An overly harsh critique of Teams

[Rob O'Keefe]

Someone wrote a harsh review of Teams giving no consideration that this is an early release. It criticizes for having easy integration with Office docs and calls everything "horrible". It frames the argument like people are choosing between Slack and Teams, and I don't think that is the case, it's more like people are choosing between Teams and Email and Skype and Teams is much better than that. Does Teams have a long way to go, sure.  I think Teams is a solid product launch.

https://medium.com/@pramitnairi/only-microsoft-could-make-teams-7b7de4da1a6#.ea9ee5rdj

[#2]

A few points to keep in mind.

- the press, pundits, and even Slack themselves have positioned Teams as a Slack competitor/alternative. So of course the question becomes why choose one over the other, and that question is something that requires a reasonably detailed analysis of features, usability, etc.

- when you ship anything, preview or not, you open it up to criticism. Critique of preview releases is what shapes quality RTM/GA releases. There's no free passes for an unfinished product.

- "horrible" is the adjective he chose to express his opinion and he's free to do so.

Everything he wrote is valid because it represents the view of people like him who will back away from poor UI/UX, anything that smells of legacy IT, and who will value simpler, frictionless experiences. Such people exist, and in growing numbers as new generations enter the workforce.

Customers will absolutely choose between Teams and Slack, and some of them will choose Slack. No point ignoring it.

[#3]

Having read the article I find it useful as a reference and some valid points are raised.

I use and have used Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp. If your are a Tech startup you use the tools you've heard of at minimal cost (free is best), what other start-ups are using, pay no real attention to security and are happy as a computer literate individual to learn how to use the tools. But that isn't Microsoft's sweet spot. Microsoft target enterprises not really start-ups, they alter have a tendancy to fail

An interesting observation by one of the research companies was that most companies below 500 empployees use Google Apps, but most organisations above 500 employees use Office365. I think this observation holds true across a number of technologies and the MS Team v Slack debate will follow similar lines.

The features in MS Team give a similar level of functionallity to Slack, but they come with the feel, support and complaince of Microsoft. As a Solution Architect I need a Slack like solution for my organisation, but we are not a start-up, we have 1,000's of users, we need to consider, audit, compliance, data privacy, data residancy, dataleakage and data protection. I want a solution that doesn't need dedicated vendor commercials or dedciated support as this adds to the TCO. For my business users IT is a tool, they don't have time or inclination to use the latest and greatest, they want consistancy and a similar UI experience so adoption is quick and easy. This isn't mentioned in the article and is because Teams provides a similar core functionallity to Slack but approaches it from a very different perspective (as do most other MS implementations).

The world is large enough for Slack, MS Teams, Telegram, WhatsApp, choice is good competition is good. For me Temas fufills a need from my bussines and I can relatively easily implement it as an extension to my existing adoption of MS applications

Paul

[#4]

if it was not so feature poor and a resource hog it could be a better product

It is an immature product

I have been using IMs for decades, worked on one that was very popular

So far there is nothing i like about teams, it seems pre-alpha

[#5]

I guess you're entitled to your opinion. I would say that MS Teams seems way way way more mature than Hangouts Chat in G Suite.

[#6]

you realize that is not saying much

[#7]

I dunno. Being way better than your number one collaboration suite competitor is something.

[#8]

i am comparing to skype for business or lync 

Which is a much more mature and useful tool 

[#9]

It would be helpful for you to list what features you are missing vs. Skype for Business. They have been steadily adding but there are gaps for sure.

There are still challenges with Teams but it is growing on me for sure.

We have seen it be a resource drain on some machines but not others -- inconsistent.

[#10]

I can list a bunch, but don't you have a team that works on this?

So far this is a big flaw

cannot share screen without calling

[#11]

---

@Mike Pollack wrote:

I can list a bunch, but don't you have a team that works on this?

So far this is a big flaw

cannot share screen without calling

---

I'm just an end user of Teams and Skype, trying to learn more. I agree with your flaw -- you said you are comparing to Skype for Business, is this something Skype can do? I think Lync could but Skype cannot?

[#12]

Skype for Business and lync are the same thing 

while the app has focus in a conversation it will still display a notification banner and makes the taskbar bounce

[#13]

@Rob O'Keefe 

I must say that I feel that the whole look and feel of the Teams interface is both clunky and over-simplified.

• On a PC, it's not possible to reduce Teams to less than about a quarter of the screen size.  I'd like my IM software to be able to dock unobtrusively against the edge of my screen and float above other apps if I want it to. At the moment it obscures 25% of my desktop and is not visible when I'm doing something else.   It doesn't really feel like this app was made for PC, while a fact of life is that most of us use PCs to do our work, and don't have Windows phones. 
• Text does not scale when the window is reduced, so if I reduce the window size, I can only see a small section of the conversation. 
• Alternatively we should be able to select a preferred font size, but that option appears to be missing.
• The left-hand panel pops out when items in it are inadvertently hovered over.
• The left-hand panel is cluttered with non-essential icons ("Get App", "Apps", "Assignments",etc).  This should all be editable.
• The left hand panel should be able to be dragged to the desired size or hidden entirely.
• There's barely any customisability.
• Stickers?  How old are we? 

This all very much feels like a rough draft of an app, and not a finished product.

[#14]

@Malcomioyeesh, I decided to read the article first without realizing how old this thread (and the article) actually is. It's interesting to think about how far Teams has come, and yet how far it has to go yet.

I hope MS is quietly working on a full UI and UX refresh for the near future. Between the mobile and desktop clients, Teams still screams 2016.

[#15]

@AlexH980 Agree on both, that it has come a long way and that much is left to do!

[#16]

Yes a much longer way to go, I still don't like the UX and notifications of Microsoft Team. Microsoft Team should inspire from its own product Skype, which really makes the difference in terms of UX for conversations or discussions.

[#17]

What do you mean (couple examples of what you like in Skype)?

[#18]

@Rob O'Keefe 

This response may be a little late Nope the critique is pretty much spot on for utilization in large enterprise environment. 

https://medium.com/@joshuamkite/the-horror-of-microsoft-teams-c18360712361

I have experience of MSFT Product Management going back to mid 90s and Teams is another in a long line of mis-steps where appropriate and actual enterprise end user use cases, personas or experiences are not thought through with any degree of rigor. 

Obviously just my perspective and Teams may well be a commercial success but I concur with the author entirely it is a bad solution to a problem nobody had, which overall erodes large enterprise decision makers faith in MSFT as an enterprise product supplier.