I understand the value of integration at the corporate level but for personal use I’ve always enjoyed being able to pick the best components and create my own sort-of suite. In my experience the big monolithic do-everything apps eventually died, at least for me, when some or all of their integrated components fell out of favor. This left me feeling I was dragging along one or more dead horses while only getting partial satisfaction from the bundle, suite, or whatever they called it.
I hated Lotus Notes and was relieved to move on to Outlook. But the Outlook turned into the new Lotus Notes and it fell out of favor with me. Then we started looking at all the hipster apps (at the time ) like Slack, Jira, Mind Mapping, Trello, Zoom predecessors, etc. I actually liked Slack, but since it wasn’t “corporate enough” it was killed off by big contracts with Microsoft’s corporate productivity mega suites. I found all these mega suites to be something I’d never want to let into my personal house. Except for Excel. Love it.
Moving to Apple and roll-your-own suite of tools was a great relief. The fact that Apple integrated everything through the operating system itself was so much better and cleaner than integrating everything through a mega app targeted at organizations with piles of money to burn and an IT support staff.
The difference between Apple and Microsoft in the domain we’re talking about is vastly different. With Apple I feel like I’m sitting in a restaurant putting together my favorite a la carte meal ingredients with an accompanying beverage. Very clean. Everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t want.
With Microsoft you’re going to get a casserole with everything mushed together into one big meaty vegetable cheesey blob. They even dump your beverage into the blob and throw some stale croutons and bacon bits on top. Enjoy, but keep your cardiologist on speed dial because it’s gonna kill you in the long run.
I’m a CIO at a large charity and we’ve been using Teams for 5 years and it’s come a long way. Ever since they switched from it being an Electron app to WebView2 its performance and stability issues have disappeared.
It’s native integration into Office365, it’s ease of use (I don’t get any support calls), our 500 staff find it way easier and more intuitive to use over Zoom and Slack. Having your calendar, chat, phone (including call centre), video, channels etc in one place and working so well together is great. The edit functionality on Teams alone is the best chat tool we’ve used.
Also with Copilot or Teams Pro getting AI summaries and take aways of meetings and being able to query the meeting you missed to ask questions as if you were there is such a huge time saver.
Teams has about a 1/3rd market share and Zoom about 50% but Teams has a lot more active daily users. Zoom has a larger “one-off” base for the uninitiated for people outside of corporate environments.
Even simple things like numbered hand raises don’t exist in Zoom (so you know the order of who raised it first, second etc).
I’ve tech supported all my friends with Zoom issues and never with Teams, even with the luddites in our org.
Those that haven’t tried Teams in a while can take another look as it’s tech stack has been rebuilt and it has caught up and surpassed Zoom in so many ways and its integration into Office365 and summaries with Copilot, call centre abilities and SSO (single sign on with Office365) put it leaps and bounds over Zoom IMHO.
To each their own.
I understand and respect other people’s opinions and experiences. What I don’t understand why so many people like to post from a point of view of laced with anger, vitriol and hatred. It makes me wonder what life experiences in general people have to have this bottled up inside them and are challenged to communicate with a lack of emotional self-regulation and balance (as I will likely see demonstrated in replies to this).
Why can’t people just share experiences, what works for them without emotional judgements interlaced. Who has hurt you that you feel like you need to hurt everyone else? I don’t know you but if you need a virtual hug, I’m sorry for whomever or whatever life experiences and trauma have made you this way. Be well. 🙏🏻
This is a typical… Lord William… and/or AI's editors… of bad news attracts page views… aka ad revenues.
Microsoft ‘invested’ $8 Billions 14 years ago… to buy tech and system… in which they bases the actual Team offerings.
It would be like saying that Apple ‘blew’ $3B to buy Drew's company… to build up Apple Music streaming service.
They put their bet on teams which plays into their Office Suite. Skype is looked at fondly but is hardly a modern communications tools, inferior to everything else out there. Teams doesn't suck. And they can enforce its use. I'd say it's a well played investment on Msft's part.
eBay wanted the service as a bolt on to their auction system before eBay finally turned into a swamp of cheesy resellers.
Teams is a hot mess. Zoom is vastly superior in every way.
and yet… the IT people at my very large institution have guzzled the Redmond Flavr-Aid and are doing all they can to kill use of Zoom and cram Teams down everyone’s throats. They seem to think Zoom and Teams are interchangeable videoconferencing solutions which is hilarious coming from people who are paid to understand technology. They actually consider Zoom to be a toy and Teams to be a professional solution 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Very fortunately our c-suite people love Zoom.
I don’t understand why so many people dislike Teams. I think it works great on many levels. Video calls work great. I especially value integration with Office.
Integration is what makes ecosystems valuable.
The company I work for used teams and it was junk. Never worked right always had little glitches just like Windows, but the IT guys loved it because it made them feel needed.
I’ve never experienced that. I will say that MS offers job security, but I’ve never enjoyed working on Windows because it made me feel needed. In fact, people whose WinPCs I’ve worked on pro bono back in the aughts I’ve td them that if their next PC isn’t a Mac I will not be helping them with it. Windows is just too much of a time suck to do for free.
I understand the value of integration at the corporate level but for personal use I’ve always enjoyed being able to pick the best components and create my own sort-of suite. In my experience the big monolithic do-everything apps eventually died, at least for me, when some or all of their integrated components fell out of favor. This left me feeling I was dragging along one or more dead horses while only getting partial satisfaction from the bundle, suite, or whatever they called it.
I hated Lotus Notes and was relieved to move on to Outlook. But the Outlook turned into the new Lotus Notes and it fell out of favor with me. Then we started looking at all the hipster apps (at the time ) like Slack, Jira, Mind Mapping, Trello, Zoom predecessors, etc. I actually liked Slack, but since it wasn’t “corporate enough” it was killed off by big contracts with Microsoft’s corporate productivity mega suites. I found all these mega suites to be something I’d never want to let into my personal house. Except for Excel. Love it.
Moving to Apple and roll-your-own suite of tools was a great relief. The fact that Apple integrated everything through the operating system itself was so much better and cleaner than integrating everything through a mega app targeted at organizations with piles of money to burn and an IT support staff.
The difference between Apple and Microsoft in the domain we’re talking about is vastly different. With Apple I feel like I’m sitting in a restaurant putting together my favorite a la carte meal ingredients with an accompanying beverage. Very clean. Everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t want.
With Microsoft you’re going to get a casserole with everything mushed together into one big meaty vegetable cheesey blob. They even dump your beverage into the blob and throw some stale croutons and bacon bits on top. Enjoy, but keep your cardiologist on speed dial because it’s gonna kill you in the long run.
I cant say that I enjoy using Teams over using Slack or Zoom. I use it because it’s part of the MS365 suite we use, but I’d rather use the others if cost were no object. Same for Dropbox over OneDrive/Sharepoint.
Teams is a hot mess. Zoom is vastly superior in every way.
and yet… the IT people at my very large institution have guzzled the Redmond Flavr-Aid and are doing all they can to kill use of Zoom and cram Teams down everyone’s throats. They seem to think Zoom and Teams are interchangeable videoconferencing solutions which is hilarious coming from people who are paid to understand technology. They actually consider Zoom to be a toy and Teams to be a professional solution 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Very fortunately our c-suite people love Zoom.
I don’t understand why so many people dislike Teams. I think it works great on many levels. Video calls work great. I especially value integration with Office.
Integration is what makes ecosystems valuable.
The company I work for used teams and it was junk. Never worked right always had little glitches just like Windows, but the IT guys loved it because it made them feel needed.
I’ve never experienced that. I will say that MS offers job security, but I’ve never enjoyed working on Windows because it made me feel needed. In fact, people whose WinPCs I’ve worked on pro bono back in the aughts I’ve td them that if their next PC isn’t a Mac I will not be helping them with it. Windows is just too much of a time suck to do for free.
You could also tell your pro bono customers to avoid cheap Windows PCs. Most of my customers use high-quality PCs, and they rarely have any issues, even after several years. Some of these PCs are over 8 years old and still running smoothly. So, maybe Windows isn't as bad as you think. Just make sure it's running on quality hardware, and you'll likely see a big improvement in your experience.
Teams is a hot mess. Zoom is vastly superior in every way.
and yet… the IT people at my very large institution have guzzled the Redmond Flavr-Aid and are doing all they can to kill use of Zoom and cram Teams down everyone’s throats. They seem to think Zoom and Teams are interchangeable videoconferencing solutions which is hilarious coming from people who are paid to understand technology. They actually consider Zoom to be a toy and Teams to be a professional solution ߙ䰟鄰ߙ䰟鄰ߙ䰟䣰藍ߤ㰟䣰藍
Very fortunately our c-suite people love Zoom.
I don’t understand why so many people dislike Teams. I think it works great on many levels. Video calls work great. I especially value integration with Office.
Integration is what makes ecosystems valuable.
The company I work for used teams and it was junk. Never worked right always had little glitches just like Windows, but the IT guys loved it because it made them feel needed.
I’ve never experienced that. I will say that MS offers job security, but I’ve never enjoyed working on Windows because it made me feel needed. In fact, people whose WinPCs I’ve worked on pro bono back in the aughts I’ve td them that if their next PC isn’t a Mac I will not be helping them with it. Windows is just too much of a time suck to do for free.
You could also tell your pro bono customers to avoid cheap Windows PCs. Most of my customers use high-quality PCs, and they rarely have any issues, even after several years. Some of these PCs are over 8 years old and still running smoothly. So, maybe Windows isn't as bad as you think. Just make sure it's running on quality hardware, and you'll likely see a big improvement in your experience.
Good job making silly assumptions about "cheap PCs" and "customers".
These are friends and family, hence pro bono. Additionally, this rarely ever had to do with the HW so the notion that it's due to low-quality HW is silly. It's all about the time to deal with Window's internet issues, which can be mitigated with faster HW, but that is not the primary issue with Windows as an OS compared to macOS. Have you ever tried to remove programs from Windows? In nearly every case you have to click many times to initiate an uninstall, and then you have to wait for it to completely finish before uninstalling the next one and sometimes this also requires a restart. With macOS you simply delete all the ones you want at once... but usually never have to do that because Macs don't come preloaded with crapware and have a lot more built into the OS that makes having to search for paid 3rd-party SW less of an issue. This is the way Windows has always been and I don't see that changing. It's a time suck for any similar task on macOS and more often than not compared to Windows it just works.
I’m a CIO at a large charity and we’ve been using Teams for 5 years and it’s come a long way. Ever since they switched from it being an Electron app to WebView2 its performance and stability issues have disappeared.
It’s native integration into Office365, it’s ease of use (I don’t get any support calls), our 500 staff find it way easier and more intuitive to use over Zoom and Slack. Having your calendar, chat, phone (including call centre), video, channels etc in one place and working so well together is great. The edit functionality on Teams alone is the best chat tool we’ve used.
Also with Copilot or Teams Pro getting AI summaries and take aways of meetings and being able to query the meeting you missed to ask questions as if you were there is such a huge time saver.
Teams has about a 1/3rd market share and Zoom about 50% but Teams has a lot more active daily users. Zoom has a larger “one-off” base for the uninitiated for people outside of corporate environments.
Even simple things like numbered hand raises don’t exist in Zoom (so you know the order of who raised it first, second etc).
I’ve tech supported all my friends with Zoom issues and never with Teams, even with the luddites in our org.
Those that haven’t tried Teams in a while can take another look as it’s tech stack has been rebuilt and it has caught up and surpassed Zoom in so many ways and its integration into Office365 and summaries with Copilot, call centre abilities and SSO (single sign on with Office365) put it leaps and bounds over Zoom IMHO.
To each their own.
I understand and respect other people’s opinions and experiences. What I don’t understand why so many people like to post from a point of view of laced with anger, vitriol and hatred. It makes me wonder what life experiences in general people have to have this bottled up inside them and are challenged to communicate with a lack of emotional self-regulation and balance (as I will likely see demonstrated in replies to this).
Why can’t people just share experiences, what works for them without emotional judgements interlaced. Who has hurt you that you feel like you need to hurt everyone else? I don’t know you but if you need a virtual hug, I’m sorry for whomever or whatever life experiences and trauma have made you this way. Be well. 🙏🏻
Nice post. I can definitely see why corporate IT departments like the big kitchen sink apps. They are generally easier to maintain and provision and manage contractually as a suite versus a bunch of different apps, I.e., a la carte. There’s a reason why companies sign those big contracts with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc. Those companies have the knowledge necessary to serve their business customers very well.
For my personal use I like to pick lightweight tools that are less tightly coupled but still integrated at a level that makes sense for personal use. Apple’s built-in apps are a good enough toolkit for a lot of individuals, but if you’re more discerning in some areas like I am with Excel, putting them in the mix is okay too.
As far as Skype is concerned, I’m not going to miss it. I actually preferred Zoom but its free version was too limited for the group I’m involved with, which is why we switched to Skype. I’ve already started setting up a Microsoft Team personal group/community and it looks like it will satisfy our needs just fine.
What was very surprising for me with Teams is the huge leap in maximum meeting time and number of participants from the free version to the Microsoft 365 version. With the free version meetings are limited to 60 minutes. With a Microsoft 365 subscription meetings are limited to 30 hours and 300 participants. I’ve had a 365 Family subscription for several years so the steep upgrade in meeting time is totally in my favor. I’m not anticipating any major issues or surprises.
As far as Windows goes, I’ve been using it and developing for it since Windows 2.0 at every level, from kernel drivers to Win32, COM/DCOM, to .NET, to building apps based on reuse of the Visual Studio framework, VSX. I have no issues with Windows and think both Windows 10/11 are very stable and performant. No complaints. Personally I prefer the Apple platforms but I still have a sizable investment in Windows.
Skype was a brilliant innovation and Microsoft effectively killed it off. The problem I’ve had with MS software (basically Office with its various apps) is far too complicated for the average user who probably use about 1% of its capabilities. Sadly, of course, every office I’ve worked in uses Office, partly because every other office does too.
People build in all sorts of wholly unnecessary formatting into simple documents and, as they are passed around with other users adding more content and more different formatting the document just becomes unusable.
Office is incredibly expensive but we’re saddled with it. I have it at home because I, effectively, have to but I paid hundreds of pounds for it and there has not been a single update. This is because I don’t subscribe to 365. Why should I? If I’ve bought and paid for a product, why should I have to subscribe to updates as well? Why should I have to provide all sorts of details to use the thing I’ve bought? I know the answer, of course: a very nice revenue stream for MS.
Teams is a hot mess. Zoom is vastly superior in every way.
and yet… the IT people at my very large institution have guzzled the Redmond Flavr-Aid and are doing all they can to kill use of Zoom and cram Teams down everyone’s throats. They seem to think Zoom and Teams are interchangeable videoconferencing solutions which is hilarious coming from people who are paid to understand technology. They actually consider Zoom to be a toy and Teams to be a professional solution ߙ䰟鄰ߙ䰟鄰ߙ䰟䣰藍ߤ㰟䣰藍
Very fortunately our c-suite people love Zoom.
I don’t understand why so many people dislike Teams. I think it works great on many levels. Video calls work great. I especially value integration with Office.
Integration is what makes ecosystems valuable.
The company I work for used teams and it was junk. Never worked right always had little glitches just like Windows, but the IT guys loved it because it made them feel needed.
I’ve never experienced that. I will say that MS offers job security, but I’ve never enjoyed working on Windows because it made me feel needed. In fact, people whose WinPCs I’ve worked on pro bono back in the aughts I’ve td them that if their next PC isn’t a Mac I will not be helping them with it. Windows is just too much of a time suck to do for free.
You could also tell your pro bono customers to avoid cheap Windows PCs. Most of my customers use high-quality PCs, and they rarely have any issues, even after several years. Some of these PCs are over 8 years old and still running smoothly. So, maybe Windows isn't as bad as you think. Just make sure it's running on quality hardware, and you'll likely see a big improvement in your experience.
Good job making silly assumptions about "cheap PCs" and "customers".
These are friends and family, hence pro bono. Additionally, this rarely ever had to do with the HW so the notion that it's due to low-quality HW is silly. It's all about the time to deal with Window's internet issues, which can be mitigated with faster HW, but that is not the primary issue with Windows as an OS compared to macOS. Have you ever tried to remove programs from Windows? In nearly every case you have to click many times to initiate an uninstall, and then you have to wait for it to completely finish before uninstalling the next one and sometimes this also requires a restart. With macOS you simply delete all the ones you want at once... but usually never have to do that because Macs don't come preloaded with crapware and have a lot more built into the OS that makes having to search for paid 3rd-party SW less of an issue. This is the way Windows has always been and I don't see that changing. It's a time suck for any similar task on macOS and more often than not compared to Windows it just works.
Based on my experience with customers and my pro-bono work (by the way, I knew you were referring to helping friends and family—I do that too), most issues are related to cheap hardware and crapware that comes with low-cost devices. I always suggest friends and family go for a business-quality PC for a better experience. Most of my customers have no issues with their Windows devices, even after many years of use.
Remove programs in Windows is easy. Just right-click the app and choose "Uninstall" to start the process. While I agree that the process is easier on macOS, I don't see any issues with right-clicking to uninstall. This process isn't a problem for my friends or customers. They usually install the apps they need on the first day and keep them for years, or even the entire lifecycle of the device.
Regarding crapware, it's mostly an issue with cheap PCs. High-end or business devices like ThinkPads don't have that problem, at least in my experience with customers.
As for what's built into macOS, it depends on the user. For example, my Mac came with GarageBand, iMovie, Siri / Apple Intelligence, Image Playground, Photo Booth, Podcasts, Apple TV+, Chess, News, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. All of these apps are usless for me. The only apps I use frequently are Notes, Terminal, TextEdit, and Apple Music, since I'm a subscriber. Maybe it's different for you and your circle of friends and family, and what macOS includes gives you a better experience.
Is Windows perfect? No, but neither macOS. At least that's my experience, and I use both daily. IMO, which one is better it's about preferences and not necessarily that one is better than the other.
Going back to the point of the article, it's good that MS ended Skype. WhatsApp is already the standard for consumer / personal chat, and now I have seen many people start to use it in the USA. In business / enterprise MS is the dominant player with Teams. Is not perfect, but it does a good job as a communication app. I think Zoom is a better videoconference app. I also think Slack have some advantages over Teams. But Teams does a better job than Zoom + Slack together, and has a better integration with the MS 365 ecosystem. IMO, stay with Teams if you are a MS 365 customers. If you are a Google Workspace customer, you may have a better experience with Zoom + Slack compared to Google Chat + Meet.
Skype had one and only one purpose for me. It allowed me to make calls over WiFi when I was traveling overseas more than a decade ago. Back then, it was prohibitively expensive and/or difficult to make traditional cell calls, especially from Asia.
Let's use a simpler personal example. Suppose you bought $10,000 in Tesla stock a few months ago when it was selling around $400/share, and sold it now when it's (below) $300/share. You would have "earned" yourself a tax write-off due to that loss of $2,500. Depending on your tax bracket that that tax write-off will reduce your taxes next year by maybe $500-$700. Sure, that (slightly) lessens the pain of losing $2,500, but you couldn't say you didn't lose any money.
Wasting money is wasting money.
(Now you could argue that they made money in the long run by killing a competitor, but that's not the argument you made.)
And don't get me started on Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive/Office365 solution. There are elements of the stack that are pretty slick. And personally, I find running meeting on Teams to be fine. But God what a confusing mess the entire MS ecosystem is. MS does everything just well enough to make it hard to justify going with separate, better solutions such as Zoom or Slack, but it's always confusing bloatware that is never a "joy to use."
Teams is a hot mess. Zoom is vastly superior in every way.
and yet… the IT people at my very large institution have guzzled the Redmond Flavr-Aid and are doing all they can to kill use of Zoom and cram Teams down everyone’s throats. They seem to think Zoom and Teams are interchangeable videoconferencing solutions which is hilarious coming from people who are paid to understand technology. They actually consider Zoom to be a toy and Teams to be a professional solution 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Very fortunately our c-suite people love Zoom.
I don’t understand why so many people dislike Teams. I think it works great on many levels. Video calls work great. I especially value integration with Office.
Integration is what makes ecosystems valuable.
The company I work for used teams and it was junk. Never worked right always had little glitches just like Windows, but the IT guys loved it because it made them feel needed.
And how long ago was that? Why didn't it work right and what little glitches? Most issues are user errors because they don't know how to make sure their headsets or mic and speakers are selected correctly and that is usually why they had issues with meetings. Same is true for Zoom. Current version of Teams is pretty stable and the 365 integration can't be matched with Zoom. Since most companies use 365, Teams is it, and Zoom is not. No software is perfect, but Teams isn't as bad as the commenters here claim it to be.
Comments
eBay wanted the service as a bolt on to their auction system before eBay finally turned into a swamp of cheesy resellers.
I changed my mind. The more I am forced to use it, the less I like it.
Compared to Zoom, WebEx and Meet, only Meet was worse.
You could also tell your pro bono customers to avoid cheap Windows PCs. Most of my customers use high-quality PCs, and they rarely have any issues, even after several years. Some of these PCs are over 8 years old and still running smoothly. So, maybe Windows isn't as bad as you think. Just make sure it's running on quality hardware, and you'll likely see a big improvement in your experience.
These are friends and family, hence pro bono. Additionally, this rarely ever had to do with the HW so the notion that it's due to low-quality HW is silly. It's all about the time to deal with Window's internet issues, which can be mitigated with faster HW, but that is not the primary issue with Windows as an OS compared to macOS. Have you ever tried to remove programs from Windows? In nearly every case you have to click many times to initiate an uninstall, and then you have to wait for it to completely finish before uninstalling the next one and sometimes this also requires a restart. With macOS you simply delete all the ones you want at once... but usually never have to do that because Macs don't come preloaded with crapware and have a lot more built into the OS that makes having to search for paid 3rd-party SW less of an issue. This is the way Windows has always been and I don't see that changing. It's a time suck for any similar task on macOS and more often than not compared to Windows it just works.
Is Windows perfect? No, but neither macOS. At least that's my experience, and I use both daily. IMO, which one is better it's about preferences and not necessarily that one is better than the other.
Going back to the point of the article, it's good that MS ended Skype. WhatsApp is already the standard for consumer / personal chat, and now I have seen many people start to use it in the USA. In business / enterprise MS is the dominant player with Teams. Is not perfect, but it does a good job as a communication app. I think Zoom is a better videoconference app. I also think Slack have some advantages over Teams. But Teams does a better job than Zoom + Slack together, and has a better integration with the MS 365 ecosystem. IMO, stay with Teams if you are a MS 365 customers. If you are a Google Workspace customer, you may have a better experience with Zoom + Slack compared to Google Chat + Meet.
Let's use a simpler personal example. Suppose you bought $10,000 in Tesla stock a few months ago when it was selling around $400/share, and sold it now when it's (below) $300/share. You would have "earned" yourself a tax write-off due to that loss of $2,500. Depending on your tax bracket that that tax write-off will reduce your taxes next year by maybe $500-$700. Sure, that (slightly) lessens the pain of losing $2,500, but you couldn't say you didn't lose any money.
Wasting money is wasting money.
(Now you could argue that they made money in the long run by killing a competitor, but that's not the argument you made.)