Rant warning!
I mean I just quit a office call, the share screen ribbon wouldn’t disappear, opened task manager to kill it nope not found, finally had to select a “quit teams” option from start window. Note this is still windows 10.
Further the entire teams app is sloppy, when I start listing, the enter works but within the same message (when unintended) I have to ensure I click shift+enter to enter a new line. I can’t choose between enter and shift+enter.
A few questions now:
- why/how do these guys design a product this way
- Does it mean Microsoft can keep running any app which necessarily doesn’t appear on my task manager?
Teams and Teams Calling exist because it way past time for hardphones to disappear.
Any organization that does not fully embrace remote employees are stuck in the fucking 1980s.
All collaboration software has issues. Women is wonky as hell, Zooms has just as many issues as Teams and Teams is just as buggy as Webex…
I’m on Mac and I dislike it too. No flashing cursor to let me know I’ve selected the chat window to type. The app insists on changing to a different view when I switch windows, making me lose it. The share screen ribbon always manages to be exactly where I need it to not be. Doesn’t allow any sort of Markdown-esque formatting in chat, only WYSIWYG.
Are you on macOS 26 Tahoe? The lack of text cursor is something I’ve noticed with Liquid Glass (also on iOS). I’m not sure if it’s a bug or by design, but either way it’s annoying and not intuitive.
Regarding markdown formatting, it works just fine for me. Is there a setting somewhere you need to toggle?
If I type
*blah*it shows it as something like blah, but I want it to not format until I send. It’s difficult for me to write in WYSIWYG editors. I want it to show*blah*.Ah yes, the live preview… that would be nice to have but I don’t imagine Teams would ever implement this degree of granularity in customization.
If you end up submitting a feature request, make sure to tag it with “ai” and “copilot” so there’s at least some tiny chance someone will look at it ;)
The AI push right now is crazy. Where I’m working all teams have to show how much they’re using AI and where. Rather than being measured on their success they’re being measured on how they’re doing it.
Yes, I was only half joking about that.
If you are ever so inclined, you can look at the Microsoft Graph API logging for some of the O365 services like Teams, there is a field in there that logs if Copilot was even mentioned in the transaction, let alone actually used.
Seems like in many cases you can easily game the system to show how much you’ve embraced Ai.
The upside to Teams is that you can always claim it’s at fault for your fuckup. It has so many bugs that no one can ever say that something can’t go wrong because of teams.
- Fell asleep at your desk and didn’t see an important message or call? => “Dang, so sorry, Teams never sent me a notification!”
- Way too late to a scheduled meeting => “Omg hi, finally! Teams crashed every time I tried to enter the meeting!”
- Hungover and don’t want to turn on the camera => “I’m sorry, Teams starts stuttering every time I turn on the camera, so I’m keeping it off for now.”
- Forgot to get back to someone? => “Huh but I wrote you like a week ago… weird, Teams must have swallowed the message”
- Don’t want to answer a tough question in a meeting? => “Sorry, your audio keeps cutting out for me. Just one moment, let me restart Teams.” pretend to struggle for 20mins and give up without answering the question
I have to use Teams for work but I’m on Linux so I just use the web app in Firefox. Other then minor, irritating UI decisions (WTF is the ‘Activity’ tab for?) I don’t have any issues. Video calls work fine, screen sharing works, notifications work. When something breaks I just reload the page. If people have so many issues maybe try using the web app?
Thanks and this is very interesting, I am lucky that I have Firefox browser (a very few in my org have the same, I installed ublock origin and ever since IT disabled installation of plugins). Let me test teams on Firefox (hoping it let’s me login), fingers crossed.
Out of curiosity are you on wayland? At some point teams stopped letting me share my screen (there wasn’t even a button) and it was around the time I changed to wayland so that was probably why. I haven’t tried it since then so maybe they fixed it but it was pretty weird.
I love MS Teams.
Long live MS Teams.
It’s quite literally the worst chat app I ever had to use. It can’t even handle fucking copy+paste without messing up formatting every single time. Constantly crashes, can’t handle notifications across devices, doesn’t work properly with even “teams certified” headsets, uses 3 times more resources than any comparable app … it’s fucking bloatware with a chat function.
Fuck Teams and everyone that made it. I hope the get cancer.
For a while, Microsoft Teams was pretty good. I’d say their sweet spot was roughly 2020-2022ish. It was a pretty basic chat app with a bit of workplace collaboration and office integration built in.
Then new teams happened. Now teams can be installed to a user profile, or to the machine as a whole. Now you need new outlook to get some semblance of functionality with calendars and scheduling in teams. Now teams is deployed as part of Microsoft office, or standalone, or needs to be imported as a package, but fuck you if you have a mix of these methods in your environment. Teams holds on to your data now forever, which would be great!.. If the search function actually worked well. Now you have to sort through everything you’ve ever said to find something that someone sent you last week.
Microsoft just can’t fucking resist destroying a “good” chat application by adding a bunch of bloat.
Which Microsoft Teams are you talking about?
The Microsoft Teams with the purple icon and white accent, or the Microsoft Teams with the white icon and purple accent?
why/how do these guys design a product this way
Its just one of many business applications that MSFT provides as you get vendor locked into the Windows platform.
Technically it was the successor to skype for business, and skype itself was its own product that was acquired by MSFT.
It doesn’t matter how crappy it is because MSFT can sell it to you as part of a complete package with stuff like Azure, M365, etc, and you would find it annoying to pay extra for a better platform like Slack.
Does it mean Microsoft can keep running any app which necessarily doesn’t appear on my task manager?
iirc it shouldn’t be hidden in task manager but it might be easier to use process explorer from sysinternals: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer
Haven’t touched hot garbage windows in a long time so I don’t remember if teams has a non obvious process that runs in the background.
An important sidenote is “Skype for Business” has nothing to do with Skype MSFT acquired. It’s just brand reuse to cover up their shitty product. What that product is? Good old MSN Messenger’s on-prem sister i.e. ms lync. In fact Skype for business main .exe is still lync.exe . This was acceptable in early 2000s. Now those outdated ui elements, confused windows and scrambled chat history, ignoring the offline messages after the first one. It’s wonky as hell to use in this day and age. At least there are some decent clients for open source platforms like matrix, mattermost, zulip etc. MS teams, MS Skype, MS anything is crap as always.
It is my work PC, it literally asks me enter password to open task manager. I am not going to explore anything on this PC
I fucking hate teams. Man its shit. Imagine working on that program at m$, how do they not want to die.
That’s nothing, Google had almost a dozen different chat apps at different times, some of them simultaneously.
As for
Does it mean Microsoft can keep running any app which necessarily doesn’t appear on my task manager?
A lot of background services run as ‘svchost’, which loads the particular library implementing the actual service. Services can be added by applications, from what I understand. They all look the same in the task manager, and also can’t be properly selected in a firewall app because again it’s the same executable.
This is not to say that Teams specifically uses an svchost service, but they could if they wanted.
Speaking about ‘svchost’ etc. I won’t break my head into it. But on the other hand would love to explore the extension of ‘ps’ and how it relates what you just told
If you mean PowerShell, it’s just text scripts that run sorta like programs. I don’t think many scripts are used in Windows or in apps, outside of sysadmin stuff and sometimes app installers, so idk where you’re seeing them.
However, PowerShell uses the extension ‘ps1’. ‘ps’ is PostScript, which is a page layout format similar to PDF and in fact the precursor to it.
Neither of these are related to svchost. PowerShell scripts typically run start to end in one go and don’t hang out in the background (tough in theory they can).
I meant the process command on linux, or ‘PS’ in short. I am not very literate with OS concepts but wouldn’t be bad to explore
Ah, well,
psis one program that is Unixes’ analog to the task manager.htopshows the same info dynamically and with pretty colors.I won’t explain their output here, there are plenty of tutorials and explainers on the web. Just gonna say that in Unixes, background services, including system ones, run under their own names instead of anything like
svchost— i.e. a proper separate program starts and keeps in the background, so you can see it inpsor another system monitor. (Although in theory nothing prevents there being ansvchostwith the same approach as in Windows, but Linux distros don’t provide one for lack of necessity.)
Teams exist because corporations are too cheap to purchase Zoom licenses.
Oh please…All Collaboration tools have the same number of issues, just different ones.
Have you ever used Zoom and then be forced to switch to Teams?
It’s like enjoying a warm baguette and then being forced to give it up and eat stale Sara Lee.
I have been forced to switch to different collaboration tools and platforms a number of times and it always just sucks…
For me that pain began back when I was forced to stop using AIM ( America Online Instant Messenger).
Have you actually tried Teams? It stands above all the rest for number of issues. There are a lot of good ideas, but then it’s like they had a bunch of interns hack together the ui over a weekend and never fixed it
Yes…
I have used it daily for at least six years.
Overlayed on that is I have used WebEx for about 15 years, hell maybe 20 years.
I agree that it has UI has issues, so does Webex, so does Zoom… hell Skype had its issues as well.
There is a lot about teams I don’t like, but that is every collaboration tool I have ever used.
Truth be had the only collaboration tool I have ever been satiated with is the tool my university used back in 2000, but that probably had more to do with not having to drive to class.
Maybe the real issue is the idea of a “collaboration tool”. You could argue the only such ambitious tools I’ve tried are lotus notes and Microsoft Teams, and both were horrible: lots of services but in an ugly ui with poor usability. Teams had unreliable phone and notes didn’t have it at all.
It’s much better dealing with a set of tools containing better implementations of the feature you want. Maybe it’s just not useful trying to cram that much functionality into one tool.
And yes I’ll name names, I currently get much better results from
- zoom for calls (especially with their generated summaries!)
- slack for texting
- files in a variety of tools specific to the need
You are absolutely correct. That they aer bundling the different software is why it will lack.
If a tool bundles up 10 components and then you poll ten people all they have to do is not like one of those components for the whole bundle to lack.
Because life is suffering.
Shh… They’ll hear you. Stop using antichrist software.
🐧 oh we’re coming, bitch
Because Microsoft owned Skype at the beginning of the pandemic, had 100% mindshare, a practically genericized trademark, and an install base of a gazillion users, and yet still managed to somehow fumble the ball to Zoom.
I feel like part of the problem was that Microsoft tried porting instant messaging and video calling services into the Office suite for decades and it didn’t stick. I remember previous attempts like Skype for business and Lync, with few people in the companies I worked at incorporating it into their workflows.
It took COVID and full remote work to push people into using a program like Zoom over SMS and phone calls. Once most of corporate America switched to using Zoom for conference calls, Microsoft had to rush out a new product that could unseat Zoom quickly.
