This thread is probably going to be filled again by perfectionistic engineers who fail to understand the tradeoff between quality and quantity. Microsoft won the work from home game by delivering more features even though the quality admittedly suffered. Quality over quantity. Your perfect engineering mindset loses to the reality of doing business in a competitive market.
> Microsoft won the work from home game by delivering more features even though the quality admittedly suffered.
Microsoft won the work from home game by bundling Teams with an O365 subscription that companies were paying for anyway, making it cost-effective for the bean counters to use a "free" crappy tool instead of a paid better one.
Whether this is anticompetitive monopolist behavior in a legal sense is a question for the courts, but it's certainly anticompetitive in spirit, and undoubtedly true that Teams is not winning on merit.
This is exactly why my former (pandemic) employer moved from Zoom to Teams. When I was leaving, they were pushing Teams over Slack for text. That business has ~5,000 global employees. The move was simply a cost savings measure. Loss of productivity be damned.
> Microsoft won the work from home game by delivering more features
Citation needed.
First off, I don't know if Microsoft did win the work-from-home game. Do you have comparative sales numbers to support that assertion?
Anyway, I'd believe that they won the work-from-home game by...
- bundling Teams in with O365 subscriptions so frugal companies don't need to pay for a separate IM platform subscription, or by
- winning over IT administrators with out-of-the-box Active Directory integration.
Those aren't “more” features, really; they're just the usual, staple bullet points that you expect of every Microsoft productivity application. The feature Teams does need is performance. I don't know a single person who has used any Teams alternative and who still prefers to use Teams, and the chief complaint I hear is about Teams' poor performance. Yes, of course, there will always be those features that people don't know they want until they have it, but when everyone and their dog complains about every possible dimension of poor performance – poor interface responsiveness, high CPU load (“my fan is on!”), poor network utilization (“sorry, my video is worse on Teams”) – you should probably prioritize that.
They might have actually have more features to be ticked off for a general sense of office employees, but it's mostly software developers with a remote first attitude of active collaboration that have been asking about stuff like "working" code snippets not just "can paste code for it to be mangled" and switching rooms (god have mercy on you if you are part of several teams (in Teams) and need to use all those channel frequently) etc.pp whereas they could not care less about some office integration (especially if on Linux) - so I would not dispute the "more features", just that they might be broken or useless :P
Most people in here are users who want to have a slick, fast responding tool. Even if I understand the market gains point; as a user, I dont like it when I have to wait >1 sec to open an application that only shows texts and images. (I also dont like it as a perfectionistic engineer.)
Microsoft cloned Slack (poorly and got sued), used existing corporate agreements to entice companies to force Teams on unhappy employees and got lucky with COVID. It really think it has nothing to do with features. Of the dozens of teams I work with, almost none use any Teams features beyond text chat and calls.
For the same reason, there will always be people who tell you how stupid you are for moving your servers into the cloud. You could just host them yourself, don't you know that?
