> Teams is particularly effective as a way to prevent a Microsoft customer from even trying Slack.
You sure about that, Ben?
Teams has been a disappointment for my group. We need it. At least, we need what it is on paper. But it's been so bad that my (Microsoft-loving) boss asked me to write a groupware web app specifically for our workflow, so that we wouldn't have to try to make that shoe fit any more.
The fundamental, universal problem that Microsoft is trying to fix with Teams is a problem of their own making: Office. Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! Can't add a series of numbers without Excel! Can't have a meeting without a slide deck! So every non-single-office-sized organization has mountains and mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it with SharePoint. They tried and failed to fix it with OneNote. And now they're failing to fix it with Teams.
Ray Ozzie fixed it with Groove, 15 years ago, then Microsoft acqui-hired him, and threw the product away. Good work, there, Ballmer.
I've seen firsthand that Teams is effective at drawing attention from Slack and similar. People want a persistent chat service. There was a strong push for Slack, or something like it. Some companies push back, but if there's enough momentum and demand, eventually infrastructure needs to provide some solution. And if a company is already a Microsoft shop, they'll provide Teams (with its full integration with everything else they're already using) rather than considering something like Slack.
A former employer bristled at the cost of Slack[1]. Why should we pay for Slack when we already own Teams? Everyone will just use Teams.
About a week later I was on 4 unofficial Slack workspaces.
They also mandated Teams for meetings, which was both terrible and particularly hostile to external invitees, so everyone just used free versions of Zoom instead.
Yeah, the one killer thing that slack has is that there is a free tier which is perfectly usable. Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team. At the end of the day it's just not worth fighting it anymore if everyone is determined to use slack.
> Organizations can try and force everyone to use Teams but in practice they can't stop people from just spinning up a free-tier slack account for their team.
Unless you work for a large corporation or really any business that takes security seriously. Many of these businesses will quickly fire employees for conducting company business on non-approved applications or sites. Major security issues there.
Those companies are bad. There’s ways to train users and secure material on slack. Picking bad tools and firing users for trying to work around IT rules punishes innovation and results in worse employees.
I used to work for a company with 200k employees that banned any use of google apps. In 2009. Even working on a different company’s doc was banned. They threatened firing. It was ridiculous.
One day a partner was presenting from google drive. One of the IT execs said “you can’t use google drive” during the presentation. The partner asked what he should use and the IT guy said something about opening a ticket with AV and emailing the presentation.
The partner kept going and the It guy said “no seriously, you’ll be fired.” The partner laughed, kept going and said “I’ll risk it.”
Have you ever seen a news article talking about a data breach? They're posted here pretty regularly, and most big news outlets discuss the more important ones when they happen.
I only ask because your comment sounds like you don't think security is a concern for businesses. It is, so much so that worldwide, companies who have been breached spend close to $4 million cleaning up after the incident [1]. In the US it's actually more like $8 million to clean up after a breach. And if you read the report, data leaks (like customer info sitting in an unsecured Google account) account for half of all breaches.
I'd like you to understand how Google Docs poses a risk to businesses. Imagine you want to share a customer list with someone else in your company, but you don't want to use Word and OneDrive like IT has approved. So you put it in Google Docs. Now sitting in your personal and unsecured Google account is a list of your company's customers. Maybe some pricing info, maybe the email address of a contact at the company, that kind of stuff. Now your personal Google account is compromised. It happens all the time, but this time the hacker finds your company's info. Maybe they sell it to one of your competitors and your company loses business. Maybe they use it to spear-phish your customers. Maybe your company's customers get breached because you put their information in an unsecured location.
Now lets say this goes on long enough that other people are using Google Docs too. If prepend can get away with it, so can Anne from accounting. And Ben from HR. And now the SSNs and birthdates and home addresses of all of your company's employees are in the hands of some lucky hacker who guessed that Ben's Gmail password was "Benjamin123".
Does that warrant firing? Doxxing everyone at your company, putting your customers out of business, and putting your own company out of business, just because you didn't like the IT approved solutions? I'm sure there are easier ways to destroy your company and put 200k people out of a job, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
Security is a big concern of mine. Real security, not fake stuff where an employee can initiate a breach by posting something to slack.
If I can screw up and post company financials, ssns, whatever sensitive stuff to Slack, then that is a big security risk. And Slack isn’t my company’s problem. The problem is training, and digital loss prevention, and access controls.
If company IT approved solutions don’t meet business needs, then I think that’s a bit security risk. To prevent people from posting inappropriate material, we need effective tools.
Should the partner not have given his presentation?
The solution, I think, is to identify docs with SSNs wherever they may be on network and major cloud vendors and redact them, or remove the files when they are uploaded.
In the partner’s case there was no sensitive data in the presentation. IT should know that and help users. If the solution is to ban cloud docs in 2009 with no solution then I think that creates more risk because rather than trying to adapt to using google drive and training users how to use it, there’s a lot of shadow functions.
There is risk in these tools, my point isn’t that we must allow everything. I think we have to support common use cases and banning functionality needed by users, and used by competitors, is actually riskier than supporting enough so that users can do their jobs.
>not fake stuff where an employee can initiate a breach by posting something to slack
This alone tells me that your first sentence is not true.
Do you work in IT security? Have you used DLP tools? Have you seen the process to certify technologies for use and secure them when they are being used? Have you seen the cost of those tools, and how much time/manpower it takes to run them?
If Google Docs is not approved for company use, how does the security team identify SSNs in Google Docs? They don't. So the security team approves Google Docs and buys a product to monitor Google Docs. But now people want Dropbox, which means more cost. And Box, which means more cost. And OneDrive which means more cost. And Bobby only uploads his stuff to S3 buckets, which means more cost. All of these services cost money and all of the tools required to monitor them cost money too.
And while the security team is spending tens of millions of dollars per year (probably a low number actually) to monitor all these approved cloud storage services, Maria uploads a thousand W2 tax forms to her personal Gmail account and brings down the company anyway. Or if Gmail is blocked, she puts it on a USB drive and loses it when her car is broken into. Or if the security team locks down USB storage, she prints the documents and accidentally leaves the folder on the bus. Or if there's a DLP tool watching the printers... she shares it in a personal Slack channel so she can work on it at home.
Security is hard, and the mindset of users who say "you can't stop me" makes it almost impossible. The security team needs to be right 100% of the time, but an attacker only needs to be right once. The risky part isn't banning functionality, it's employees who refuse to follow the rules. And in any job, if you refuse to follow the rules, you get fired.
> Or if there's a DLP tool watching the printers... she shares it in a personal Slack channel so she can work on it at home.
And here we are. An idiotically simple use case that is not covered by IT.
If instead of locking the shit out of infrastructure people in IT in your story focused on providing a comfortable solution to work on a document from home, none of that would happen.
It repeat of the story with passwords. Muh security guys establish rules that your password should be a crazy something and you must rotate it every month and then are surprised that those passwords end up to be written on sticky notes beneath the keyboard.
Try to be human-first and address use cases and nobody will need to use third party tool to get on with their work.
>If Google Docs is not approved for company use, how does the security team identify SSNs in Google Docs?
Part of my argument is that Google Docs is popular and widely used by users, so IT should support it.
Then there’s training on how to use unsupported stuff (ie don’t email ssns, don’t upload ssns, etc).
Then there’s DLP as the source file was a PowerPoint on the partner’s laptop. Back then, I don’t know what products existed but today I have implemented DLP that if a file has a social it is flagged for review immediately and will present visual cues to the user for sensitivity and it is blocked from lots of different transfer methods. This helps prevent users who don’t know the file is sensitive (most of the potential breaches I’ve encountered) but users can get around it (screenshot, phone, etc) if they are really determined.
My point is mostly about rules being better rather than rigid. The best rules fit into a mental model and should be easy to follow. The “Just say no” style rules work just as well for security as for drugs and smoking.
Usability is really important, I think, in security.
Those companies are bad. There’s ways to train users and secure material on slack. Picking bad tools and firing users for trying to work around IT rules punishes innovation and results in worse employees.
If they just capriciously fire someone for deciding to use Slack in their functional team away from everyone else, sure.
But if one's org has a security mandated policy to use specific communication programs and services that one presumably agrees to and signs a document asserting their compliance to as a contingency of continued employment, and that person violates it anyway...I'm hard pressed to call the company "bad" when they take disciplinary or corrective action against that individual.
Such cavalierness (generally speaking) is how you get ants..I mean data breaches et al.
Slack isn’t some random company, they have enterprise practices and there are third party companies that do data management on slack.
An enterprise can adapt to use tools and apply security to the tools used and needed.
Also there is really basic “don’t post sensitive data to the wrong places” training. I think there’s a difference between banning posting sensitive data and stopping teams from planning a meeting agenda.
A company that can’t stop an enployee posting sensitive data to Slack also won’t be able to stop them posting it all sorts of bad places.
I expect that sensitive data is protected in an org. With something more effective than firing people from posting it to Slack.
So much of security entails making policies that people want to help enforce, rather than working around those policies to do their jobs.
If any substantial fraction of your workforce sees your security policies as an obstacle and IT as an adversary, your policies have already failed and it's just a matter of time before there's a problem.
If your policies make sense to everyone, you educate people on why they make sense, and they're so sensible people's first reaction to a breach of those policies is to genuinely understand how doing so might cause a security incident and advocate better solutions person-to-person, you're far less likely to have a security incident.
(That doesn't mean every person needs to be happy with every policy all the time; it means that people need to not systematically feel that IT is primarily an obstacle to their job.)
Companies where most people think IT is actively awesome (not just "not in the way" but actively good) are 1) rare, and 2) likely to be substantially more secure.
Unfortunately so much of security entails working around the technology you have, rather than implementing the best policies that make sense to everyone. At most companies, IT security is a cost center, so executives will only spend enough money to just pass the yearly audit and then stop. Which means a security operations center (SOC) that should be staffed with ten people gets by with just two. And making an upgrade to your SIEM's license got cut this year, which means you need to store fewer logs which means those two people have less data to work from. And the company is still using McAfee EPO because more modern endpoint solutions cost too much so malware is running rampant across the network.
In another reply I talked about my experience working as an infosec analyst at a company where we had to implement a policy against streaming media because our security monitoring tools could not handle the constant stream of data. That policy wasn't written because streaming media is inherently dangerous, it was written because the technology the IT security team had was not capable of monitoring the network when a bunch of people were streaming music on the corporate network.
Ultimately IT security is a racket of overpriced and outdated tools which forces CISOs to make decisions like that. If anyone is looking for an industry to disrupt, look at infosec. A startup could easily double the value of the software and still be able to cut the cost in half and they would just absolutely destroy the big vendors. And/or get a billion dollar exit when Cisco or Amazon buys you out.
Yeah. My security team would really have my hide if I tried that. The other day I had a visitor from security come in and scrub all my addons off of my Firefox installation because they hadn't been vetted through IT. They most certainly wouldn't allow shadow slack rooms.
A place I worked as an information security analyst about 8 or 9 years ago had a policy against various streaming technologies on the corporate network because it often overwhelmed or blinded the security monitoring technology we used back then. Spotify had just launched in the US right around that time and I had to spend a couple of days visiting various desks and asking the employees to stop streaming on the corporate network.
We were just completely and utterly blind as soon as two or three people started streaming.
> The other day I had a visitor from security come in and scrub all my addons off of my Firefox installation because they hadn't been vetted through IT.
I’m compressing time a little for my story. This was last year before the lockdowns. He probably could have done it remotely. But we never missed an opportunity to talk about nerd stuff. He was definitely a talker.
I'm not sure how much of a security issue there is. What's the threat model exactly? Terminated employees still having access because you don't have SSO? Sure I guess but if there is security sensitive data being posted in any chat app (approved or not) then you've got major problems.
I logged into an old Google account I hadn’t used since 2009 and realized I still had access to some documents from a company I had worked at back then - and the documents had been updated two years ago.
If I send a sensitive document in the approved chat app that uses SSO, once I quit. I don’t have access to it anymore.
Right, that's a legitimate security concern but the point I was trying to make is that the problem is not so much people using unapproved chat apps but people putting sensitive information in chat apps at all (approved or not). These applications aren't generally designed to have the sorts of access controls required to manage sensitive information. If I post something sensitive in a public slack channel at my work (where we use Slack) then it is available to anyone in the company. I guess it is marginally worse to have it available to everyone in the company plus any former employee who wasn't removed from the slack team, but only marginally.
Exactly this. I’ve taken pictures of whiteboard drawings using my phone for years. But that is completely against my current company’s policy because pictures get synced to iCloud.
It makes perfect sense why something I could do at small no name companies would be banned at BigCorp.
We merged with a Microsoft shop and they cut out most of the non-Microsoft services but Slack was so strongly preferred we still pay for licenses and users can use Teams or Slack (there is an app that syncs the two)
I find it really hard to understand how MS thinks it’s ok to have such bad search functionality as Teams has. I am not able to find anything reliably in there. For the first few months it was ok to use not now finding something more than a year old is almost impossible. In my mind Teams has taken over the function of SharePoint to swallow docs to never be found again. Considering that Teams is a thin layer over SharePoint this makes sense...
In the Enterprise organizations I've participated in recently, most of them have Teams & Slack. Business users and leadership go with Teams -- especially because it pulls in the Sharepoint connections they've been using for the last decade.
Devs, devops and other tech teams gravitate towards Slack.
And product/project management teams end up using both.
SharePoint has fared so poorly in my Fortune 250 that the company rolled out Teams as its spiritual savior. Now, Teams has fared so poorly that the company is going to re-introduce the software next week -- with some Zoom meetings (uh, don't we already own Skype FOR BUSINESSSSSS?) -- and give away swag to get people re-interested.
> This is where Teams thrives: if you fully commit to the Microsoft ecosystem, one app combines your contacts, conversations, phone calls, access to files, 3rd-party applications, in a way that “just works”...
This is another part of the problem. Again, living in the litigious, policy-addled state of corporate IT that Microsoft has created, our company has turned off message history on Skype for dubious legal reasons, so this compelling integration is MIA for us. I suspect we are not alone in this decision.
> Teams has fared so poorly that the company is going to re-introduce the software next week -- with some Zoom meetings (uh, don't we already own Skype FOR BUSINESSSSSS?)
Teams entirely replaces Skype for Business when you actually turn functionality on. The real WTF is why you'd use Zoom instead of Teams itself for a Webinar to explain how Teams works or Streams (the "Business YouTube-like" in O365/MS365), unless they aren't confident they actually turned on all the Skype for Business replacement features correctly.
I agree that the fact that Microsoft leaves so many "core" parts of the application able to be turned off by over-zealous IT micromanagers (often at the behest of over-conservative corporate lawyers, yes) really does not help at all, and leaves too many companies just shooting themselves in the foot and wondering why their foot hurts so much when they use the software they way they've configured it.
When ISO-9001 came along, the original intent was simply to 1) document what you should do in order to produce parts to your specifications, and 2) document how well you followed those processes. Simple, right? Companies made WAAAY more work for themselves than they needed to, because the people who were assigned to assure compliance went crazy, carving out kingdoms for themselves, making all sorts of ridiculous rules and documentation demands that actually had nothing to do with implementing the spirit of the standard.
When SOX came along, I saw the same thing happen to IT. The concept was the same: 1) document your separation of duties and authority, and 2) document how well you were working in regards to that. What we got was a complete, secondary industry of consultancy which demanded ridiculous things, which did nothing to improve security or compliance, and onerous documentation of all the things that were missing the point.
I blame Microsoft for being complicit in giving corporations the ability to, for instance, prevent a user from changing his desktop background, as though this had anything whatsoever to do with computer security or financial regulation compliance. There are HUNDREDS of options like this in AD policies. The ability to, for example, turn off Skype conversation histories, is a perfect example of something that Microsoft enables in the name of "security" or "compliance," but which actually does NOTHING but inconvenience users. (There are open-source libraries to re-enable the functionality on GitHub. I know someone who wrote an application to do it. Or you can, you know, just copy-and-paste.) And it was the Microsoft-funded trade press which told all the CIO's of all the Fortune 500 companies that this was the sort of thing that had to be done in order to comply with SOX.
That's why a blame Microsoft, but that got long-winded. Sorry.
Most of these aren't proactively done by Microsoft - it's usually a customer who says "in order for us to purchase N licenses, we need features X, Y, and Z, where X/Y/Z are quite often "disable/customize this behavior"
And my current org has spent a lot of time and energy integrating Teams into a highly regulated environment -- with additional archiving integrations. It wasn't just a "because it was there" kind of thing.
I don't necessarily agree with you, but your point of view is rather interesting, and I've never seen or read it before.
I guess it's hard to gauge the exact behavior of hundreds of millions of customers, from all over the world. Both you and I might be heavily biased by our point of view.
I live in San Francisco; what do I know about German Microsoft users?
> mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it
I see this more as a corporate organizational problem and work flow issue with different departments' responsibilities, than microsoft not providing an adequate tool to create a "cloud" based fileserver (sharepoint, onenote, onedrive, etc).
GIGO. I've seen people do useful things with sharepoint with a proper organizational structure thought of ahead of time, before it starts getting populated with content. And also have seen some truly terrible things done with sharepoint.
All too often I've seen companies try to make some microsoft based tool work for group collaboration, when they shouldn't even be trying to use any of them at all. For instance things that should be tracked with proper ticketing software such as RT, and a hierarchical role, responsibility and queue setup within RT, that instead get implemented with Outlook/Exchange/shared inbox functionality.
> Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word!
This reminded my of when we gathered project managers from virtually all continents to define the company's global PM methodology. We had chosen Teamwork our PMS and the backbone for the methodology. The product has a nice text notes feature the group could be using to document anything to the favor of "seachability". But hey, someone said "we can only make a good impression with customers if we use Office documents". So instead of using simple text notes we ended up flooding the system with 3 trillion Office documents. Unreal.
Support for the Ozzie comment - Groove was an interesting thing - strong, user friendly, permissions model built on groups as the user perceived them (as opposed to the corporate LDAP model). Once had a (cancelled) gig to deploy it for sheep farmers in Albania as the trust model mapped. IMHO Ozzie definitely understood the user perspective.
> files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere.
This is why I promote wiki's whenever I can. Locking data up in files makes it nearly useless.
I maintain an open-source project with a few corporate sponsors. As part of their sponsorship, companies get Slack-based support. Shared channels have made this process incredibly easy. Since they already use Slack, I just create a shared channel in my organization and invite them. They get to decide who is in the channel. Even if you get added later, you can see the whole chat history. It's extremely valuable for doing cross-organization work.
>When in reality tons of people spend more and more time "chatting" and trying to communicate in Slack than... actually working.
This has always been the cases. Offices are social environments. Chat formalizes some of that communication, which is actually quite useful. But it doesn't suddenly make a chatty, distracting co-worker less chatty or more productive.
I don't think anyone is arguing that chat is how most work should get done, but rather that it a good tool for promoting legible communication and good communication is one of the most important factors in driving effective work.
Maybe. But most channels I'm in devolve into multiple cross-team chats that are interspersed and impossible to navigate if you aren't reading the messages as they come in.
Hell, searching for topic of discussion that happened more than a few days ago is pretty much impossible in Slack.
My experience of Slack is that their search has gotten better recently, especially when using some of the filters available. That said, I would also agree that search is probably a key area for them to improve on.
That exactly. The whole idea of a chatroom as a searchable archive doesn't make sense to me. Chats are quick bites of information that make sense "right now".
But a good tool could mitigate that. Mainly by providing an organization per thread and make it easy to catch up only from time to time. Like Zulip or Twist.
Would you have any data points to support this side of the argument? My anecdotal experience is that well managed synchronous chat with a searchable archive can be insanely powerful for reducing blockers in intellectual work.
I guess it's just my anecdotes, really. I find Slack search to be horrible because there is no grouping of conversations. For example, many times a day several people are trying to have several different conversations in the same channel. Reading through that afterwards is a mess.
Basically, as a software dev I don't think there are actually too many things that need to be answered "right now". If that's the case then I would think there isn't enough planning involved.
Well there might be the context you're missing. You're looking at this as a software developer. I can tell you from a ops standpoint I get blocked daily just because of some small information missing/needed to be checked. Slack solves this. (If you're in the same timezone... Which is not always the case and slack falls apart here.)
> Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. [...] what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about.
Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about?
"An application experience that trascends any device"... isn't this the web? I can access it in my smartphone (the real personal computer device), my laptop, ipad, you name it... All of these of course powered by "the cloud" (somebody's server on somebody else's giant datacenters)
Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider.
At this rate they'll be eating the lunch Google could have had but can't quite get...
It seems that Google is dangerously close to a crisis even if they cannot percieve this over all their ad revenue.
Google original's innovation which got them to where they are now is basically their better technology. But how good is google search today? IMO it is way worse than it was around 5 to 10 years ago.
> Microsoft's purchase of github seems clearer and their overall strategy seems very coherent. To be the best web's (understood as an OS) vendor and tooling provider.
I think you are being too generous with Microsoft. My take is Microsoft is forced into this strategy because it failed build a successful mobile phone and the ecosystem around it, unlike Apple and Google. It has to transcend the hardware as its only option. MS 365 is capitulation that the strategy of using Office as the killer app to keep people on Windows is no longer as effective as before.
Microsoft was born as a developer tooling company that accidentally ended up in OSes because early OSes were developer tools. (BASIC was the first OS for the IBM PC, just as it was for the Commodore 64.) Microsoft's strategy to buy GitHub is clearly a developer tooling choice, nothing to do with the failure in phones. Microsoft's original strategy was always to transcend hardware (early Microsoft products were notoriously cross-platform in an age where cross-platform was much harder), they've always been a software company first (hence their name), and a hardware company begrudgingly.
1. For a few years now, it has been very difficult for me to search for specific phrases, even with surrounding quotes, without getting results that don't include those phrases
2. Lately, every search where I am trying to research a topic or look up some instructrions for how to do something leads to to pages upon pages of products and services in that space rather than information about the thing. I can't look up how to install a stove without endless ads (whether posing as explicit ads or as official search results) for handymen or appliance stores. I want to know how to change my swamp cooler motor but instead I get professional HVAC services, and useless sponsored articles that aren't about "how to do <thing>" but "why you should do <thing> oh and by the way hire us".
On google search, results are neither informative nor accurate. The results exist only to sell something.
This is essentially the same thing that happened with Siri, started out really great and functional, then results shifted towards 'businesses' and 'services' rather than just the best content. Google's insistence on surfacing local results first exacerbates that in many cases. Better though for their bottom line.
GMail is unable using the web client. Google search results are not great when doing research on new topics, its good for telling you things you already know but forgot, but when trying to search about new topics the search bubbles are bad. They beg for adoption of new products and then cancel them within 18 months. Android is essentially a giant spyware platform, using your mic sends everything to google. Using chrome sends everything to google. On and on, I believe Google was a better company 10 years ago.
It is much harder to bypass the you-really-meant-something-else algorithms and search for the exact terms I need. I don't need you to "correct" it, I don't need the helpful synonyms, etc.
When I search for information about specific strings like class method names, now I quite often have to resort to GitHub search.
This is honestly not a shitpost, I truly feel that Google isn't doing anything better than they were 10 years ago. Search has noticeably declined in the past year, and I am regularly struck by how readily they will rank matches based on removing parts of my query over results that include all of the terms. Every Google Android app I use asks for some kind of interaction every time I start one up. "Got It!"
This happens most surprisingly when navigating with Maps. I have shortcuts for destinations I regularly use, and the number of times I've tapped one of those and had Google cover 90% of the screen with restaurants nearby and the announcement of some feature and the "start" bar across the bottom...my conclusion has been that Google's Maps UX philosophy is based entirely on discouraging use while driving.
Re: Google maps, the recent change where the map orientation changes when the phone changes orientation was almost enough to get me to quit using it. I just want to lock in my preferred orientation and forget about it, not have to fiddle with my phone because it got bumped, the car hit a bump, or something.
I wonder if that's related to this...bug? feature?...where at least once per minute (in Android) there's what is something like a spontaneous app swipe to itself without having touched the device. This infects other apps too, so it's been hard to figure out where it's coming from but I'm pretty sure it's caused by Maps. Like there's a hypervigilance in the attention the app pays to rotation.
Early Google took pride in following other people's standards and avoiding walled gardens: XMPP, RSS, semantic web/micro-formats.
Today's Google avoids traditional standards and many standards that don't originate from Google, doesn't mind walled gardens in their favor, or "standards" that they (almost) solely control (AMP as an obvious one, HTML nearly with the Chromium monopoly), and doesn't even use standards in many areas where early Google thought it important (communications apps that might use something like XMPP or Matrix to federate, for instance).
Relevance.
if the search results has less relevance and historical data has lower importance compared to spikes in interest at the moment of the search, it's worse
For example medical related searches right now prioritize covid related results, they are important _now_, but they are less important than general statistical data
A general purpose search engine shouldn't be about what social networks talk more about
> Isn't this basically what the web is (or could have been?) all about?
Yes and no. The web started off and until recently was a content-first and application-second system. Reversing those two priorities is just starting to happen now, to some extent.
As someone who moved job between a huge (>20k employee) org that had Slack (alongside Exchange, I believe was moving to G-Suite) to a smaller org (<1k) on Teams, while I miss some of the fun of Slack, generally I'm not desperate to switch back.
Video calling (aka 2020's must-have) was always less than idea with Slack (prior org used Zoom for it) and the threaded interface was a mess (one colleague always replied to threads with the 'show in main feed' (owtte) option checked, which had the clumsiest UX of all time, with the main channel repeatedly interrupted with a linked header from a previous message). I do miss custom emoji and more diverse reactions (I long for a thumbs down particularly, I regularly disagree with suggestions without feeling sad/angry but have to add a text response).
Now, any time a OS technology/etc. points me to a community Slack I'm hugely hesitant to join, the interface is unfamiliar and loud since the recent refreshes, and the difficulty to actually leave once one has joined is substantial (along with public emails which often lead to spam).
Hoping the Microsoft Teams devs are following these comments. I've been a long time Slack user in multiple large orgs, and I'm using Teams in my current role for the first time with multiple teams, total headcount around 100.
Things that need love -
1. The UX. The navigation bar, tabs along the top of the chat window, separate chats and groups, ugh. In Slack, the navigation panel is tidy and chats and groups are in one consistent place, the chat header is minimal and functional.
2. Message formatting. Pasting code into a message doesn't automatically change the style to monospaced, and there's no syntax highlighting like in Slack.
3. Pasting a picture or attachment into the chat waits for another ENTER keypress before sending, presumably so that you can add some text alongside the picture. This seems counter intuitive, compared to the behaviour in messaging apps (whatsapp, fb, signal, etc).
4. Experience parity across all versions/platforms. It bugs me that Teams for Web is incapable of video and phone calls. But worse, the Linux version doesn't have feature parity with the Windows version. Useful tools such as remote control and video call background blurring don't exist.
5. More emojis! There are so many times when I've tried to use an emoji and it's just not there. Slack has this pretty well covered, as does every other messaging app out there.
6. @channel usage. If I type @channel, when the message is posted, it's converted to the channel name. So I type "Good morning @channel, just to let you know...", Teams will convert the message to "Good morning General, just to let you know..." - that makes no sense when you're reading it! Who's "General"!?
7. The General channel. WHY?! I can make it read only, I can't hide it, I can't rename it. UGH.
8. Sending a new message. I can type Ctrl+/chat name to start a new message, or click the icon (WHY is right aligned at the top of the navigation pane?). This should be as easy as Ctrl+K name messsage, like in Slack.
9. The linux version seems to run 2 threads, both using around 800mb of RAM. I wouldn't mind so much, but one of threads seems to be just for the system taskbar icon.
11. If I download an image from the internet and post it into a chat, there will frequently be a popup that says "A file named ui.jpg already exists.". Why would I care what the name on the backend server is? Just rename it and let me send it.
12. Users over 40 in my Teams instance seem to have a hard time distinguishing between the UI for starting a new thread and replying to an existing thread.
13. It's system for highlighting messages you haven't seen is pretty janky. It frequently highlights my own relpies as messages I haven't seen.
14. If someone posts a message to any thread in the current channel when I am typing a message, the message editing box will lose keyboard focus.
15. It uses its own notification system instead of the system one. I basically have to have the left half of the window always visible so I can manually check for visual indicators in the app itself.
16. Sometimes you can pause gif playback, sometimes you can't.
for 11 - Pretty sure this is because one drive is the backing store for all files uploaded. You should be able to go to open your one drive account and view every file you've ever uploaded.
What do you mean by #4? I've used the web-based teams for video calls with screen sharing even, with no problem for years now. Agree on remote control and blurring, it's also not available on Web.
I'm going to be honest, this post is a very long winded way to state the obvious.
Businesses already using some kind of microsoft software that get something "on top" which is "like slack!" are never going to switch.
It doesn't matter that teams is basically sharepoint+email+skype (and not, as slack is: an IRC-style chat system) and it certainly does not matter that bringing bots to the platform is eggregiously painful.
It only matters that business executives and people that have never stepped outside of the microsoft ecosystem perceive it as "being the same" and "being included".
I'm not really sure I follow. I'm a long time IRC/Slack user for personal and side projects, and my company adopted Teams a couple years ago. The core chat functionality is very comparable and we use it regularly for exactly that use case. Every team (organized or virtual) owns a Team with multiple chat channels that most use all day long for talking.
I am not implying that they are equally good - Slack has a huge advantage for power users with non-MSFT integrations and bots, but the core "channel-based chat" use case is pretty much 1:1.
For full context: teams came out during my current employment and I have not moved to another company to see it used any other place.
From my understanding; at least how it's configured for my company... A "channel" is more like a series of threads, reminiscent of a forum post per message which can be replied to. This is what I mean when I say it's like email; it's heavily thread based.
"Chats" are ad-hoc, un-ordered and will become inaccessible/removed when they cycle out of the sidebar (as in, you can have 20~ chats, the one last interacted with the longest ago will be dropped if you add a new chat).
Our organization was recently forced to switch from Slack to Teams. In Slack, there was a sense of spontaneity and fluidity to the experience, allowing for countless types of emojis and integration with services like giphy that made collaborating fun.
With Teams, it’s all business. No more #random channel or water cooler chats. Not sure which of the tools actually is better but personally I really miss Slack :-/
– Video chat integration (not as seamless as Teams)
– Threading (not as good as Zulip)
– Information discovery (i.e. slow search)
In addition, Slack faces a bigger challenge that the “moat” described by OP might not be as defensible as the author suggests. I’m not convinced that an “enterprise social network” is a key feature sought by users of chat apps, and even if it is Microsoft has the stronger hand with its Office 365 user base supplemented by LinkedIn.
At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business in favour of it.
The app is incredibly slow, doesn't have tabs so if you're in a chat, then you want to reference a file you're making in the tools you have to click out of it.
Teams chats and 1 on 1 chats are another "web page" to load.
Clicks load as fast as my 1mbps internet connection in 2004
Skype for Business is still used for chat even though we're told by IT to transition because the app is so slow.
I just see it as crap clone that Microsoft coded together in a messy hurry to copy Slack, and then included it free in their Office subscriptions.
The conversations around using slack are that it's really expensive in comparison to free.
I wish the forces didn't align to make every "enterprise" application drop performance down the priority list to somewhere around position 20 or 30. I understand how it happens, but I don't have to like it.
Slack has been slowing down on me lately too. It seems like every couple of months, the amount of time between typing someone's @name and it finally resolving is growing longer, meaning I have more time to type more stuff before the cursor snaps back to just after the @name.
(I wish there was a "hey, be less rounded and polished and deeply nested in HTML tags and be fast" mode....)
I understand how performance isn’t a priority but would argue that it should be: The users of enterprise apps are typically employees whose time is valuable. That ought to be an important consideration for those who control the purse strings.
The advice I have for you is to try opening Teams in Firefox or Chrome instead of the Electron app. It seems to be more responsive from what I can tell. The native browser notifications are nicer on my multi-monitor set up too.
It’s always been this way though, we started using it during the public beta, and the performance has not appeared to improve at all.
I’m very curious with what’s going on here... Microsoft of all companies should have the resources to either make native apps for Windows and Mac, or share some best practices from the VS Code team.
> At my company we use it and there's a timeline to shut down Skype for Business in favour of it.
That's not because your company loves it, it's because Microsoft is starting to discontinue some versions of Skype for Business and forcing everyone over to Teams.
Do people really enjoy slack? We're forced to use it, but if I had a choice I would not. It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it but its not good software.
> It's similar to FB, everyone is on it so you have to use it
FWIW, that's the article's thesis.
For my part, I've never used a chat or company communication tool that was better than Slack. Not saying it's good or that I "enjoy" it. But it's the least bad option available AFAIK.
Agree strongly with this sentiment. I always found it very clunky and hard to use. We migrated to Discord for our recently remote office. So much better. Chat is better. Voice rooms are great. Visibility is great. Granted, we are a small shop, so unclear how it will scale, but big step up so far.
This was my reaction too. Slack doesn’t have many fans at my job either, but that (rather childish) newspaper ad that Slack wrote suggests their users “love” it and would never switch to anything else.
Both Teams and Slack are slow chat apps that run in the browser. One uses AWS and the other uses Azure. I’m not surprised there aren’t 100 alternatives at this point.
>the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts
This is also why Atlassian is so popular in enterprises. I don't particularly like Jira or Confluence or Bamboo or Bitbucket/Stash, but they're "good enough", and the way they work together is effectively magic.
I don't like Teams, but am forced to use it for work because they don't support Slack. They don't support it for a pretty practical reason: they've spent a lot of time vetting Microsoft's security, SLAs, etc. So have our customers. Slack is a new variable that introduces more work and cost.
Leadership basically sees Teams as a version of Slack that is already integrated into Outlook and Office. Slack doesn't offer enough for them to switch to it. That would also require clearing it with all of our customers, too, for communicating about customer projects.
Microsoft has something Slack doesn't have: a built-in customer base that is already fully committed to their products.
"And even when it comes to the cloud, the choice for startups is usually between AWS and Google Cloud Platform. Microsoft is out-of-sight and out-of-mind."
I thought Azure was number two in the Cloud-as-a-service game.
It's possible that startups are not representative of the market as a whole.
Intuitively this makes sense, I've seen an out-sized number (compared to their market-share) of enterprise products hosted on Azure. To the point where I'm usually surprised at how low their share is. I spend a lot of time working with large companies, so one way to square this would be large companies being more likely to use Azure than the average.
I agree that there’s a need for communication / collaboration tools that allow easy work across organizational boundaries. MS Teams permissions to allow for outside collaborators is painfully complex.
But Slack Connect, while better than Teams, still doesn’t get the job done well. So Slack’s so called “competitive edge” isn’t that competitive.
For outside collaboration / communication - I like AirSend (www.airsend.io). It’s a lot simpler than Teams or Slack - less integrations, but perfect for people who work across organizational boundaries on a regular basis.
I've never tried Slack, uses Teams (and have used IRC and lots of other chat programs). Can someone clearly and concretely explain the differences/benefits of Slack over Teams? Would love to understand. At they moment they feel the same to me, more or less the same as IRC (except for some non-important details, except for maybe Teams integration with the rest of the MS ecosystem and how easy it supposedly is to add "extensions").
Slack is the worst piece of tech I forced to use in years. It is also an eye opener for wishful thinking myths like "better products will eventually win the customers". But it is still no wonder they lost to first competitor with similar feature set and slightly better user experience.
Correct me if I am wrong. Slack connect is available only in paid slack versions. When you collaborate across organizations than the assumption is all parties have paid slack. That most likely will not be the scenario when you collaborate with third parties. That is the big problem here.
Teams really killed it in this department. For example my junior sent an email to a vendor, and the vendor replied to him on Teams. No complex integration was required. It's just if you have Teams you can contact them.
How is security going to be handled with Shared Channels? Eg, there is a ton of private/proprietary information that may not want to be shared between companies/partners/vendors. Now I can just send a file through chat to a vendor (presumably, not sure what will be allowed and not be allowed) ? This makes me nervous. But I guess this could always be done via email between companies/vendors/partners, so the onus is still on the individual to be responsible and follow internal company policies in making the determination about what to share at the end of the day.
Mattermost is an open source Slack alternative - it's got the same core features, familiar user interface, Slack-compatible integrations (so you can migrate them easily if you choose to), and more.
The added benefit with self hosting is privacy, customization - and basically full control of your data.
- On the business social network side, I now get as many Teams invites as Slack invites. Teams won the bigger social moat. Hard for a #3 to enter, and sounds like Slack quietly lost #1.
- On the tech community Slack side, Slack community features are hostile, so pushed to discord and friends. Slack is losing their base ('love').
Interesting times for one of the oldest internet technologies. Or.. were for a second there.
If you want something that does chat and does it well, go with Discord over Slack.
While Teams doesn't do anything good to write home about, it avoids one giant misfeature of Slack - the fact that if I start typing a message, get distracted, then come back to Slack later, the person or channel that I was chatting in is gone. Into the invisible Drafts section.
I never want this behavior. And there is no way to turn it off.
It doesn't do the drafts thing anymore. Well, it does, but it doesn't move it. It stays in the normal location and also goes to drafts. So you don't have that jarring moment where you scroll alphabetically and find missing dm's/channels.
I noticed a few weeks ago that it had reverted to keeping my draft in its original location (in addition to putting a copy in the Drafts section at the top). And I confirmed just now that it still does that.
Yes! This is the biggest thing I hate about Slack. It feels like it's trying to make Slack more like email, and the whole reason I use Slack in the first place is to get away from email.
Slack claims to be an open platform, yet their platform is closed, and they took away IRC features, one of the few things they could claim as being "open" about the platform.
I'm not about to try using Teams, but I'm also not about to use Slack, and for mostly the same reasons.
Closed source, centralized platform, and "you must use our frontend". Fuck that.
Does anyone know a Slack alternative that supports one-click voice and video messages? Slack has some clumsy integrations but nothing one-click.
My team recently switched from Telegram (yes, seriously) to Slack and you'd be surprised but for small teams Telegram is great. Specifically, the fast easy video notes save management time and prevent confusion.
I think that the biggest thing about slack is just how nice it is to use. I remember first trying it for groups in college, and it was a godsend compared to most messaging services.
Not that Teams is better but I feel like Slack started to die the moment it removed IRC and XMPP support. That was their only clear advantage over the competition.
The inability to turn off notifications shouldn't be a feature. People (at least me) want more work time, less noise.
Voice/video chat is completely broken (at least for Linux).
Having to very often "clear the cache and hard reload" on the "native" app, makes me feel I'm using a bloated browser tab.
How, with all those quirks, do they want to compete with Teams - (from a well established company with such a big user base?
The difference between a feature and a product is in the eye of the beholder, but "just chat" isn't a very compelling product. All the strong products in this space (Teams, Slack, Discord et al.) are Chat+ products with integrations, voice, bots, and other non-chat features to make collaboration more productive.
I think the product is facilitating remote collaboration, chat is just one very significant feature.
Products like MSN messenger, AOL instant messenger, Yahoo messenger, ICQ, etc are either no longer around or are far less popular than they used to be.
You realize that just because some companies in a space go out of fashion doesn't mean the market is shrinking? MySpace also went away and Facebook seems to just fine instead.
There's a lot more messengers than ever before. Signal, Matrix, iMessage, FB Messenger,...
Yeah that's the real kicker. If you're a company with the resources to buy a small server (such as a raspberry pi if you're being cheap about it) and run an IRC chat, why not do it and be in total control of an essential part of your business?
Most companies aren't exclusively comprised of developers.
If you were to somehow manage to convince exec or director level leadership to implement something like IRC as your main communication platform, I'm sure they'll be more than happy to let you be the person who's full time job becomes fielding helpdesk requests from non-technical users who are struggling to use IRC :)
Tools like Slack and Teams win because they're all-but-frictionless. One of the competitive edges that Teams has out of the gate is integration with an existing account that is tied to your entire workplace identity if you're in a Microsoft-heavy shop.
It's really easy to assume that things that are easy for us as devs are a "no brainer" for everyone else, but they really aren't. My parents recently had to begin using chat apps for work under COVID restrictions, and although both are plenty proficient at general computing, IRC configuration would be an absolute nightmare for them.
Not to mention the bigger issues of security, log preservation, HR compliance, or any other myriad things that a toy implementation of IRC wouldn't offer. What happens if you lose your backups? What happens if your server becomes compromised? What happens if an employee textually assaults another employee through DMs and you need to audit it? These are all very real questions that people ask, and are questions that Slack and Teams have very sleek answers for. It's not just emojis - it's letting someone else handle the headache of maintaining a critical piece of your communication infrastructure.
Slack does a lot more than your basic IRC server. It offers search, SSO integration, mobile app with offline notifications, phone / video chat, screen sharing.
Sure you could build that on a small server with open source tools, but is it really worth the effort to build and maintain it for most people?
You sure about that, Ben?
Teams has been a disappointment for my group. We need it. At least, we need what it is on paper. But it's been so bad that my (Microsoft-loving) boss asked me to write a groupware web app specifically for our workflow, so that we wouldn't have to try to make that shoe fit any more.
The fundamental, universal problem that Microsoft is trying to fix with Teams is a problem of their own making: Office. Everyone LOVES to make Office documents. Can't write a memo without Word! Can't add a series of numbers without Excel! Can't have a meeting without a slide deck! So every non-single-office-sized organization has mountains and mountains of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files that lie scattered around various, obfuscatedly-shared directories, with absolutely zero ability to find the thing you KNOW is "out there" somewhere. They tried and failed to fix it with SharePoint. They tried and failed to fix it with OneNote. And now they're failing to fix it with Teams.
Ray Ozzie fixed it with Groove, 15 years ago, then Microsoft acqui-hired him, and threw the product away. Good work, there, Ballmer.