No one would use Teams if it wasn't bundled together with other stuff.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I absolutely agree : our company used slack, Google docs, and self-hosted exchange.
Eventually, MS forced us to replace our self-hosted exchange for MS' cloud solution. This was basically a ramrod for shoveling O365 and having it replace Slack with Teams and Google Docs with O365.
The migration was painful... going from "I have the exact tools I need for the job" to "jebus, this is the best MS has? On Teams I can only see 4 people at the same time? What was MS thinking".
Not sure why yours doesn’t let you see more than 4 people. I’m in a call with 12 and I see them all. That being said, Google docs, etc. beats Word and Excel hands down in the area of collaboration and a few other minor points. I hate being stuck in one ecosystem that way.
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Serious question, I don't get the "forced" part. Could you clarify this for me?
Microsoft has been making hostile moves on licensing for on-prem/non subscription products for a while now. They want you to give up on local resources. Of course you could go to a competitor, but the only large competitor in the US is basically Google, and their offerings are not well tailored to business.
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My company only uses Teams and it works fine from what I can tell, what's so bad about it?
Lots of weird polish issues in my opinion... One that really peeved me was (for a while at least) you could search for a message, but there was no way to jump to that message from the search results. So you couldn't read the context unless you scroll all the way back up.
But primarily it's that the mechanics are different from things like Slack and Discord in ways that are just less intuitive.
Channels function more like announcements + comments rather than a chat—you are really shoehorned into posting a "Topic" and discussing it in the replies. There's no way to carry a linear conversation in a channel otherwise. And to load replies you have to keep clicking "see more" as if this is a social media site, so it's very annoying when your 800+ comment critical discussion happens there. Not to mention notification settings aren't granular enough, so you either get hammered by all activity, or remain oblivious to discussions which may have popped up in an older Post.
What tends to happen in my experience is small working groups spawn off a group chats because the flow is better for daily conversation there than in Channels. Which, of course hides this activity from anyone not in the chat. And group chat's are entirely linear in Teams—you don't have threads the way you do in Slack, so chat history tends to get messy quick.
The channel-then-thread organization Slack uses is much more natural for the teams I tend to work on, because you just have the one main discussion which can be segmented into threads as needed.
No company will ever use Discord as a replacement for Teams. It's not nearly secure enough
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Yeah. There must be tons of places that would choose Slack, or another alternative, over Teams if they weren’t getting Teams bundled into a piece they were already paying.
Let me disagree. My workplace is deep in ms "stuff" - dotnet development + other windows only stuff. Honestly, I got to use a lot of sw for online meetings due to c-19. Well, teams is as shitty as the others. Or good as the others. Depends on what you like to hear. I got used to it, and it does what it must almost always; very often what it should do. I've to say something more, but I don't want to look like a fanboy or similar.
I can understand Teams in Office, particularly O365 for organizations… what I don’t get is Teams being mandatory in Windows 11…
Seriously you can't have windows without having teams now?
I have a feeling when I finish rebuilding my gaming PC I'm not going to be a fan of using windows again...
A lot of us use Linux for gaming now. Supports almost all games. But for God's sake, pick a amd graphics card if you plan to do Linux gaming. Nvidia is buggy as hell.
Ugh. I've been wanting to switch for a while but that's a bummer to hear. I might just have to bite the bullet and deal with buggy drivers. Back when I got my monitors like 6 years ago there wasn't a ton of options for sub-5ms IPS displays with adaptive sync technology so I had to go with Acer Predators and G-Sync but now I'm kinda stuck with NVIDIA. I'm sure there's more options for monitors now but I'm not dropping that kind of money on monitors again.
Unless something has changed? Is GSync still proprietary? (Edit: looks like G-Sync does work on AMD cards now but only for newer monitors, dang.)
Ironically, I remember not long ago it was AMD that used to have the crap Linux drivers.
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My steam deck has been a god send! I am definitely looking forward to using Linux or trying it when I get to rebuilding my PC.
My biggest hope is that by the time I rebuild anti cheat for games like destiny 2 will work...
I have been using windows exclusively for 20 years now but just made the switch to Linux (EndeavourOS - an arch distro) 1 week ago and I couldn't be happier!
99% of all applications that I use work just as well (including games) and for the very very few that won't work (like Valorant) I am using a dual boot setup. The reason that I made the switch was that I got anxious with W10 EOL approaching since I would rather stop using windows altogether than using W11.
You will be really thankful for learning Linux in the future, the way big tech is going now.
When can I get an iPhone without iMessage being preinstalled? Microsoft is, if anything, late to the party on this kind of anti-user BS.
Or any of the i shit on there. And can you still not even change the default app for some things?
Last I checked, opening links in iOS with alternate browsers is very app-specific and requires a hack using a different protocol. E.g. Chrome registers itself as a handler for the "httpChrome" protocol and the app needs to do Open("httpChrome://lemmy.ml"). It's far worse than anything Microsoft did with IE back when they got sued.
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Microsoft is, if anything, late to the party on this kind of anti-user BS.
…do you not know about the IE lawsuits?
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I personally do a ton of game streaming to my Steam Deck which is my main driver for using Windows as it works better with NVIDIA Shield + Moonlight, but I highly recommend you give Pop!OS a try. I'm very pro-linux, but for the longest time it just wasn't there for gaming and I didn't recommend it. With Valve going full steam ahead for the Steam Deck, Proton has gotten so good that for 95% of games things just work out of the box without any issue. Wine even has support for Easy Anti Cheat now and more features are coming every week.
Seriously you can’t have windows without having teams now?
you can just uninstall it
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If they would also investigate Apple for forcing Safari on iOS
I'm not an expert on EU antitrust but these things seem like they naturally go together. After all, Outlook comes with Office, right? Is that not a communication and collaboration tool?
Well.. that depends on who you ask. Some say that Teams being a part of the bundle is anti competitive (which it is). Outlook used to be only a mail client, so it made sense when it was part of the Office package, as one thing that an Office user needs, is an email client. Exchange servers had to be hosted by the company. However nowadays, you get the client and the infra for a subscription based model so it was kind of grandfathered in, I guess. If I as a company say I'm not interested in Teams and want to not pay for it as I do not plan to use it, msft will tell me it's not possible. Therefore, businesses like Slack can never succeed because I as a company will never look at alternatives if I already get a messaging app built into my Office suite.
I dunno, I'm just mumbo jumbing really and not a lawyer (or an EU citizen, for that matter). I just hate Teams.
I think this is a great explanation. Teams really is anti competitive and the way you laid it out made that easier for me to understand.
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Yes. If they argued that oh no, we can't have excel in office. That's just too many products bundled together, I'd be pissed
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I'm no big fan of MS. And even if I were, using Teams would make that praise fall in the shitter
But I'm tired of these groups arguing that something should be less complete as a good thing
Why doesn't Yamaha sue Honda for including their own radio in the car? And surely customers would be irritated that they had to go and get another fucking radio
If I buy "Office Suite" I want it to have all the products included. If I think teams sucks I can get something else
If they make it difficult for that, like they did with IE, that's a different story. But merely including it? Come on
They tried that shit with antivirus. I'm GLAD MS includes defender. If I had to get all that shit separately, I'd be irritated. And if I don't like defender, I'm free to get something else
I use a lot of MS products. But when they try to trick me into using their browser every time I update, I have to dig through settings to remove Teams,and I have to install a third party app to choose the browser and search engine used from search bar, it's clear they're running amok
Well that's the kind of shit I was talking about with actual issues. It's annoying
Same in edge where it keeps trying to enable recommendations and other trash. Even now on my phone it keeps trying to send notifications to get me to use bing chat gpt. You're a glorified wallpaper rotation, gtfo
I keep edge as my default for work. It's just easier with the typical shitty intranet that breaks down if you use a different browser
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How is pairing two of their own products together even a trust/monopoly issue?
In General, using a part of your business that's on top to boost another part of your business that is not is typically seen as anti-competitive. Office is clearly the market leader, but Teams isn't.
IMO, the EU needs to do with Edge and Office. There is now a toggle in Outlook that ignores your default browser and opens everything in Edge. It's ridiculous.
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Now do google and DRM
It's certainly not wrong to take a look into Microsoft and its subscription business, but I don't see much success in pressing this particular point: Not only was there always some sort of free version of Teams since 2018, but since 2022 there has been a Teams Essentials subscription, a version that doesn't bundle O356.
If anything I'd like some compensation for the loss in sanity you get trying to understand the dozen different subscriptions and (incompatible) versions of Teams, all of which are confusingly named.
I’m all into inspecting big companies like Microsoft but this seems a little bit like, over reacting?
They relentlessly try to coerce us into using their browser, messaging, and Bing using windows. They undermine developers of apps like Firefox who try to sidestep their restrictions. They clearly need to be reined in
Yeah, but Teams in Office? Is that really the main problem?
How they pick cases is mysterious to me. I would go after them about Edge first, where they're doing real harm to Firefox, and Bing. Both of these are also pushed through Office. But maybe there are chat apps based in Europe that provide them jurisdiction, I don't know enough about it.
I remember a similar case regarding Windows shipping with IE. Whatever happened with that?
They added a browser choice window to Windows 7 where you could select and download a web browser to install. It isn't present in Windows 10 and on, possibly wasn't in 8 either.
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