> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success.
Not sure if the author has used Teams.
But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.
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...
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
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).
* 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'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.
Whatever. I've been using it since day one and its still a broken turd. People are just used to shit software, restarting, rebooting, missing calls, missing messages. Sure you can make it work, but you can't deny its a real piece of shit.
Maybe in 2020. Teams is the defacto IM app for enterprise now. It may not be to your liking, but most workplaces don't need apps to constantly be adding new features. They need videoconferencing, chat, meeting recording and AI transcription and note-taking. All synced with everyone's Outlook calendars and authenticated by the same SSO used org-wide. Teams has had all of those for years.
For the 1000+ headcount companies who sit outside the Silicon Valley webdev/software dev world, it doesn't. Silicon Valley looks at these as "products". Purchasing managers see these as "commodities" that need to be interoperable with the rest of their stack first.
That's fair, in my last org we used Teams for meetings despite Slack for general chat etc.
Partly I'd say that's due to MS giving it subpar experience in O365 calendar/mail/outlook - you can't join a call directly, best you can really do is link to the channel as location.
They're ending webhooks? Bummer. By the looks of it, they're going to introduce a more complex alternative. No, two, because why not. Why make something work when you can also make two things that work half, right?
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.
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 :(
Yeah, I mean the first thing we all do when we get one giant unified inbox is write a bunch of rules to break it back out to a set of folders so that we can triage it appropriately. Slack channels just do this from the get go.
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
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.
Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN.
Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office.
That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.
I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.
Hardly. You're going from analog to digital and vice-versa. You probably need specialized appliances. For every country in the world. And it's "solved" but only in proprietary contexts; I don't think there's a standard. Then you need to operate it - you need SREs, bug fixes, keeping up with downstream changes etc.
Adding PSTN to Discord is absolutely a Discord-sized problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hard disagree. We use both in my company. Google Chat is definitely better than Teams for actual collaboration: it's easier to track unread messages in "Home" (it's the "inbox"), and channels (called "spaces") are much better designed (they are conceptually closer to Slack's channels). Also, it's not crashing all the time. What's missing: the message editor doesn't support nested bulleted lists, we can't archive a space/channel.
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.
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.
Also if you are using language with more than 24 letters - like you know, most of the world... You can't do {left alt}+n in teams while {right alt}+n works perfectly fine, and I haven't found a way to disable this awful behavior.
Like mate - I'm on Mac, I use CMD+n for new tabs, not windows-like shortcuts...
> Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.
I've tried it multiple times in Firefox, since it's the browser I normally use for everything else, and it was somehow even wonkier than in Chromium. I didn't stick with it long enough to notice the difference in battery use, especially since I don't often run the laptop unplugged.
> 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.
I do notice the delay, but I swear they sometimes come out in the wrong order. The most common occurrence is it registering the enter key and sending the message before the last 2-3 letters. Sometimes it doesn't register the enter at all and the message just sits there, while I wait for a reply, which obviously never comes.
I'm not saying I'm some kind of god of dactylography, I do make mistakes, but, somehow, I only have issues of this magnitude and frequency in Teams...
If you are having perf issues in calls, see if you can buy the hevc codec from the Microsoft store. Windows does not come with it by default, and supposedly teams needs this to offload video processing to the gpu. I think it made a difference to me. But who knows.
I have that installed for watching Prime Video and stuff while away with only my work laptop. Watching Prime Video in its app or YouTube in the browser doesn't heat the laptop (fan stays quiet), but I've never done this on battery, so I don't know how those fare on that front.
Now, I don't have performance issues per se, by which I mean that I don't have video or voice skipping or whatever. The interface lags, but it does that all the time, even without a call happening. If I only looked at the PC during a call, I'd think everything was fine. But I notice the fan ramping up and the battery draining if I'm unplugged. And this happens even when there is absolutely no video whatsoever on the call. I'm not even sure that not having video on makes that much of a difference battery- and heat-wise. Switching the Windows power profile to battery saver doesn't seem to affect Teams in any noticeable way, nor does it help with battery drain.
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.
What do you mean lately? I remember Office apps always looking and behaving a bit off ever since, like, Office 2000. For some reason, they seem to have never quite embraced the design language of the current Windows version, even though they're in-house apps.
Now, the latest version of whatever the suite is called this second is a web page in some weird browser window, which has some rather funny failure modes [0]. What makes this all the more ridiculous is that running them in actual full-blown browsers is a better experience.
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[0] I'm specifically thinking of New Outlook, which, sometimes, kinda hangs, but not completely. It will fail to either fetch new mail or update the view with the new mails (can't tell which it is), but the view isn't actually broken! You can click around, select different mails and it will show the contents, move around folders—everything looks fine! Except no new mail comes in. And then, you want to, say, maximize or minimize the window. But you can't! The window controls don't react at all to the mouse! You obviously need to "end task" and restart that crap to get it working again.
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.
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.
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.
Teams is definitely a solid success. It is by no means a good app. Those two things aren't the same.
Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible.
Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI.
And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
I thought Slack started as a failed game and they only pivoted when their in game chat proved popular. They still have game assets around like their 404 page iirc.
Not quite, they built Slack as an internal communication tool while building the game Glitch (RIP) and after the game failed they decided to productize Slack.
Lol it aas an admirable attempt at something new. I loved the interesting blend of messaging and document creation. It the code still lives on as an archived open project btw.
Not sure if the author has used Teams.
But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.