What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case.
We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at.
The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
The Facebook comparison is on spot: Both GitHub and Teams have become social networks. Even better if inferior, they solve visibility and connection issues. Actually Microsoft keeps the friction for people without an account just high enough that you want to use it in a business. What we need is that those services are regulated more like Telefone networks allowing federation.
In our european company (insurance/gov space) we use Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint as side products of Office, largely to get the official editing tools for the documents our clients provide.
Depending on who you are in our company, you are using either Mac or Windows, although we are slowly shifting to OpenSUSE. Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question, and OneDrive is only used in the context of Teams/Sharepoint. Sharepoint, too, is only used by half the company for whom it is relevant.
Security-wise most of our data is with our customers on european servers (Word/etc. are not linked to OneDrive), except billing.
100%. We're a total Microsoft shop and it's all so mediocre. We started with Azure AD and slowly replaced all our AAA solutions with Microsoft ones. The Microsoft ones are cheaper (packaged together) and better integrated but in terms of user experience they're really mediocre.
The only thing that was not really worse was email, we came from lotus notes which was a crashy piece of shit.
But our messaging, storage etc solutions all were a big step back when we went to Microsoft.
I my experience, it's often that Excel is an absolute necessity. Try telling people who work in finance or accounting that they will have to use Google Sheets or another alternative and you'll have a picket line out front of the office within a week.
I've never met anyone who was a die-hard for Word, I'm sure they exist but they can't be a large contingent of users.
Excel is a lot like Photoshop. Everyone hates the parent companies, but there just aren't good alternatives for either one.
There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.
My company is using Teams. I chose it, and I do regret it but we're not using anything else from Microsoft and I've gradually reduced the surface to where we are just using it for messaging/large file storage, both of which it does fine actually.
My reasons:
- critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now
- probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually
- critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge
- the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that
- inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD.
So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.
I’m not quite sure, but the reasoning that some technology is frustrating users and therefore is not calculated in when optimizing cost per seat could apply to every software. In a large enough company there will be always people complaining about this and that. If you google you will also find people complaining about Slack.
I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products.
The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.
I preferred Skype (which Microsoft bought years ago but only killed last year) -- it also, at least in its final iteration, did the share screen thing well and just seemed snappier than Teams.
The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..
Of course it is. And from a user's perspective, I often hear people saying they are 'forced' to use it because their employers want them to, otherwise they risk being fired, but I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal, since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
Sure, but the privacy and service policies are only applicable to your employer's data, it was never your data in the first place.
> I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal
You can't give employees veto power over software choices, an employer that can't choose which software platforms its employees use is not going to be viable.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
As an employee, the company sets the conditions and tools to work there.
If communication is to happen on Microsoft Teams, and you refuse to use it, your future employment with them seems difficult. Same as if you refused to show up to meetings, or kept sound isolation headphones on at all times, including when your boss wanted to speak with you. Or you would never use a telephone.
When using enterprise tools, I expect the employer to have accepted the terms of use; most employees can't bind the employer.
I certainly prefer to avoid Microsoft communications tools, but if the work is interesting enough, I guess it's fine.
A lot of places claim things for "security" and violating them is grounds for firing because truthfully or not, they claim circumventing them is exposing data. We used to be able to choose our e-mail client as they had IMAP access. A few years ago they decided to only allow Microsoft's own protocol to enforce Outlook use and disabled IMAP access.
I don't know whether Teams is worse than Slack. I do know that I loathe Slack, though. Of the software I use almost every day, it is the worst by miles.
I think it's gotten a lot better over recent years but in just the past week we had:
A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.
It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.
There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.
And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.
- A colleague's whole system has been freezing for a full minute every time he joins a meeting. This has been going on for over a year, including after multiple full system resets
- On macOS, I regularly (~once a week) end up in different broken sync states, where message histories for all chats are missing messages from the last few month. The only way to reliably fix this is to remove the whole cache, causing it to resync after a app restart. Due to this, I run a whole Windows VPS, just to be able to "reliably" receive Teams messages from customers.
- In multi-tenant usage, it's incredibly slow to switch between different tenants. If you are semi-actively chatting with users from 2-3 tenants its a big PITA
- If you are an external user to a organization, the default settings are that your Teams session will last ~24h, after which you have to re-authenticate. Teams doesn't give you any good indication that you have been logged out, unless you actively check, in which case you might be shown a warning banner after ~a minute delay (if you are lucky).
---
I'm usually one the more defensive side of cargo cult hate against software (e.g. I think a lot of people dislike JIRA to an unjustified degree, and mostly due to badly hosted or configured instances), but Teams is one of the few where it's absolutely deserved. I think it's a prime example of how Microsoft as an organization has forgotten how to build good desktop software.
Only upside is that it's a good bonding ritual with customers, as the Teams suffering is a universal feeling.
I don't have much experience with others, but I can throw out my complaints about Teams:
* Too much resource usage.
* Chat UX is not good. The team/channel concept makes sense, but threaded (and nonthreaded) chats really just have a bad UI, so everyone at my company just uses multi-person chats, which are terrible for managing access, history, etc.
* For the past while I get some extra prompt about "improving my security" every time I punch in my 2FA info that I have to decline on a daily basis.
my coworkers are always complaining about how much trouble they have with it, not being able to copy and paste into chats, freezes, crashes... never happens to me.
Snap opinion made by a software dev who thinks the entire world revolves around software development and this dev's workflow.
There's any number of reasons an org would choose teams over slack, or any Microsoft product over an alternative, even your example of the cost shows a clear lack of knowledge of information outside your narrow scope.
How do you know your org is paying the price you found on a website?
You realize there are other vendors people pay infrastructure contracts through who bundle Microsoft products in their contract?
Then give devs slack or an equivalent alternative? The point the author making is that forcing devs into Teams, because the org uses it, is a red flag. And they’re right.
It’s an indicator that developer experience pales in comparison to bean-counting, and that is an indicator that the business focuses on ROI in the wrong areas.
I’m sure there are finance teams that love it. I work in marketing and I sure as hell don’t, after it using it in two different full-time roles.
1000000% agree. I'm currently interviewing for new jobs and when I hear that they use Microsoft Teams it's always a red flag. Not a deal breaker, but a red flag nonetheless. It is truly awful.
What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case. We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at. The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
GitHub is not git. GitHub is not an alternative to mercurial or svn.
This is like saying Facebook is the alternative to http.
The Facebook comparison is on spot: Both GitHub and Teams have become social networks. Even better if inferior, they solve visibility and connection issues. Actually Microsoft keeps the friction for people without an account just high enough that you want to use it in a business. What we need is that those services are regulated more like Telefone networks allowing federation.
The four companies that I've worked for here in Europe all used GitLab, btw.
How many times has Gitlab deleted their production databases and had irrecoverable data loss? I remember twice.
In our european company (insurance/gov space) we use Teams, Outlook, Sharepoint as side products of Office, largely to get the official editing tools for the documents our clients provide. Depending on who you are in our company, you are using either Mac or Windows, although we are slowly shifting to OpenSUSE. Azure and GitHub are completely out of the question, and OneDrive is only used in the context of Teams/Sharepoint. Sharepoint, too, is only used by half the company for whom it is relevant.
Security-wise most of our data is with our customers on european servers (Word/etc. are not linked to OneDrive), except billing.
100%. We're a total Microsoft shop and it's all so mediocre. We started with Azure AD and slowly replaced all our AAA solutions with Microsoft ones. The Microsoft ones are cheaper (packaged together) and better integrated but in terms of user experience they're really mediocre.
The only thing that was not really worse was email, we came from lotus notes which was a crashy piece of shit.
But our messaging, storage etc solutions all were a big step back when we went to Microsoft.
You’ve missed Office suite.
I know people love Excel and Word, but I just don’t get it. What even is Word? The web thing? Teams Word? The app?
Whichever Word last touched it, formatted it. This breaks it in the other versions.
How is this is a thing? It’s so awful.
I my experience, it's often that Excel is an absolute necessity. Try telling people who work in finance or accounting that they will have to use Google Sheets or another alternative and you'll have a picket line out front of the office within a week.
I've never met anyone who was a die-hard for Word, I'm sure they exist but they can't be a large contingent of users.
Excel is a lot like Photoshop. Everyone hates the parent companies, but there just aren't good alternatives for either one.
> - You use GitHub for scm
- You use Azure DevOps for SCM
- You use Windows for OS
Personally I run linux but most of the company is on Windows, sure
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
No, we use Nextcloud for docs and most storage
- You use Outlook for Mail
No, Mxroute. Which actually caused quite a bit of problems with Teams original because it REALLY expects you to use exchange
- You use OneDrive for storage
For large files only, or files that are shared in chat
- You use Azure for hosting
Nope, Hetzner
- You use Copilot for LLM
Come on, not even Microsoft uses that
- You use GitHub for scm
Yep and for all the complaining here, I've literally never had any noticeable downtime or issues. I don't use it for CI though
There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.
My company is using Teams. I chose it, and I do regret it but we're not using anything else from Microsoft and I've gradually reduced the surface to where we are just using it for messaging/large file storage, both of which it does fine actually.
My reasons:
- critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now
- probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually
- critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge
- the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that
- inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD.
So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.
I’m not quite sure, but the reasoning that some technology is frustrating users and therefore is not calculated in when optimizing cost per seat could apply to every software. In a large enough company there will be always people complaining about this and that. If you google you will also find people complaining about Slack.
I like Teams. Especially the Meeting feature. I like that I can join with multiple devices in a meeting. Sharing stuff in a meeting is also pretty cool and easy. I also like the integration into other products.
The only thing which could be better is performance - even the new WebView2 thing is not enough. But this is sadly common for most tools like this.
I preferred Skype (which Microsoft bought years ago but only killed last year) -- it also, at least in its final iteration, did the share screen thing well and just seemed snappier than Teams.
The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..
What are you talking about? Messages don’t need titles? They aren’t collapsed? Are you confusing posts with chat messages?
Why can’t they rewrite Teams as native apps using AI? How in the world of AI can Teams still be such a total shit memory/CPU hog product?
Of course it is. And from a user's perspective, I often hear people saying they are 'forced' to use it because their employers want them to, otherwise they risk being fired, but I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal, since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
Sure, but the privacy and service policies are only applicable to your employer's data, it was never your data in the first place.
> I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal
You can't give employees veto power over software choices, an employer that can't choose which software platforms its employees use is not going to be viable.
> since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
As an employee, the company sets the conditions and tools to work there.
If communication is to happen on Microsoft Teams, and you refuse to use it, your future employment with them seems difficult. Same as if you refused to show up to meetings, or kept sound isolation headphones on at all times, including when your boss wanted to speak with you. Or you would never use a telephone.
When using enterprise tools, I expect the employer to have accepted the terms of use; most employees can't bind the employer.
I certainly prefer to avoid Microsoft communications tools, but if the work is interesting enough, I guess it's fine.
A lot of places claim things for "security" and violating them is grounds for firing because truthfully or not, they claim circumventing them is exposing data. We used to be able to choose our e-mail client as they had IMAP access. A few years ago they decided to only allow Microsoft's own protocol to enforce Outlook use and disabled IMAP access.
I love when people shit on teams and provide no basis for why it’s so much worse than all the other chat offerings other than it being teams.
I don't know whether Teams is worse than Slack. I do know that I loathe Slack, though. Of the software I use almost every day, it is the worst by miles.
I think it's gotten a lot better over recent years but in just the past week we had:
A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.
It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.
There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.
And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.
Also they removed the Linux native app.
- A colleague's whole system has been freezing for a full minute every time he joins a meeting. This has been going on for over a year, including after multiple full system resets
- On macOS, I regularly (~once a week) end up in different broken sync states, where message histories for all chats are missing messages from the last few month. The only way to reliably fix this is to remove the whole cache, causing it to resync after a app restart. Due to this, I run a whole Windows VPS, just to be able to "reliably" receive Teams messages from customers.
- In multi-tenant usage, it's incredibly slow to switch between different tenants. If you are semi-actively chatting with users from 2-3 tenants its a big PITA
- If you are an external user to a organization, the default settings are that your Teams session will last ~24h, after which you have to re-authenticate. Teams doesn't give you any good indication that you have been logged out, unless you actively check, in which case you might be shown a warning banner after ~a minute delay (if you are lucky).
---
I'm usually one the more defensive side of cargo cult hate against software (e.g. I think a lot of people dislike JIRA to an unjustified degree, and mostly due to badly hosted or configured instances), but Teams is one of the few where it's absolutely deserved. I think it's a prime example of how Microsoft as an organization has forgotten how to build good desktop software.
Only upside is that it's a good bonding ritual with customers, as the Teams suffering is a universal feeling.
It switches to a randomly chosen microphone when I connect. Why can’t it default to the microphone on the device I’m using?
Try get transcription to work. What the hell is all that about?
And these are things that happen once you have got the call going. Half of all calls start with a debrief on WTF happened this time we tried to talk.
And then there is the document structure. Try adding a long file name, or dealing with the random upload fails.
I don't have much experience with others, but I can throw out my complaints about Teams:
* Too much resource usage.
* Chat UX is not good. The team/channel concept makes sense, but threaded (and nonthreaded) chats really just have a bad UI, so everyone at my company just uses multi-person chats, which are terrible for managing access, history, etc.
* For the past while I get some extra prompt about "improving my security" every time I punch in my 2FA info that I have to decline on a daily basis.
my coworkers are always complaining about how much trouble they have with it, not being able to copy and paste into chats, freezes, crashes... never happens to me.
Snap opinion made by a software dev who thinks the entire world revolves around software development and this dev's workflow.
There's any number of reasons an org would choose teams over slack, or any Microsoft product over an alternative, even your example of the cost shows a clear lack of knowledge of information outside your narrow scope.
How do you know your org is paying the price you found on a website?
You realize there are other vendors people pay infrastructure contracts through who bundle Microsoft products in their contract?
Stay in your lane.
Then give devs slack or an equivalent alternative? The point the author making is that forcing devs into Teams, because the org uses it, is a red flag. And they’re right.
It’s an indicator that developer experience pales in comparison to bean-counting, and that is an indicator that the business focuses on ROI in the wrong areas.
I’m sure there are finance teams that love it. I work in marketing and I sure as hell don’t, after it using it in two different full-time roles.
It’s as much as a red flag for me as the author.
1000000% agree. I'm currently interviewing for new jobs and when I hear that they use Microsoft Teams it's always a red flag. Not a deal breaker, but a red flag nonetheless. It is truly awful.