That’s all.
I chalk most of the shit that makes teams horrible, is closely related to electron and their whole web app as a desktop app bullshit.
Buckle up, because they’re doing that same enshittification to outlook next. It’s already begun. There’s a “new” Outlook. FML.
Since I have not seen anyone mention this problem yet: Teams doesn’t let you mute other people in a call for yourself. Obviously also no volume control per person. Imagine sitting next to your coworker in a teams meeting and having to deal with hearing them twice with like 20 ms delay. Awful.
i hate ms with every fiber of my being, but teams has gotten better. it used to be practically unusable. now its just mostly so
I’ve had nothing but issues with it since their “upgrade” over the last year or so. It keeps cycling between the new and old versions when I open it, it often closes itself on my PC, and every time I try to pin it to my Taskbar it disappears.
i had this exact issue until i wiped my machine this summer and it refreshed into a full win11 after the crowdstrike debacle
This is a shared workstation PC at my job so I’ll have to just continue to deal with it.
The auto closing is driving me insane.
I have 3 different computers I use on a daily and each of them encounter this issue multiple times each week. A meeting starts and I have to go start up Teams and wait for it to fully open to join the call. Or I have someone cold call me and I don’t get the call on my computer and won’t even after opening Teams.
They can do a full refresh and release new features to make it look pretty but nothing has been done to address this issue that has been ongoing since day 1 of this “new Teams” refresh.
There’s a huge Teams outage right now. I have to use it at work and it makes me want to jump face first into a wood chipper.
My company is currently forcibly migrating off of Slack to Teams. It’s so heartbreaking…
You’re in for a world of shit.
Is that regional? Ours is working fine out in the midwest.
Must be.
We used to use it before switching to Google Workspace (don’t get me started on how much I hate that), and Teams wasn’t too bad. But it had two things going for it then:
- It was replacing Skype for Business which never should existed because it was so awful. Compared to SfB, literally anything was an improvement.
- At the time, it was basically a Slack clone that didn’t have everything and the kitchen sink bolted on yet and was decently lightweight if you used the browser version.
I’m still convinced the turning point was when Microsoft deprecated Skype for Business and merged the devs from that team with the ones working on Teams. My tinfoil hat theory is they brought their garbage Lync code with them and pulled seniority to somehow jam it into the new codebase.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire!
To be fair, you are right about SfB. My previous job used that
Maybe I’m remembering early/beta Teams with rose tinted spectacles, but at the very least the silver lining was that I no longer needed to keep a separate Windows machine running just for work IM.
I even tried adding it to Citrix, but it refused to install on a server version of Windows.
I do not believe anyone at Microsoft actually uses it because if they did there’s no way in hell that they would have let it be that bad.
It literally keeps every single conversation you’ve ever had in a big long list on the left, with absolutely no way to organize it, categorize it, order it, or in any way manage it other than deleting history, that’s it you can delete history.
Microsoft’s design philosophy in any of their products has gone from well organized menus to relying instead on a search bar. Copilot is a further addition to that design, with yet more pushes to never use a menu, but instead just tell it what you want and have it spit it back out. They want everything you make to go on OneDrive as well, so it can also be indexed this way. Teams works the same way. The big search bar at the top is unavoidable.
Windows search is complete garbage, which you might think is a counterpoint, but instead it’s just that they only put work into having it serve results for cloud-indexed items or web results.
There’s a program called “Everything” which is basically just a functional version of Windows search. It’s one of those programs that really should be integrated into the OS but isn’t. The other one being Fences.
with absolutely no way to organize it, categorize it, order it, or in any way manage it other than deleting history
But you can pin any chat and you can reorder any pinned chat (and maybe even non-pinned ones - I haven’t checked).
But only 15. Yeah, I hit that limit regularly. I just want to out things in folders. That would be a major improvement.
Wouldn’t the folder structure kind of defeat the purpose of the messenger vs mail?
Not when you’re expected to use it as a texting/messenger device for work. I have so many threads and DMs through it that I truly need to make it more organized. I’m not alone.
I think when I said stuff you weren’t thinking of threads and chats but that’s what I meant. Apologies.
I mean, when you need to operate chats via folder structure, wouldn’t it make Оutlook out of it?
I want to be able to label chats. I don’t know who Sammy Gupta is, I know we must have spoken to them at some point but it was 2 years ago and I don’t remember who they are, what their role or responsibility is, or anything about them.
It literally keeps every single conversation you’ve ever had in a big long list on the left,
Not all of them, actually. I regularly have to use the search function to find chats/groups I haven’t used in a bit. The most organization you can do is the dozen pinned threads they let you have.
That’s my primary gripe too. I could theoretically work around it if the chat search worked. I’ll try searching for a specific word to see who said it to me and when, but if it was more than a couple days ago I’m out of luck. Later I’ll remember who said it, eventually find them in the sidebar, scroll up 40 pages in the chat, and find the exact word Teams claimed it’s never heard of.
I believe they will never allow users to delete entire chats like that because it will cause mass panic for users and managers, particularly. You already have users doing dumb shit like deleting files accidentally. And more than that, you’ll have managers getting upset that users may be doing it on purpose like “omg I never saw that message! 😱 “
Deleting your own stuff is easy and okayed because it’s not an easy process and it involves multiple steps.
While I have close to zero trust in MSFT and event much dislike a lot of m365, teams isn’t actually that bad and loop is really good.
That’s all.
There’s more: microsoft outlook is garbage
If I’m being honest the only Microsoft product I actually like is Excel.
They’re doing their best to “improve” excel too… I can’t understand how their AI generated cell fill is worse than the old approach.
I’ll die on the hill that classic outlook is far better than Gmail and similar web interfaces for email especially if you have long threads or lots of emails.
Also somehow Google’s email search sucks so bad compared to searching in outlook.
I agree. The old Outlook was snappy and dense of information. The new Outlook is just a fucking web page.
Thunderbird <3
It’s actually disturbing that Thunderbird is the only good smtp/imap client available and it’s not receiving that much funding.
Ever try finding an old email by sender. Lol, good luck
The new outlook has exceeded “garbage” and gone all the way to dumpster fire. It sometimes takes upwards of 15, 30 seconds to open an email. The new auto formatting is a hindrance to be overcome by tricking it to act how you want. Trying to schedule an event across timezones shits the bed half the time, resulting in improper meeting times being sent out. Absolute failure.
I will give respect where due: I like the sweep button. It’s handy for me personally, as someone who is on several email lists that are public-facing. That’s about it.
Every attempt to help me automatically is a pain. Like most things in this vein it never learns what you’re trying to do, only what they would do in a given scenario that’s vaguely like ours.
I think there’s tons of things I love for it to do for me automatically - there’s all sorts of quality of life features that I only notice when they change it, usually without bothering to tell me. And now, my muscle memory is leading to unexpected behavior, and it’ll take me weeks to learn to stop doing that, and a few more months of training to learn the new muscle memory as I relapse at all the worst times
Some of it is straight up better, some of it is great new capabilities, but in the last few years? All that comes to mind is I thought it was pretty cool they added auto responses, even if I never actually use them. Doesn’t change existing behavior, just adds a new option that’s not in the way
But then the auto complete - I hate it so much. And I love auto complete - except it’s the fucking opposite behavior of every IDE out there, including Microsoft’s! I can’t even unlearn it, because it’s a core part of my workflow!
So now, I constantly have to delete things I never wanted to say, and I delete the things I thought sounded good.
I like new features and the computer doing things for me automagically… But I’d rather them to just stop at this point
I accidentally switched to it and it dropped all my non-MS mailboxes. Then when I immediately switched back it had the gall to ask me why.
New Outlook also doesn’t support Really Simple Syndication, which I used a lot with the Old Outlook.
So back to old Outlook I go.
My CISO has all but said he’s going to prevent any auto-rollout of that shit because it breaks decades of user training and TRUNCATES THE FRONT OF THE URL, NOT THE BACK LIKE ANY SENSIBLE APPLICATION.
Like, let’s make it so Steve in accounting can’t see that the login link he wants to click is actually haxxor.com instead of bank.com, makes perfect fucking sense.
Wait, really? I’ve found the new outlook opens emails faster than the old one, especially the HTML-heavy ones that my work loves to send me.
The refactor to the rules UI is really nice too, the old one was so crusty. Can’t comment on the timezone issue though.
I’ve been told the extended time to open is related to how big the outlook database is, I average 200 emails received a day with various alerts and notifications from internal tools and it cripples new outlook in about a week if I’m not diligent with keeping folders cleaned out/emails deleted. This volume wasn’t a issue before I switched.
Ah so your issue is, let me see here… Ah, actually using Outlook like a normal user.
I’ve tried switching to Thunderbird myself but it doesn’t support Office 365 without a third party service. So I feel stuck with Outlook.
Ah, actually using Outlook like a normal user.
Ha, right? I’m keeping my fingers crossed there is some executive at MS raging and it will get resolved before they force everyone off the legacy version. Surely there are people inside their organization with tons more traffic than I see.
There’s probably a microsoft engineer out there somewhere sitting in a cubical who has the solution already written and tested and they just can’t figure out how to send it to their boss. They’ve tried outlook, teams, github, skype, and even one drive but they’re all so broken that it may just be faster to print the code out and mail it.
Microsoft OneDrive is the maggots in the dog shit
There shouldn’t be worms in the poop of a healthy dog. This analogy just keeps getting better and more accurate.
Maggots aren’t worms.
Onedrive is pretty ok, other than being annoying. A company I worked for was acquired by another company that had their own cloud storage product. After the acquisition, they forced us to migrate from onedrive to their product. It was so bad… Files would constantly corrupt and disappear, the speed was terrible, trying to share files didn’t work half the time, when sharing folders the people you shared with wouldn’t see all the files in the folder. They also limited our storage from 1TB to 25GB making it pretty useless for storing builds of our product or trying to share VMs.
And the worst part is that they also closed our SMB network share to force us to use that piece of shit.
After that experience, I will never complain about Onedrive again.
Haha oh man that sounds infuriating. Of course it could be worse, but def could be better
Oooh, I hate it so bad…… I used to click “Save” and my word document would ask to save in the only folder I save ALL my documents in. Change the name, save, so easy!
Now it asks if I want to save to OneDrive… Fuck No Mr Paperclip! I want it in the folder I always use and don’t want to have to select “Other” then dig through screens to select the thing I use every time!
So annoying. The OneDrive documents folder masquerading as your actual docs folder. Diabolical.
What’s worse is when I need to upload the doc to a website the OneDrive folder is nowhere to be found.
Hit F12 to bypass the bs.
Note to self….
On Mac, I would use Keyboard Maestro to try to automate that. I think AutoHotkey can do the same kind of thing on Windows?
They make use it at my job. I hate it.
Microsoft
Teamsis dog shitFTFY
Everybody liked this
What’s bad about it? I’m a Linux admin by nature but an admin of all by profession and overall I have no real complaints about Teams. Has always worked just fine for me and to my knowledge everyone else.
I haven’t used competing apps to know, but as a forced teams user it is very sluggish, seems to break other ms apps half the time and has some strange and persistent design choices that irk me. It also crashes on its own, when I’m not using it 2-3 times a day.
It has improved in terms of features lately, but still feels very bloated and WIP most of the time. It still won’t let me control where video windows are, and I’ll never understand this.
This is our replacement for Skype, which was obviously feature deficient and getting old, but does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t cause problems.
Not sure if there’s a good competing app in terms of video and slack functionality, integration into outlook and onedrive (both of which also annoy me and seem to be performing worse-over-time, but are unavoidable and sometimes useful.)
Slow, buggy, annoying interface, hogs extreme amounts of resources locally, can be used to spy on its users.
What’s not to like? It’s basically how Elon envisions X, an “everything app” that is actually good at nothing specific.
Agreed. It feels a bit janky here and there but otherwise works ok.
But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t say I like it.
It’s missing basic features. The stuff that any normal human would assume it can do it just can’t do. It’s absolutely terrible if you use it in a large organization where you have to speak to multiple different people.
For one-on-one conversations I guess it’s okay but the moment you try and get anything more complicated than that going on it becomes a nightmare.
You know what, I forgot about the actual Teams section which is a disaster. I use it in a corpo but only actually use the IM and calls part.
What basic features?
Is there a Microsoft product that isn’t?
To be fair, Teams is pretty bad even for MS. I’ve never seen something do so relatively little and still perform so poorly. When I switched jobs and got to use Slack it was like a great fog being lifted off of my being.
I must be the only one who prefers Teams over Slack. I just don’t like its design. Nothing makes sense to me in how it operates. But then again, Trams runs fine for me. No slow downs or deleting things that others have mentioned.
Excel, Active Directory, and to a somewhat lesser degree MSSQL.
Excel?! Have to respectfully disagree on that one.
What’s wrong with excel?
It’s an awful mix of half-assed approaches to things. Awkward syntax on everything and very poor at recognizing what types of data it is handling.
Open a CSV in a fresh Excel install. It will almost certainly mistake something for a date if the CSV is sufficiently large (unless the user is exceedingly explicit at changing settings for that particular CSV). It will reformat that data as a date, and as an added bonus, since Autosave is on by default, it’ll save that reformatted data back into your CSV. Yes, settings can be changed to avoid these things. But why isn’t it just designed better so as to avoid it altogether?
If that was just a natural side effect of spreadsheet apps, I could understand it. But LibreOffice Calc is a million times better at recognizing what types of data it is handling, so it seems to just be Excel’s shittiness.
The fact that it also hasn’t really changed beyond aesthetics since 2004 is just… wild.
Can confirm. I’ve sent csv files to my coworkers, and they’ve tried to tell me that the files I sent were invalid. It’s because they opened up the file in Excel to look at it first, and Excel autosaved the reformatted data.
Excel is great.
It does so much that people make it do what it shouldn’t, and never think to explore technologies beyond it… Like a proper fucking database.
Then you get garbage business systems based on fragile excel sheets with bonkers macros and weird ETL pipelines to sync things.
And never try to deal with dates and timezones.Reminds me of my last job where I had to build a ridiculously complex excel spreadsheet that I copied a bunch of reports into to do scheduling because someone decided I didn’t need access to the actual data…
And never try to deal with dates and timezones.
Or anything that looks like dates.
Gene scientists had to revise their whole naming scheme because Excel would see MARCH1 (Membrane-Associated Ring-CH-Finger Type 1), and ‘helpfully’ convert it into a date, rendering it useless (since it uses timestamps on the backend).
It’s bad enough that my data science course recommended against opening CSV files in Excel, because it would edit the file to do the conversion, even before you explicitly saving, mangling your data before you could process it.
I have an old Microsoft brand thumb drive that fits perfectly into my ass and makes me nut every time
Excel?
PowerPoint is shit but it’s the best by far
C#, technically not a product but it’s pretty great. The first few Xboxes, but that’s going back a bit.
Windows pre 8.
Microsoft Excel is goat for spreadsheets.
Erm. Can’t think of any more.
VS Code. That’s it though.
VS Code is OK if you can’t afford the JetBrains ultimate subscription. I never want to see a VS Code launch configuration again.
WebStorm and Rider will have community versions soon, they are going to eat VS Code’s lunch.
Fuck subscriptions though.
Agreed…the community editions of their tools are solid, but if you’re doing cloud stuff, get your company to pay for it. It blows VS Code out of the water.
Ehh, it’s ok in the case of JetBrains - if your subscription lapses your license converts to a ‘perpetual fallback license’ so can just continue using the version you installed when the subscription was originally purchased.
I’m using a 4 year old version of PhpStorm with no issues and no subscription. My PyCharm sub ended 6 months ago and I’m staying on the 2023 version of PyCharm because the latest version comes with lots of AI which makes my CPU fans scream continuously.
They’ve been cramming random stuff in that though that’s making it more laggy. Recently switched to Zed and it’s so much faster.
Some C/C++ extension process once reduced my laptop to a crawl, and I couldn’t close VS Code, so I killed the process through the task manager, simple enough, right?
Long story short, I started smelling burning plastic and saw that, somehow, there was no VS Code process, but the extension had a separate process that was still running at full speed doing idk what. I almost burned myself when I picked up my laptop. So I’m not very happy when I see VS Code
WSL was my gateway drug to Linux. It’s neat. Until it isn’t.
TypeScript isn’t terrible. It’s extra work to set up, but it makes the excessive pile of excrement that is JavaScript somewhat tolerable.
Powertoys too
That’s open source though?
You may know already, but you should try VSCodium. At least they took the Micro$hit telemetry out!
Ah yes, you’re right.
I guess a better qualifier might be: closed-source Microsoft products tend overwhelmingly to suck.
Sadly I had to go the other way, from Slack to Teams. Oh the horror!!
How about Zoom to Teams?
For your sacrifices, I salute you
Have to use it at work, it is a real nightmare.
Who told you to tell the truth?
You had no right!
well, it’s not just Teams and not just MS. Have you worked with Zoom lately? I do agree that Teams occupies that very special dark space in my heart right next to hate and loathing.
Zoom is fucken cancer.
Zoom works for video. I test it a few times a week for a few hours with a few contacts each time.
And a few beer.
It’s a vPub most of the time with some tech thrown in.
I hate to say it, but FB Messenger is realizable for me too : starts well, sounds good, video’s clean, ends cleanly . I need to remind mom how to start that call when it’s with her on her old portal unit, but yeah. Cambridge is the worst thing to happen to good products like M and Portal.