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Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally in new attempt to appease antitrust regulators
(www.geekwire.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Stop trying to make Teams happen. It isn't going to happen.
There's already way better solutions out there, and Microsoft keeps making their dogshit service even worse.
Decoupling it like this is the first step to it being wound down and then shut down.
as a consumer product, yeah. but teams is ubiquitous in business and govt.
You'd think businesses wouldn't want to give all their communications to... a bigger business, especially one currently invested in AI training.
It would be like a company doing mapping/GIS stuff using Gmail for communications. You're just handing your data over to your largest competitor. It's fucking stupid.
When you’re an enterprise client paying serious money for the service, there are often data protection requirements. They have the capability to support things like export controlled information or HIPAA compliance in office, and appropriate legal agreements ensuring data protection. It’s the power of collective bargaining (they are buying 100s++ licenses instead of just one).
Exactly. If it's a regulated industry, they're not just paying for Teams. They're paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I'm not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it's a fraction of the available options.
It's probably more than 100s. One of my Slack orgs has over 300 paid users and Slack barely considers us midsize.
Yeah that’s why I added the ++, the last org I was in had >10k users.
Facebook violates HIPPA (The Guardian 2023)
Really though, what happens when a company gets so greedy they that they even think they can get away with something has probably the most predictable outcome
Facebook is usually not used by businesses which expect it to be in compliance with compex healthcare regulations, the law is spelled HIPAA, and that article is about the UK, which doesn't have that law.
You've clearly not worked in enterprise recently. Everything is about the Cloud, AI, and reducing Opex spending currently.
They already did before this. MS-hosted Office 365 is running the vast majority of worldwide corporate email and hosts a significant amount of corporate files on business OneDrive/SharePoint. I'll never understand why companies bought into 'the cloud' so easily.
For most these things, it is far cheaper to simply use some sort of SaaS than to actually set things up in house. There's probably plenty of times where it'd in theory be cheaper in the long term, but most businesses are going to see the short term savings as extra capital to try to expand.
In my size of company, it's simple. I simply don't want the overhead of running an email system. It's not just running a server, it's running a server farm for HA, dealing with domain blacklisting, retention systems, storage and firewalling to name a few.
It already has happened. All companies I work with use teams now. Despite better solutions. Teams sucks, but I came for free... It worked..
Completely. Teams is EVERYWHERE in post-start-up businesses.
I wish. My company and my wife’s company use teams, and we fucking hate it.
Why is it so bad tho?
It’s buggy, the call quality is shit, and it lacks some major Slack and Zoom features.
Specifically, channels, organizing / grouping chats, threads, etc. Not having that hurts.
That said, it does archive video chats in a thread that people can comment on. That’s cool. But that’s the only cool thing Teams does.
Fuck slack though.
I hated the channel organisation, I would always click off a channel where I needed to respond to try and find other information, and then I'd never be able to find the channel I was responding to. Chronological sorting channels at least means I have a chance of finding where I was.
Also fuck their terrible reply options. I generally just wanted to acknowledge that I was responding to a message, I didn't want to spin up some weird thread.
Basically, I hate everything, and don't want to talk to anyone.
Complaining about Slack is like complaining about Jira. Jira sucks, and I hate it, but every time I get forced to try the alternatives, I’m even grumpier.
Are you aware that slack has a back button? Makes getting back to that original channel a breeze. Even works with thumb buttons on my mouse like pretty much every browser.
Or ctrl + k and you can just type part of the channel name/person name etc to quickly go back to it.
Also just a emote to acknowledge a message without spinning up a thread is my go to. Just a 👍”yep I see this”
I changed companies and we all use teams now.
But none of that stuff helped when I did use it.
The problem was I was in AWS and needed to be subscribed to hundreds of channels. So when I needed to find something, I'd have to click through maybe 20 different channels all with similar names to find it. At that point the back button is useless.
Thumbs up is good for telling a person you've seen something. It doesn't help the rest of the team know this, unless they like to go back and read old messages.
I mean the real take home message is "don't work for Aws". Slack just made some of the dysfunction worse, it didn't create it.
It is, in my experience, one of the better video call solutions out there. What do you think works better for calls?
Zoom. The video, audio, and stability are all much much better than Teams.
I did not have that experience. Additionally, the ux is so much worse
I do a lot of interviewing and often encounter moments where we jump from Team to Zoom, or vice versa, and everyone gets a side by side of call quality. This usually happens when a candidate hasn’t used one of the products before and they are struggling to enable screen sharing permissions, so instead of wasting time, I jump us to the other product.
Everyone always makes an unprompted comment about how much worse Team’s quality is. It’s really noticeable when you put them side by side. Feels like placing an old CRT TV next to an OLED.
Services like what exactly?
Yeah, everyone always seems to bash Teams, but I haven't worked with anything that is as good out of the box as teams. I'm no M$oft fan, but besides the first year or two of rollout it's been just as good if not better than Slack. And that's not even mentioning the fact that Salesforce (a potentially worse company) owns Slack.
I don't believe that there are solutions that are as complete as team, for video and voice calls it's among the best.
But it's so bad for text ! Why do I have to wait for a second when I change channels ? Why does it not support markdown (the partial implementation that it has is arguably worse than no implementation at all) ? Why is the search so bad ?
Why can’t I make a thread? Why can I only use one emote? Why can I sometimes see a message on my phone but not on the computer? Why is there an “old” and a “new” teams app? Why does each one constantly ask me to use the other one? Why are there god damn Mabalene video filters, but yet my god damn calendar won’t sync properly with outlook. Why when I update my picture, does 1/3 of my team see the new one, 1/3 sees the old one, and 1/3 just sees my initials. I’d continue but my thumbs are tired.
Teams actively makes communicating with my team more difficult and I hope it dies so soon.