Like many I use a variety on those chat programs, Zulip for my companies, Slack for some customers, good old IRC for some open source things, Discord for gaming, ... They all have some strenght and some weakness.
But then Teams keeps showing up because "everyone knows it", "you already have it through office", ... And somehow I can't name a single strenght for it. It's just plain bad.
It reminds me of the galaxy of "prime" service from Amazon beside delivery, that don't need to compete on their own merit but benefit from the main product they're attached to: on its own, it should have died a dishonorable death a long time ago.
Teams is one of the only exceptions I can think of to my "blame the system, not the developer" rule with regards to corporate software.
No, in Teams' case, they somehow managed to take a trivial problem that was solved quite well 30-40-odd years ago (albeit in a slightly different skin - IRC) and completely botch it in every way imaginable, and then a few more ways not even the most creative of QA engineer could have possibly imagined a team messing up such a basic problem set.
It's finally a little bit less bad than it was 2-3 years ago, so the trend line is slightly angling upwards out of hell now, where the bar has been, but that's really not saying much.
Spoken like someone who has never used Deltek Maconomy. Teams is really bad but not Deltek Maconomy bad. Nothing else I’ve used is.
That being said, in the last job where I used it regularly, Teams was responsible for 100% of the blue screens I regularly experienced. Dell laptop and some quirk of interaction between Teams video calls, NVidia graphics drivers, and WiFi drivers than no update ever fixed. Very frustrating.
As bad as teams is, there is absolutely no comparison to the crap that is slack. Just a number of things I regularly encounter:
1. Slack selecting speakers instead of headphones for call, even though I've used the headphones just before.
2. Calls ringing on my mobile that has been quietly sitting on the desk, instead of on the desktop that I've been typing on.
3. Mobile and desktop client being completely out of sync, it sometimes takes several minutes for messages typed on the mobile to show up on the desktop or vice versa.
4. I always have to select which screen to share twice before it shares (non of the other programs have this issue)
5. Don't get me started on the worst search ever, it's almost always easier to scroll than to search if it wasn't for:
6. Whoever thought it was a good idea that we should everything older than 15 messages or so back from the server. So instead of just quickly scrolling up it becomes an excercise of wading through molasses.
7. The absolute brain dead formatting, which makes typing equations or e.g. python exponents super annoying (no I didn't want to have this text bold)
I mean don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of teams either, but it's absolutely mind boggling how slack got to such a dominant position in this space
At work for some reason we use both Slack and Teams because part of the company likes one and another part of the company likes the other, so i actually get to have simultaneous experience with both.
I use both on Linux via Firefox (their tabs are pinned side by side). I prefer Teams because:
a) Slack constantly forgets my credentials and i need to go through a whole dance of logging in, proving i'm human by clicking bicycles, having it email some code. Pretty much every day.
b) Slack, for some reason i cannot fathom, randomly switches me to "do not disturb" mode (or something like that) even though i'm right there. Not even away: it switches to a mode where i do not receive notifications when someone messages me. Fortunately it still does the beepy sound and i do keep the tabs visible on my screen all the time so i actually do notice messages, but i had at least a couple of questions from others why i am in that mode.
c) Slack does not support audio calls. Not sure why, but it doesn't work in Firefox. Teams does work just fine. Fortunately all work meetings are done via Teams and all people on Stack are also on Teams so if someone wants an audio call we use Teams, but still, a negative for Slack.
The only issue i had with Teams is that its text input can get confused when typing `backticks` and it seems to dislike using emojis at any place except the end of the text. Also Slack has some (old) meme emojis, though if that is a good thing or not depends on your taste :-P.
Oh interesting, I could say all of these same points for Teams.
Being signed out on Teams leads to a really slim banner at the top (of the already messy UI) that tells me to sign in again, the strip is even grey... the only reason I notice I am signed out at all is because I have notifications on my phone that aren't reflected in the Teams UI. This is a consequence of my IT department having short sessions, but the fact that this is how Teams displays it- is a fragrantly terrible UX.
The more annoying one is when my phone is signed out I just stop getting push notifications. There's no indication that I need to sign in again or anything. I think Slack would have the same issue with short session times to be honest, unless they send you a push notification every time your credentials expire which is also frustrating.
Teams working in Firefox is relatively recent, afaik it still doesn't work in Safari. I think I specifically had to install Chrome a few times to join job interviews that were conducted on Teams as Firefox definitely was not supported a year ago.
> c) Slack does not support audio calls. Not sure why, but it doesn't work in Firefox. Teams does work just fine. Fortunately all work meetings are done via Teams and all people on Stack are also on Teams so if someone wants an audio call we use Teams, but still, a negative for Slack.
My slack experience is old so I don't remember but on msteams there aren't audio calls at all. All calls all video calls, the only difference the audio/video call buttons do is wether your webcam will be activated or not from the beginning but you can still disable it before joining on a video call and you can always activating your camera even if you pressed the telephone looking button to start the call.
