Technology

It uses a fucking inordinate amount of resources to accomplish its task, mostly.

Teams randomly selects the wrong microphone, so either people can't hear me or they can hear everyone around me too (laptop mic).

How hard can it be to store my microphone preference?

Teams meetings aren't really that much worse than Zoom, it's mostly minor gripes, although there are quite a few of those. The Teams chat client on the other hand is an absolute garbage fire that's significantly worse than Slack, Discord, or pretty much anything up to and arguably including IRC.

An organization , "team", channel, and chat are confusing as hell, that breakdown does not in any way align with the way communication works in a large organization. Why is there so little configuration available for notification settings? Why can't I completely silence or ignore a "team", channel, or chat? Why do I not receive notifications half the time for the things I actually want to be notified about? Why aren't there threads or at least a sensible and easy to follow "reply to" option? Why can't anyone seem to agree on the correct way to organize things? Half our groups are creating gigantic "teams" that include half the company, while the other half are creating shared channels nobody knows about. Both options suck.

For me, it has nothing to do with how good or bad the actual application is, it's the terms of service that go along with it. Basically microsoft hoovers up every morsel of data you put into their system, including your voice and face. I liken it to giving all your personal data to someone (including your voice and face), they put in a pretty looking safe on the side of the street and then they sell the keys to it.

Ignoring the fact that the data could be stolen from one of the many third parties it partners with, microsoft could (will) also give the data to the government which will then be used as evidence to deport or jail you or people you know for speaking out against the American regime or acted against Gods will and had an abortion. Or maybe someone in DC makes up some bullshit law targeting some arbitrary demographic which includes you, they request data from microsoft which is promptly provided; you get arrested and sent to jail or deported.

Data privacy is important, especially when the government is corrupt and insane. It's prudent to protect ourselves and the people we know.

Haven't needed to use it myself, but here's an open source alternative I've heard a lot about:

https://meet.jit.si/

Not sure it'll help with your work though.

So when my old job had it, about 5 (out of 30) people in my area just couldn't open it.

Not the same five, IT would frequently reinstall it to fix it, but it would just break constantly.

Work computers, very locked down, couldn't do any alternative to it at the time, and we worked remote, so while everyone else had chat, some unfortunate people needed constant updates via email.

The question was who would be SOL, not if someone would be, that day.

I had to use teams with multiple accounts with multiple organisations. Sometimes my account is added to their organisation, sometimes I used their provided account. Microsoft was going for a one sign in approach and the whole thing just totally failed to account for my situation. It never successfully let me switch accounts, running multiple concurrently certainly never worked.

With one situation the work around was to follow the original organisation invite again, reset my password then proceed with my meeting. I'd do this maybe ten times a day sometimes if I had to bounce between different companies.

And all controls are basic as fuck. It's a business tool that thinks its target market is my grandma. All controls were apple-ified. I'd get a long error code and I couldn't select it to copy and paste it, and if I clicked off the window the notification displaying the error code would go away, so i'd have to print screen the error code, paste out somewhere, and then type it out manually into Google to try and diagnose. This was a solved problem 30 years ago. Why are we going backwards?

Anyway, rant over. It's a pos. Slack is light years ahead.

You know you're an old time user when you call it paintbrush :)