The fact that "Click to expand" / auto-collapse is the default for almost all conversations and there is no way to toggle it off is inexplicable to me.
Microsoft included Teams with their offerings that most businesses already subscribe to. So, it's essentially "free." It makes it really had to pick other options. Especially because it has Active Directory.
I feel like this could be said about paid APIs as well? The ones purchasing/signing the contract (business) and the ones using the API (developers) have completely different 'needs'.
Not that include hosting (with a SLA), SSO support, and integration with all of the other apps you already use (well, at least Office). And if you pay for a Microsoft license that includes compliance stuff, it automatically does Teams too.
Teams is not free, it's a free addition to the subscriptions that almost every IT department buys already. So you can think of it as a subsidized moat, or a loss-leader for new clients. Any competitor needs to figure out how to cover the not insignificant costs of running this service, plus to give them their due, Microsoft support is better than almost everyone else in the enterprise setting.
It's not even free in that it mostly just replaces the Lync/SharePoint interfaces. It's a feature people were sold that was rewritten and replaced, and the old feature removed.
Yes, but someone would have to be responsible for making the entirely reasonable choice to use them. No one gets blamed for buying into the status quo and following "best practices" (by popularity), even when they're bad practices.
