This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Nobody is forcing me to use Office or Teams, but I'm stuck with a single ISP.
Why won't regulators even LOOK at the ISP oligopoly? For fucks sake.
Turn it into a utility. Having an Internet connection is arguably more important than a phone line ever was and is up there with electricity.
It's a utility. Treat it like one.
I only have one option for most utilities. I don't get to choose which private power company I use and I certainly don't get to choose from an array of options for how that electricity is generated.
Making the internet a utility is good, but that won't make it less of an oligopoly.
Here in NL they have a decent system if you ask me. Infrastructure for power is owned by TenneT, a semi-government organisation. Then power is supplied by private companies, from whom you can choose any one you want (aka the cheapest/greenest one, depending on your wishes). They then supply power to the national grid, so you’re technically using power from all companies, but paying your share to the one you have a contract with.
Because you probably do have at least two options for ISPs, it's just that one option is DSL and lawmakers still struggle with understanding color television.
Yes you can get dial-up, DSL, cell network data, or even satellite! These services are clearly equivalent to cable or fiber in the ISP marketplace.
My ISP overlords added fiber to my neighborhood and have stopped allowing DSL signups. Well they also didn't replace the copper in my yard (fiber is only available across the street and I've spent 3 years trying to get AT&T to come across to my side). So my options are cable, or cable, or T-Mobile hotspot (it would be against their TOS though).
Because the unbundling is happening due to EU intervention and the ISP oligopoly is in the US, and not within the jurisdiction of the EU.
Said oligopoly has those wittle reguwators on a string
The company says Office 365 suites with Teams will no longer be sold to new business subscribers, but will continue to be available for existing customers that opt to continue using the bundled products, even upon renewal.
So if your company already has 365 that includes teams, as long as it renews 365 there’s no additional/separate cost for Teams?
Yeah they've rolled it out to everyone, got a defacto monopoly and now they're increasing the rates for new customers.
This is just capitalism 101 while pretending it's for the regulators.
Perhaps, but my concern is investing time and energy helping customers learn a system and that system becoming financially unsustainable. I welcome change, but my customers don’t. Hearing that it’s only for new customers is a relief.
This is a big deal for me. I’ve got a MS account for Azure but I use Google suite for email etc. I can’t sign into teams at all with the account that matches my email address because it’s not a 365 account. I end up looking very unprofessional struggling to log into a Teams meeting hosted by a prospective client.
Do not worry, everyone that uses Teams on a daily basis knows the most professional action is to defenestrate the machine running it.
Seems weird to be honest. I would agree on removing personal Teams from new Windows installations, but if you are locked in Microsoft 365 environment it is very unlikely you will not use Teams due to how well it integrates with whole ecosystem.
It's almost as asking to unbundle Outlook because Thunderbird exists.
It doesn't really integrate that well, but it's included with most enterprise licenses so what company is going to pay for another option when they get it for "free".
Maybe a solution like on Android where users are given a choice of a few app on first setup?
Would be nice for new OS install, including default browser choice and maybe even cloud storage.
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.
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?
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.
