Seems like a fantastic idea of OpenAI other than, like, why would anybody else go along with it? It would be like giving all our emails to an ad company or something.

Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.

Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.

The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...

Yeah, I would be curious if there is anyone out there paying for Teams. Teams wins as Teams is free with your other Office stuff.

Sod it all. Just give me a decent email client again.

Business instant messaging is electric shoulder tapping and that makes me want to punch people.

I literally feel Slack drains me every day.

Its a solid success if you squint just at the adoption numbers they achieved by cross selling it.

I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.

We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.

Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives

Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever

I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.

> I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack

They did: Google Chat. It’s bundled with Google Workspace.

What issues do you have with teams?

It works well and there’s nothing I can think of that I want in it. It’s just a video and chat app.

Agreed. Every productivity software and their mother has chat.

> Why it uses 400mb I have no idea.

Yes, this is an important detail as well.

Make a Slack clone, but have it perform way better than the original (less RAM, CPU usage), with a smaller storage footprint.

Also deliver on features faster than the original. And have those features be more tailored to what the users both want and need - and things they didn’t even know they needed as well.

This is, after all, what’s being promised, no?

Slack would be a lot better if they supported clients via rest api or similar. I want to run it in a terminal window alongside IRC etc. I have no desire to put up with their ridiculous UI/UX decisions

That's just the base footprint of an Electron-based app.

Which they do because it means they can ship the same thing in many places (actual browser, cross platform OS and mobile if they're lucky).

Electron?

I hate how Slack has no syntax highlighting for code blocks. Even Discord has it.

Funnily enough, from Slack's own testing they could make it that tool tomorrow by changing the input box from a single line to a multi-line input. A la the Hacker News input box we are all typing into right now.

You got me thinking about whether a pre-send message that could theoretically appear: "Given the channel that you are currently in, this might not be an appropriate message. Would you like to reword it, have AI reword it, or send it anyways?"

This presumably would feel absolutely terrible to use, but it might be a way to nudge towards community consensus for how certain spaces would work.

I see what you did there

> Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought

Yeah great for in person and email companies.

But it's so unreasonably slow. It lacks basic features like syntax highlighting on ``` blocks. It's basically become a super expensive and painful to use while Discord continues to be a joy.

And the 'start a thread' nazis are just too much to bear. Prediction: they will add subthreads within 3 years.

I mentioned them last week and per the comments I got, not really: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901946

We used to have a local devs slack and any time someone came up with a random slash command one guy would add a new php script to power that command. I assume a lot of it is just an abandoned API that nobody cares about anymore because Microsoft forced Teams into Office so it took over corporate America in waves. I cant remember the last place I worked at that didnt just use Teams.

for the same reason why not a federated <insert-the-tool-you-would-love-to-see-federated-here>

No one is claiming that level of productivity.

My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack

Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(

Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.

Exactly, no on is truly overjoyed with Teams. As shovelware goes it is passable, but that is a low bar

Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.

Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.

The fundamental design choice of Teams teams channels makes channels unusable vs Slack channels. The chat part (outside channels) is OK. I've seen the metrics for our instance (10k users), the teams channel part is basically unused.

Does this matter? Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.

> And the 'start a thread' nazis

Social issues can't be solved by technical means. Just slightly incentivised in some direction (like discord's "this is the third reply, would you like a thread instead?")

But for the resource usage, ripcord https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ already proved you can have a capable client which is super light and fast if you care. This was made by a single person and in many ways is better than the official client.

Prediction 2: companies will hire full-time Slack Cops whose whole job is shaming coworkers and talking about threads (the #1 Slack anti-feature).

Well, this was my prediction pre-easy-to-use LLMs, anyway.

There's the mostlymatter fork which restores the proper oss behaviour https://framagit.org/framasoft/framateam/mostlymatter

Speaking of php slack was built with php until they followed Facebook with Hack (which is essentially a modern flavor of php)

Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.

And it's worse than Teams

It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom.

On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.

For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.

It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.

All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.

and, why is that?

Oh yes they are. People are claiming 100x improvements, which is completely insane. But they do claim it.

> That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions

You could do it with other software hosted outside the office though. There are definitely options here.

It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).

The hot takes are from people that have haven't touched Teams in 6 years.

Like everything Microsoft it was shit for the first few years, they slowly sorted it out, and now it's fine. Most non-tech-bro businesses successfully run the majority of their comms through it.

The main problem now is that it works fine, and the project managers on Teams need to create work for themselves, so just mess around with stuff that wasn't broken.

In no way is Gchat worse than teams. It's basic, but the basic functionality works... which is a lot more than you can say for teams.

I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.

My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.

> It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow

Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.

> It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy.

That's because the typed letters appear with a large (often even ~1 s) delay. Close your eyes while typing and you'll be back on you track.

It’s fine if you want a barebones chat.

Teams developers are like that obese guy in the seat next to you on the airplane, just… spreading out into your personal space.

For example, Teams likes to control system-wide audio settings instead of acting like any other application. I had to disable the “allow applications to have dedicated hardware access” feature in my sound card driver to stop it screwing around with my settings. I’ve never had to do this for any other app.

It also likes to “edit” system controls like right-click menus on the task bar. This not only breaks muscle memory, but they also put in a gap so that if you move the mouse onto the menu… it closes.

It's fine. Messages sometimes fail to appear unless you navigate away and back and sometimes they fail to appear at all until 30 minutes later but it's fine. This regularly slows down communication and costs company time, but it's fine. It's 2026, classrooms full of children can vibe code a chat app but a $3T company struggles with basic chat functionality. It's fine.

> The main problem now is that it works fine

Except from:

* notifications for channels

* search

* using more than one org (needs app restart!) although screen sharing between 'classic' and 'web' editions works only if sender's and receiver's graphic cards share a hw-accelerated video format blessed by teams. Not, it's not easy to check what edition you are running and you can't change it without poking js variables by hand

* inconsistent read statuses between devices

* 'incoming call not shown at all' bug (but you get a missed call notification)

* can't join two video calls even in two separate windows

* random audio device switching on every morning (even if you don't close the app and computer for the night)

It would be less of an issue if they hosted it themselves.

It works in communities, not corporations. Every federation seems to die when enough millions are connected to it. Facebook used xmpp for chat. Google chat could federate too. Apple promised iMessage and then hid behind a silly excuse.

It's extremely against company interests to federate.

still no way to check your email from teams though.

so is IRC

I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.

I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.

I mean, it's not a hard requirement that you ask a company to build it.

Why would you want to do that? Outlook is perfectly fine, and on Windows it’s easy enough to toggle between the two windows.

There's no way to check my tire pressure through teams, either. That's a good thing.

Let applications do a thing. The more we duplicate the crappier the original and the duplicate get.