back to article It's the wobbly Microsoft service sweepstake! If you have 'Teams', you've won a lifetime Slack sub

Microsoft's Slack-alike, Teams, has taken a beating from the stick of instability, and was still wobbling at the time of publication. Users around Europe and beyond began reporting issues connecting to the online collaboration platform from around 10:00 UTC. The problems cover both the app and web versions of Teams, with users …

  1. TomChaton
    Trollface

    Who would notice?

    I can never tell if there's a bug or if teams is behaving as intended, it's that bad.

    1. Christopher Rogers

      Re: Who would notice?

      Couldn't agree more. Teams just looks like a mess.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge

        Re: Who would notice?

        Definitely one of the worst User Interfaces of all time. Still not sure if it's possible to start a meeting immediately rather than have to muck about scheduling.

        Other than the UI and reliability, it's great!!

        1. Stephendeg

          Re: Who would notice?

          What? Worse than ‘Skype for business’?

          1. Dan 55 Silver badge

            Re: Who would notice?

            The UI is actually worse than Skype for Business's, and it's everything's written in corporate matey-bollocks speak.

            The voice codec is marginally better so there is that.

            1. SundogUK Silver badge

              Re: Who would notice?

              "...corporate matey-bollocks speak."

              I'm stealing that.

          2. SundogUK Silver badge

            Re: Who would notice?

            Unfortunately, yes.

  2. sabroni Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    It's working fine for us!

    So clearly this article is bollocks!

  3. cjcox

    Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

    Recently the rumors are that Microsoft may be ditching Edge for a new browser based on Chromium (or maybe just WebKit?). Microsoft deploys a Linux enivronment, tries to support Powershell (by the way, poorly) on real Linux, attempts to move away from Wrm to ssh, yes you're Windows has an ssh daemon now.... etc...

    Maybe Microsoft should just buy Slack and go with that...

    1. TomChaton
      Stop

      Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

      Nooo! Look what they did to Skype

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

      "Maybe Microsoft should just buy Slack and go with that..."

      They'd finally have a stable, secure OS ... but I doubt Volkerding is interested in selling out.

      1. MyffyW Silver badge

        Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

        @jake well said, alas only two of us seem to have got the joke.

        Have a set of "a" disks circa 1998 as a reward...

    3. CheesyTheClown

      Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

      What do you mean poorly on Linux? I’m not baiting, I’m currently investing heavily into Powershell on Linux and would like a heads up.

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

        "I’m currently investing heavily into Powershell on Linux"

        Out of curiosity, why? I'm not baiting here, either, I'm genuinely curious what PS does for you that the native Linux toolkit can't handle better, faster, easier, with a smaller memory footprint and thus inherently better security?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

          "that the native Linux toolkit can't handle better, faster, easier, with a smaller memory footprint and thus inherently better security?"

          Powershell does pretty much anything better. For a start there is no need to format text with SED, GREP, etc. It's way easy in general to use and learn that say BASH, with mostly English commands and consistent formats across commands. And it's way way more secure by including many security related features that Say BASH simply doesn't have like code signing and execution policies.

      2. JohnFen

        Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

        "I’m currently investing heavily into Powershell on Linux"

        Why?? If you're on Linux, you have much better options.

      3. JohnFen

        Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

        "What do you mean poorly on Linux?"

        Since nobody else has answered this, I'll take a stab at it. First, the open source versions of PowerShell are still very new and have the elevated number of bugs you would expect from new software. So I'll ignore those.

        Here's what I think is the fundamental problem with PowerShell on Linux -- compatibility. PowerShell does not handle the differences between platforms well at all, and they are not fully interchangeable. So if you write a PowerShell script for one system, there is no guarantee that it will work on another system. The PowerShell ports also implement a subset of what is available in the proprietary version. There are commands available in some environments that simply are not available in others. PowerShell is full of gotchas along similar lines.

        The scripting tools that ship with Linux distributions have none of those problems (and are easier to use and more powerful anyway). Not to mention that in order to use it, you have to talk Linux users into taking the extra step of installing PowerShell in the first place. I think getting more than a minority to do this would be a heavy lift.

        Given those problems, I honestly can't think of a real world use case for PowerShell on anything except Windows.

    4. JohnFen

      Re: Of course, given recent statements from the rumor mill...

      "Maybe Microsoft should just buy Slack and go with that."

      Why would you want Slack turned into a horrible mess too?

  4. Kevin Johnston

    Wonderful product

    We have been piloting it and when I was struggling with killing a chat I did some searching and found a huuuuuge pile of comments around the GDPR issues with Teams (ie, you cannot delete data from old chats, just hide it)

    With the reams of overlapping products from Microsoft you have to wonder quite why they are bothering with Teams, seems to be the ginger-headed child of all the unloved MS products.

  5. Electronics'R'Us
    FAIL

    Teams as an "upgrade"

    My Skype for business (as poor as it was) had all the basic functionality I needed. I then got notifications

    You are being upgraded to Teams!

    When I saw the horrible mess that passes for a user interface, it was promptly deleted. Much more complex to use, a crappy UI and a resource hog.

    Shame really as it is part of the subscription, but I cannot see any practical use for it that I cannot get elsewhere with a far superior experience.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Teams as an "upgrade"

      Funny you should say that. I was about to express scepticism about how MS might have been achieving the figures to claim that "Teams is the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history".

      Wouldn't have surprised me if they were giving it away free, or bundling it as part of a deal that worked out more favourable than not having it, just so they could make some fluff claim.

      "87 Fortune 100 companies use Teams". Really? Technically, I guess they could make that claim that if one person in the company used it, or at least sent a test message to ensure it was working. Or possibly if they'd been given a free subscription, regardless of whether it was actually used. I've no idea if that's the case or not.

      (IIRC, didn't MS have a deal with GoDaddy and/or some other large registrars to get them to run the holding pages for newly-registered or unused domains using IIS, so that they could claim some misleadingly high percentage of "websites" or "domains" were running it?)

      Back to Teams, though- if they're counting all the people they're automatically "upgrading" from Skype for Business to Teams, then it doesn't mean much. But they get to make an impressive-sounding claim to PHBs, so who cares?

      If it's really doing that well... well, good for MS, if not their users. But you'll excuse my scepticism.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Teams as an "upgrade"

        Teams comes with Office 365 whether your like it or not.

      2. JohnFen

        Re: Teams as an "upgrade"

        "Technically, I guess they could make that claim that if one person in the company used it"

        This is likely the case. It's long been standard practice for enterprise software companies to claim "corporation xyz uses us" based on even a single product registration or invoice. That's why such claims should always be ignored.

  6. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    We know how that works

    "Slack continues to enjoy a greater share of the market in spite of the gang at Redmond flinging out a free edition of their platform to get users on board"

    Of course Microsoft is doing that. It's Market Capture 1-0-1 : hook the greatest number possible on the free version, then transition them to the paying version.

    Or kill it and propose a new product that does the same thing, but you have to buy it.

  7. A.P. Veening Silver badge

    Without an incident clock

    "While deep within the bowels of Redmond, a sorrowful engineer reset the "Days without an incident" clock, Microsoft's support orifice initially professed ignorance of the issue, much to the annoyance of users."

    Looks to me like that clock should be showing hours instead of days if it ever wants to show a respectable number (more than 1) again

    1. TomChaton
      Joke

      Re: Without an incident clock

      They've just exposed the clocks API to their CI servers, and it's automatically zeroed whenever there's a deployment anywhere in the company.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Need a distributed peering model

    The wrong model for such a use, what's needed is a peering model that doesn't reply on any single point of failure, once the call is set-up then communication goes directly from client to client, lets call it an inter network of computers.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Need a distributed peering model

      But, but, but, but ... how would google/amazon/microsoft/apple be able to watch everything you do in order to keep you informed of all the great deals you are missing out on?

    2. msmitha

      Re: Need a distributed peering model

      They had that when they bought Groove from Ray Ozzie. The Sharepoint team promptly eviscerated it.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Show me just one finished MS product

    I think MS are trying to do too much. Pretty much all of their products are unfinished, unreliable, slow, buggy, inconsistent etc etc. Office in the browser, or worst, in Teams is like wading through treacle.

    As for running poweshell in Linux, mind blown!

    There is a disaster coming and I’m not talking about their licensing model.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Show me just one finished MS product

      Ah, so they're following Google's "successful" product model, then...?

  10. JohnFen

    Of course

    "Slack continues to enjoy a greater share of the market in spite of the gang at Redmond flinging out a free edition of their platform to get users on board."

    That's because Teams is awful and Slack isn't.

  11. hitmouse

    Re: "Fall Creators Update"

    I generally like Office365 Groups, but Teams seems to have been created as a set of disconnected features stuck on top of Groups. Teams also seems to completely bypass all Office and Windows settings for language and formatting, so if you're not a vanilla US English user then it's a friggin' mess.

    They do like to advertise their Agile approach, but it seems that there are multiple feature teams agilely running in different directions - result: product is drawn-and-quartered.

  12. msmitha

    Teams combines the shitness of Skype for Business with the impenetrability of Sharepoint. The only thing I can say in its favour is that is is not Webex.

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