Teams is garbage. When my friends suggested it, I said what the hell for when we can use Discord instead.
Teams is great for enterprise stuff. It links right into Outlook and everything else in the Microsoft business sphere and makes actual team sharing and collaboration a snap. I love it.
For work.
For consumers, it’s inferior to a ton of free options. Kids yapping, family sharing, groups hanging out, etc. don’t want business collaboration. They want cool shit that Teams either doesn’t have or does badly.
Nope. Still hate it.
Well to each, their own. I use it all day every day, and I thank the gods above that we adopted it before COVID forced us all to work from home.
Regardless, I think @Ginger_Yellow is right. I don’t see how you could merge Teams and Discord without screwing one or the other up. They serve fundamentally different audiences and purposes despite both being communication and sharing tools.
Well so do I. That’s why I hate it. For meetings we use Zoom because… Teams is awful.
It’d be nice if they leave Discord as Discord if Microsoft acquires it and not give it the sad lonely death they seemed determined to give Skype.
That’s just the opposite experience of mine. Teams has gone through some pretty fast iterations but like a lot of things MS they finally got it into good shape. Everything just works now and I can join easily on both my computer and phone and it has no problem switching around. That’s probably the number one thing most other apps like Zoom and WebEx screw up. Oh and screen sharing, I can just share a window and it is correctly sized, last time I tried that on WebEx and Zoom it made them super tiny because I run in 4k or Ultrawide 1400p and they don’t understand DPI.
They may all have parity now, I don’t use WebEx but once a week and Zoom is now treated like a virus at my company =)
Curious as to why you hate it so much. What is it fucking up for you?
IMO, Teams is fine. Slack is better for chat, no doubt, but Teams is OK. It just isn’t as delightful.
Similarly Zoom is better for conference calls, video, and sharing your desktop for demos/slideware and such, but Teams is OK too. It’s serviceable, and more importantly, if you pay for O365 you’ve already got it.
That’s Microsoft’s pitch in a nutshell. “Teams is fine, and you already pay for it.”
Made me think of this GIF
So 90% of the time someone loads a picture into Teams, it doesn’t show for most of us on the team. It’s just shows this broken image tiny icon. An hour or two hour later, it might show; we don’t know why. Desktop doesn’t really care it doesn’t work. If someone loads a file and you try to open it, it tries to open it on our SharePoint which is supposed to link to Teams, but all it does is tell you page is not found. As a result, we don’t post screenshots in there very often nor do we share files.
Around 40% of the time someone actually tries to do a Teams meeting instead of Zoom, it just doesn’t work… like it crashes or won’t load. About 10% of us who can join a Teams meeting, the CPU and RAM is never released, so about an hour after joining a Teams Meeting, I have to reset or slowly watch my laptop just stop responding. It sounds like a jet engine for… hours. Two of my co-workers can’t get the audio to work on their headset. Zoom, Webex and Windows can see the headset, but they can’t get Teams to recognize it… at all.
Availability status? Forget it. It constantly tells you someone is AFK except they’re not, they’re just not playing in Teams because playing in Teams is not the job. That’s the tool that’s supposed to make the job easier, but you don’t need to engage in teams unless someone wants to engage you. Skype was able to tell when someone was there, as in using the computer, and presenting… automatically by checking Outlook and recognize someone is in a meeting. Teams? Pfft. It usually takes 2 or 3 people before everyone stops using our channel because one person out of 20 is presenting, and they can’t stop in the middle of their presentation to go Do Not Disturb, so there is 1-2 hours no one uses that group channel. Else little pop-ups in the right corner bombard that meeting the entire time.
Speaking of channels. the team that runs Teams keeps telling people to go to such and such channel to get information… except no one really knows how to find the dang channels. We got auto added to like a half dozen teams that are basically just ways to send us newsletters outside of emails, but the channels are hidden or you have to know how it is precisely labeled to find it. So when you do find this channel everyone should know about and engage in, it’s usually one person talking to themselves for… months because no else has found their channel and when you do, if you can figure out out to turn on notifications… you get them all damn day. 50 channels popping up on your application to tell you Dr. so and so can’t log into his Desktop… which isn’t something I need to monitor at all.
Some of this is tech issues, but the other is… like everything we ever get someone in our management staff just decides to try and organize it like it’s some new fancy Windows Explorer. We hate SharePoint as a result of that, and of course Teams is supposed to encourage the use of that of which our version does not use meta data at all. It’s staffed by guy who runs it part time who doesn’t do anything and can’t understand why sorting files from oldest to newest doesn’t make sense in our libraries. But hey Teams won’t work well with our SharePoint anyway… so I guess looking at data from 2012 every time I go in there is only marginally annoying based on how little I try to use it.
I know how this works though. Someone monitoring the budget or something is going to look at 365 and Teams and ask himself hey, how come we’re paying for Zoom. And because it’s been 3 minutes since we played musical chairs, they’ll considering dropping it. Our only real hope is I believe Zoom is key to patient video visits… and Teams just doesn’t play in the playground at all. We’re not taking video visits away from patients.
We use Slack and Google Meet for all of our meetings at my company. But since we’re a government contractor, we have to use their tools also. And they use Microsoft Teams. And tell the truth, I can never get the fricking thing to work properly on my mac. Even though I have the app installed, half the time I don’t have any audio, so I have to quit and rejoin multiple times. Or someone from our team is presenting, but I don’t see anything but the individual circles with the initials in them. Good thing I don’t really need to see what’s being presented (since it’s our project). At any rate, Team appears to suck compared to our other choices.
First off - daaaaamn that is some detail. No wonder you hate it. I have experienced almost none of that except the picture issue once. I get the channel hate, I don’t like them much myself.
Sounds like you have a bad installation that isn’t properly maintained honestly. Which you could place at MS’s feet that it could even get like that I guess, I can only talk about my experience where I admin an O365 instance for the extended family and use another instance for work.
I was just on a webex call an hour ago and it made the window I shared out super tiny because I was on my ultrawide. So I had to switch to 1080p. It just works in Teams. Maybe Zoom handles this better now, but it’s literally treated as a virus by our systems so I will never know.
This is pretty much the fate of any tool that is primarily used by IT and not as beloved to our end-users until someone on the end-user side asks for more. My users barely use it now.
That’s probably because you aren’t blocking Slack at the firewall, people so strongly prefer Slack that they’ll setup their own little individual ones unless you smack em back down.
Assuming Microsoft acquired Discord, I wouldn’t expect much to change for Discord aside from some more overt hooks into the Xbox platform, maybe some cross-pollination with Teams, etc. I’d expect it to be like GitHub, where it’s easy to forget they even own them.
It would be a smart buy for MS, considering how Discord has seemed to completely conquer gaming in such a short time. And a lot like a Twitch or Facebook, it’s the kind of segment domination that’s not likely to be diminished by a competitor that simply has a technically better substitute.
If I were the Discord people, I’d take the money and run.
I think they’d go the compete opposite way since it’s so heavily a gaming brand. They’d screw it all up like Mixer.
I think the problem with Mixer was that it had already lost the war to Twitch and YouTube.
Discord owns gaming chat, and everyone is trying to catch it.
The only thing they screwed up with Mixer, was the strategy to make it more competitive. And even that assumes there actually was a strategy that would work, AND be financially viable. It’s not like Beam was a big deal before Microsoft bought and renamed it.
Twitch is basically the Facebook of streaming, where it takes far more than a “better product” to succeed against the sheer inertia of already being the entrenched default for millions or billions of people who already have found content creators and communities there…
The Mixer platform itself was great, and remained great up to the end. Microsoft threw a hail mary to build viewership at the end by signing Ninja and Shroud, and it didn’t work.
Yes, exactly.
Discord would be a rare case of Microsoft getting in a little ahead of the curve and buying the runaway leader, instead of buying the equivalent of another Mixer and banging their head against concrete for several years.
If Microsoft buys Discord for $10B, where’s their ROI? How does Microsoft monetize Discord?
It’s a scary thought.
MS made a offer for YouTube back when YouTube was trying to figure out whether to go public or sell, but Google won that battle. MS then tried to build its own YouTube. Obviously it had no chance at all, and it got shuttered after a few years.
And YouTube was a relative bargain, $1.6 billion. Even in 2006 dollars that was pocket change for a company like MS. (Although I believe one reason they gravitated towards Google was the perception of both companies at that point in time: Google was still the do-no-evil darling and MS was being seen as more and more like IBM of old.)
Amazon got Twitch for $970 million in cash. Seems like a bargain now, especially after burning so much cash on Mixer.
Maybe MS has finally learned a lesson: just buy the market leader. See LinkedIn