Onboarding alone is enough for plenty of hate. What feels like half a dozen competing SSO systems trying to highjack the funnel, each of them gimped by two other internal Microsoft factions trying to shove in their upselling path. And of course with a Byzantine form flow through the full set of desktop client, OS-level Windows user identity management and multiple browsers (system default, Edge, and iirc occasionally even that pre-webkit edge, perhaps popping up because of some activeX zombie). I recently had the pleasure of participating in a one-off teams call (project handover to an external consultant), from a company network that runs on Microsoft but without 365 and no routine Teams usage outside of some unrelated division, with a non-Microsoft browser as the system default. A day to remember. Spent hours between the onboarding labyrinth and a pre-existing private account that was almost but not quite accepted by the Microsoft maze, before I eventually got in dusting off some ancient Skype account. Yeah, that Skype, the one I stopped using around the time I quit ICQ.
Teams uses sqlite to store data. Are you able to use Process Explorer[1] to see how much of the 520MB is the sqlite file mapped into memory, if sqlite memory mapped IO has been enabled[2]
That's akin to saying a car is more impressive than a nuclear power station because it can go to such interesting places. Or something something apples and oranges. Point is, my analogy may be bad, but it's not as bad as comparing Firefox and Teams in terms of what they do.
Yes, the thing that consumes more resources uses more resources. Because it can do more things. People are also mad about that btw.
Saying "well, x uses more than y" where `y` in this case is using about 5x more resources than its contemporaries is just an insultingly weak argument.
Most of our systems here are equipped with 8 GB only, where it's 15.75% as said by somebody else.
With everything else that runs, you're out of RAM pretty quick: Our production software takes around 1 GB when running, Firefox/Chrome with a few tabs, Acrobat Pro...
I'm lucky that I've received an upgrade to 16 GB because I need special software for my work. For the next system I'll ask for 32 GB and 16 GB for my teams. Don't understand why the corporate IT is so sparse with RAM...
15.75%, for an app doing nothing in the background and a trivial set of data to work with, unless you meant 16 GB. Install just 5 more applications with that same development philosophy and an 8 GB machine is already swapping, which is ridiculous.
> Why the teams hate. I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence
Ha!
Even though I know this was addressed to me, you clearly opened the floodgate on the very vocal customer complaints section on HN that has clearly struck a nerve with many more than you anticipated chiming in.
With that said, yes it's full bloat and sounds like utter crap even with audio only on every time I've ever used it; I typically use Signal and only revert to conventional apps for work purposes and it always struggles worse than the other.
Apparently it's corpo/PM speak [0] for meeting #'s, which judging by his stance on the poorly reviewed Teams app so far makes me think that MS product market fit strategy worked in this case: it knows who it built Teams for.
Just look at who this is aimed at:
> Where the Action Is is a book for leaders seeking to make sense of their meetings and master their business.
This comes up all the time, to the point where I think people are running different versions of Teams. I would be interested in exploring that angle tbh-
For me:
* The client is "heavy" when compared to contemporaries.
It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP. So Teams gets turned off, and maybe someone gets annoyed that I don't respond to something, while I run a few VMs in Teams' former memory space.
That aside: why should I severely impede my battery life, cause my fans to spin (audible discomfort) or create discomfort due to heat on my lap: for an app where there are better alternatives that don't do that?
* Web version only works with Chrome.
Firefox, Qutebrowser, Safari have severe limitations. Safari needs to have some security controls disabled globally otherwise it won't even open.
* Notifications are absent or overly-verbose
I miss notifications that are timely and important on the App (like calls which get forwarded to my phone) but an unrelated message on a topic somewhere else will get "promoted" to me.
* UI design leaves a lot to be desired, things are all over the place, finding things is hard.
* New UI refresh for meetings is "top heavy"
Most Video Conferencing programs are trying to make it so that you get close to eye contact with other participants (behind screen cameras in phones for example!); But for Teams: lots of elements are loaded in the top bar which makes people appear to be looking down at something, because the subject they're looking at is lower down on the screen. This is the only video conferencing program to do this.
* Video quality is very low compared to contemporaries.
* Screen Sharing is extremely low quality too
You have to really bump the font point, they've recently added the idea of "content awareness" too, as in sharing Powerpoint slides directly from OneDrive, but it's janky as hell.
* Whiteboards are some kind of extra application which has to be enabled - acts like an external website, not at all integrated and does not live at all with the meeting.
* Having external people invited still requires you to manually allow them into the room (unlike Google Meet, which treats externals that you allow as part of the meeting)
* "Teams" are linked to Sharepoint and will cause Chaos with Onedrive and Sharepoint if you don't remember certain things: like uploading something to a channel will drop it in a weird folder with open permissions, or that "private teams" make brand new sharepoint sites: your org probably has hundreds of these.
* The Client randomly hangs on my machine during meetings (freeze, blocking all incoming and outgoing audio/video) My machine is a Threadripper 3970x with 256GiB of ram: there is no fucking way it's due to resource exhaustion.
* the latency in audio is at least 3-5x higher than contemporaries
* when attempting to launch a meeting in a hurry, it's almost as if teams knows and spends 30s loading. I suspect there is some "Join now" function for a meeting in progress that is actually causing an adverse affect here as I've been able to repeatedly measure this problem.
I suspect that some of these issues are because I'm in Europe and the servers are hosted in the US. It could also be because I use Linux and MacOS.
I often also find that _people who like Teams_, have only really used other Microsoft collaboration tools in a professional setting. (Or worse ones that are known to be worse like AT&T Connect.)
I am also not a huge fan of how they push Teams on people by embedding it in everything else, you could argue that this is vertical integration: but a lot of things do not integrate well with Teams, even outlook (for an example of better integration just look at recorded meetings and presented content in google calendar! it backfills the meeting with the recorded content so you can easily see it! outlook doesn't do that!): https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly
> I personally find it the best conferencing tool for recurring cadence
"Best" is so insanely subjective that it's difficult to answer this.
Audio/Video Quality and ergonomics are better with Google Meet: but Jitsi works absolutely fine on recurring meetings: you just put the link in the meeting request.
To the extent that I'm forced to run Teams by my coworkers' choices, it sure would be nice if it were less of a bucket of ass.
I haven’t used teams that much, but one annoyance I found immediately is that it uses the lowest resolution of my webcam and doesn’t offer a way to change it to other resolutions. Slack and FaceTime both work fine with the same camera, but with FaceTime it looks like I have a camera from the ‘90s.
