What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case.
We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at.
The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
Of course it is. And from a user's perspective, I often hear people saying they are 'forced' to use it because their employers want them to, otherwise they risk being fired, but I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal, since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.
The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..
I think it's gotten a lot better over recent years but in just the past week we had:
A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.
It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.
There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.
And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.
I don't know whether Teams is worse than Slack. I do know that I loathe Slack, though. Of the software I use almost every day, it is the worst by miles.
What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
You would severely limit yourself if you're strict about your list without nuance. GitHub is pretty much bog standard in most companies unless you're working for the few using mercurial, etc.
I work in a MS stack and most of your list is untrue for my case. We use slack for messaging, Confluence, Wikimedia, and GDrive for documentation, Google Mail for email, I develop primarily dotnet/C# apps on a MacBook pro M5, have access to all major LLM providers and primarily use Claude and antigravity.
There only thing that checks of your list is Azure hosting.
On a personal note, it has been by far one of the best place I've worked at. The dotnet ecosystem is so well developed and rich, I expect to be paid a huge premium if I ever have to deal with Java again.
GitHub is not git. GitHub is not an alternative to mercurial or svn.
This is like saying Facebook is the alternative to http.
Of course it is. And from a user's perspective, I often hear people saying they are 'forced' to use it because their employers want them to, otherwise they risk being fired, but I have never understood how that behavior is considered legal, since it's literally coercing somebody to accept Microsoft's abusive privacy and service policies that explicitly state that unless agreed, their products can't be used.
I have never used Zoom or Teams in my life since I never agreed with their ToS&PP, and I've never been in a situation where my career would depend on it (I'm self-employed). When somebody asks me to join these, I nicely respond with that exact reason why I can't use them and propose using Jitsi Meet instead, and I have never experienced anybody rejecting it yet.
The usability in Teams always feels bad to me, like it was designed and developed by someone trying to be fancy without being usable.. Text content in chats is in a strange light gray color, messages are collapsed by default so you have to expand them to read anything longer than a few words, then requiring a "title" for every message.. Slack just feels more natural to me, more thought-out..
I love when people shit on teams and provide no basis for why it’s so much worse than all the other chat offerings other than it being teams.
I think it's gotten a lot better over recent years but in just the past week we had:
A meeting where 2 people somehow weren't able to join. Even after "restarting". One dialed in by phone, the other gave up.
It chose I guess a dock's microphone over a headset mic. Honestly having some kind of tiny local speech recognition model that would say "get you're really quiet/far away/muffled" would be a godsend. That's user error but still. They have the technology.
There's also the problem that it doesn't remember layout preferences so every meeting I have to focus the content, which still doesn't show it full screen.
And unlike discord there's no option for smooth video so good luck.
Also they removed the Linux native app.
I don't know whether Teams is worse than Slack. I do know that I loathe Slack, though. Of the software I use almost every day, it is the worst by miles.