, but the actual products have usability as an incidental feature. With both major players, the chats are just there to ensure that Slack cannot/will not grow, same with other programs such as Discord. It's a revenue stream that is yet untapped, and soon Microsoft and Google will come calling for their payment from Businesses.
FYI, as a Microsoftie, (so I really have no horse in the teams v skype/lync debate) I find teams to be FAR better than skype. I'm on a half-remote team, and when we have to interface with groups that preferr skype, it always seems more frictional; I even was joking to my peers today that in teams we are more prompt+get through+done with meetings even faster than our in-person versions. It has rough edges that I trust engs are looking into, but I raise an eyebrow at the assertion that skype does it better, outside of integration scenarios which are rapidly improving. (And I used to use skype as the primary method of communication between my breakdancing crew a decade or so back, and used slack more recently for another job, I simply don't see Teams being as far behind as you imply.)
Similarly, I personally find the bundling->anticompetitive argument very unconvincing, especially given G-suite and other players in the cloud office space, especially in this context as atlassian's business model "rhymes" pretty heavily.
(As always disclaimer all opinions are my own, etc etc)
> Absolutely nothing in Teams is not done better in other products, including Microsoft's own products such as Skype for Business or plain old Skype.
I haven't tried Teams yet, but I struggle to imagine how anything could be worse than the current state of Skype for Business and still function even minimally.
(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on Teams / Office)
I've used Slack for 2+ years, hipchat for ~1 year, Discord for gaming for years, and now Teams for ~1 year. For work, I like Teams best.
In my mind the most significant, perhaps the only significant, difference between Teams and the rest is the threaded-by-default approach. It was hard to get used to at first, but this make it so much easier to keep track of different conversations that would otherwise overlap. In my mind, it's the best of both chat and email. Slack kind of does this but it's not nearly as seamless. You have to hover over the small reply icon and most of the time people don't do this. In Teams, you are forced to use threads and I think it is a good thing. Teams definitely has its quirks but with the velocity of improvements I've seen, most have already been fixed and I'm optimistic the rest will all be ironed out before long.
I don't even include Skype for Business in this comparison because in my mind Skype for Business is in a completely different category. It doesn't do the same things. And I can't think of another software product I dislike as much as Skype for Business / Lync.
1) It constantly minimizes for seemingly no reason (at least once a week).
2) The "Teams" and "Chat" menus are separate. They're in the same window in Slack, and that just makes sense.
2.1) The "Teams" menu won't list more than 4 channels per Team by default. If you want to open a channel there you have to open the menu or favorite everything. I know this can be fixed by good sanitation by Team admins but Slack's way of doing it encourages it automatically.
3) Can't invite outside users like you can with Slack.
4) The chat history is so short it has to load after maybe 10 lines when scrolling up.
5) The "thumbs up"/message menu covers the message when hovering over it so it's impossible to highlight a message to copy/paste starting from the right to the left. You can go the other way but I never have until Teams.
6) Updates take forever to release! I've googled issues that MS staff note as "on the docket" for adding but months later it's still not added.
7) I frequently don't see the toast/popup notifications for some reason. I don't know what's going on there and it could be me but I don't remember it happening when I used Slack at work.
8) When it updates it shuts down without notification.
9) This might be the Android "work profile" in play but if I get a call or sometimes even a message the Android notification will not go away until I restart my phone.
I mean, Slack isn't perfect but I didn't have any complaints about it except that the call functionality would disconnect randomly.
re toast/pop ups, it’s SO frustrating that they don’t use the OS built in notifications framework! doesn’t respect DND and plenty of other integrations because of this ridiculous decision
I didn't know they had a desktop app. I only use it in a web browser and on my phone and I don't think they have those issues. Maybe you should give those a try?
This list contains the majority of my and my teams' complaints about Teams. For us, the big issue is that historical data is near impossible to dredge out of Teams because of the aforementioned scrolling issue. Search is universal and cannot be limited to a single user, and also is fairly literal, meaning you can't really search for something that So-an-So posted awhile back about X, unless you know the exact content of X.
Bookmarking exists, but you can't link to public bookmarked chats.
5 is a surprisingly frustrating one for us as the exact way it occurs is simple: Someone messages you, then right away attaches a ticket number, for example, which appears on the second line. The context menu will obscure this number completely, and only if there is enough whitespace on the line to double click to "Select All" can you select it.
Teams gives incredibly limited access to the calendar, insomuch that you can only go a few days back and forth, not a week for example, and you can't block out your time via Teams (i.e., add just an appointment time for yourself, since you need to add someone else to the meeting)
The mobile client seems to be absolutely the only application that decides there is a low internet condition, despite every other application on my phone fetching content happily and freely (Outlook on Android likes to do this too and refuse to fetch message content, frequently requiring a force quit of the Application to recover from and the Application becomes completely unresponsive)
Back to the Desktop app, it's also quite slow just in general, moving between Team Chats is very sluggish whereas other chat programs handle this in a snappy and graceful manner. File uploads are very awkward, and the fact that dragging and dropping a picture from a browser uploads it as Sharepoint content instead of as just inline (like other messaging clients) do is just a bit asinine. To have to first drag it to the desktop, then attach the file is just another annoyance.
All in all, for me it's just comparing what Teams offers to what something like Telegram offers, and it's night and day between the two. Most of the time in our org, as soon as you're past the acquaintance stage with someone after discussing an issue on Teams, you ask to be allowed to talk with them on Telegram instead.
For the actual chatting part of a chat program, it's really bad. For internal video/calls, it's not too bad (though our experience trying to use the Web-version to make a video call was an exercise in Microsoft frustration, as we found out that we basically had to use Edge if we wanted to use the Web Version to do it, and even then it didn't work). Nevermind that a Safari Version has been promised from months at this point without any delivery.
To me Teams feels like Microsoft saw that there was revenue in locking clients into their chat eco-system, but didn't have a product ready, so they decided to release Teams and just get everyone onboard. My cynical take is that soon they realized they didn't have to compete if they bundled Teams with their Office packages and called it a Slack Competitor; suddenly, the decision was pay for something like Slack, or a "Slack Competitor" you already bought.
I will give Teams this thought, their bot integration is very nice. I think Telegram does it a bit better, but we do make very good use of the chat bots for basic automated updating and information distribution.
Same here. We just started using it and everyone really likes it so far. Much better than Skype. I've tried Slack and didn't really care for it. I realize MSFT is mimicking the Slack style in Teams, but I just didn't really actually want to use Slack. But Teams seems like something I want to use.
Business chats in general are just completely incongruent with what users are expecting from end-user chats like Telegram or WhatsApp or Messages. Even Google has fallen far behind with regards to Hangouts, and Allo is not a good answer either. From a business perspective, I get why businesses choose Teams or Allo, but the actual products have usability as an incidental feature. With both major players, the chats are just there to ensure that Slack cannot/will not grow, same with other programs such as Discord. It's a revenue stream that is yet untapped, and soon Microsoft and Google will come calling for their payment from Businesses.