50
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Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny, will cost $5.25/month standalone
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- Authors
- Foo Yun Chee
- Published
- Apr 1 2024
- Word count
- 774 words
Unfortunately for my case, I don't think this will get my company to move to Slack.
Microsoft waited long enough for Teams to become well enough ingrained that there would be massive cost to switching. It was obviously a good business move by Microsoft, but I would have preferred a system that remembers my audio settings from meeting to meeting.
When I came back to my company in 2021, they had already been using Teams for the previous year. When I left in 2019, we weren't using any chat platform, though one department had experimented with Slack in years prior. Obviously the pandemic made them move quickly to select a platform, and having Microsoft 365 Business Standard accounts, they went that direction. Honestly, smart decision.
I considered moving us towards Slack, but figured the juice wouldn't be worth the squeeze. Now here we are 3-4yrs later, and I'm definitely not doing it. While we don't use all the features of Teams -- we don't even use the "Teams" in Teams, instead spending 99% of our time in chat -- we have deepened our use a bit. For example, we use Teams Phone now that we're full remote.
Unless Teams costs were to skyrocket (we're grandfathered in anyway), or the service were to degrade hard (And no, I don't think "New" Teams counts), I don't see us leaving anytime soon. People know how to use it well enough now. That counts for a lot.
I will say, that the #1 benefit of Slack, especially in a large organization, is that its patterns foster communicating publicly. This reduces siloing, the enemy of productivity. Especially in IT, it became trivial to ping every relevant party to a thread discussing an outage that Teams is just utterly incapable of.
Even in private channels, you can add or remove members and the new members can see history. This is immensely useful when staff changes.
Because Teams is such a hodgepodge, everyone defaults to using group chats. Which is adequate, but definitely isn't any better than any other chat program. Even Matrix does group chats better than Teams.
Oh man, the amount of people who stubbornly make group chats even if they are already in teams with channels with the exact same purpose still gives me nightmares. Luckily, I switched organizations last year and the new one does use Slack. Which has been a breath of fresh air.
Our organization has a policy of deleting all chats after about 24 hours so thar doesn't really matter for us. This means about 20% of the chat is work-related while the rest is shooting the breeze and talking shit about coworkers.
This kind of behaviour is a huge red flag for me. The only reason I’ve seen it used for it is hiding information from investigators and lawyers.
Honestly I think that may be part of it, supposedly less from being shady and more because we work in healthcare and they don't inadvertently want PHI stored.
It's been a hot second since I used Teams, so I'm curious, what features do you miss from Slack?
I like the custom emojis in Slack, and I sometimes appreciate the simplicity of channels. However, I often find myself wishing we had proper teams to group the maelstrom of channels.
It isn't features that I miss from Slack, quite the contrary. Slack has fewer features but they work.
I regularly switch between three desks. Every time I switch desks, Teams changes my audio device. Sometimes it changes the audio device to one that does not exist.
When I am in Do Not Disturb mode and get a call, the Do Not Disturb does block the call, but then plays the hang up noise anyway so the distraction is still there.
When I am on a call on Teams and unplug from one of my docks, Windows Explorer crashes and Teams disappears (which is both absurd and possibly not Team's fault). The call continues but I need to ask the other person to hang up because I can't end the call.
Often, pings don't show up in Chats when I am viewing the Teams tab and vice versa.
The whole thing just feels unpolished. I don't use the software in any particularly weird way. I use it for chats and calls, both of which Slack handles without issue. I have Slack on the same machine to communicate with some of our external devs, but it never has weird audio device issues or misses pings, it just kind of works better.
Slack's UI ia 10x more suitable to chatting...even Team's densest option still has more than double the whitespace of Slack's. When I loaded the default UI of Teams it felt like there was an inch of margin between each line of chat.
Slack's threading is the best implementation I've seen, bar-none.
The API integrations are fantastic for notifications, and the workflows show promise for automating a lot of approval rubberstamping emails/meetings.
You can group all you channels in Slack on the client side if you want more organization. I group all my team members private chats, the team private channel, and the team public channel together. The infrastructure teams (network, storage, etc) get bundled together.
I do the same thing to keep my Slack super organized (and aggressively mute channels). I've seen some coworkers' setups that don't use sections or muting, and their Slack notifications are so overwhelming and cluttered it gives me anxiety just looking at it!
This whole thing is a source of frustration for me. I'm the treasurer for an organization I'm part of and we pay for the bundle of Microsoft BS and I hate it. I also think this is going to end up with us paying more money for these split up services after the dust settles.
For about 15 people we need:
a group messaging platform
an email provider
cloud storage
office suite
Of that group < 10 need the full suite of stuff and the rest only need email and the group chat. We pay around 3k a year for this stuff and its not like we even need MS Office instead of a free alternative Libre Office but we pay for it so I don't have to play tech support for this group of people, one of which can barely figure out email!
Also I HATE outlook anr setting up the email service was a PITA with pages and pages of documentation that doesn't match up with the random mismatched pages of settings to get it setup properly WHEN THAT ALL SHOULD HAVE BEEN PART OF SOME INITIAL SETUP PROCESS. Then there's the nonsense mess of random tiers of paid subscriptions plans and the sales guys who keep on calling for the first year to see if I need anything. How about you just make it streamlined enough so that I don't need a degree in Microsoft to add one more damned user and get them set up with Office and I'll never need to talk to your lame ass sales team!
If Microsoft wasnt so ingrained into business culture they would never survive. Maybe it gets better once you're looking at other services or maybe inertia locks in big businesses, but for me trying to buy their service for a small organization I just don't get it; I pay way too much for a bundle of generic ass services that are only marginally better than alternatives and we're only locked in because MS has convinced people its more integrated so its better.
I'm getting a little too ranty here... I just despise Microsoft and I think the entire company should be dismantles into smaller pieces (like bell) because they're one giant ball of anticompetitive garbage.
Is that what happened at the end of the browser war? The way this was phrased made it sound like MS lost in a zero sum game, beaten in courts when they fairly conquered in business, only because of unfair antitrust lawsuit.
From Wikipedia :
It almost reads like the opposite of the article quote but they're both true in a way aren't they? Any tech memory keeper want to weight in? It's only 15-ish years ago but I can't remember what happened.
There's a good bit that happened. The wikipedia page about the antitrust suit is a better spot to start. Microsoft escaped getting split up the way Ma Bell did by the skin of its teeth.
It wasn't 'good business'. It was more like 'heavily restricted OEM deals to prevent installing alternatives' and making 'IE impossible to remove.'
Gate's testimony was the butt of much late nights due to the quantity of 'I do not recall'. They fabricated evidence. They lied.
The fact Microsoft still exists as it does is a travesty.
Whatever Microsoft was sued for in 1998, Google should be sued for 10 times over. It's ridiculous how much of the web and mobile infrastructure runs through Google. They should not own a browser standard but de facto do, I've seen more and more web apps blatantly telling you they only work with Chrome. Same shit as that happened with the Internet Explorer (ironically, Edge is now a Chrome reskin as well).
Microsoft was sued by the DOJ for monopolizing the browser market on Windows, which at the time was the predominant OS. It's also noteworthy that they settled the case with the DOJ, so no precedent was ever set. Even if it was, the only way this would apply to Google is with Chromebooks, but that never had anywhere near the market saturation that Windows had.
I am not aware of any lawsuit against Microsoft that had any issue with Internet Explorer being a closed web standard, although frankly I think that would have made as much sense as what actually happened.
You have that a bit backwards, Microsoft had a monopoly on x86 desktop machines, to the tune of 98%, even if you included Macs it would've been at 80%. As admitted by OEMs, there was no viable alternative that could be considered at the time. They then used this monoply power in an anticompetitive way to wipe Netscape and others from the map. And that monopoly still more or less persists today, especially since Macs never really directly competed as an OS available to all x86 machines.
To be clear, they were convicted, and on appeal the facts were not disputed, but the judge was deemed biased from his conversations with the media and overturned the ruling. This was a questionable call, as everything the judge discussed with the media was reasonable within the scope of what Microsoft was doing in court.
When later recusing himself from a later racial discrimination case against Microsoft he commented:
How do they read as opposites? When I read those passages, I don't see them as contradictory.
I assumed that Teams was one of those things that companies used just because it came with their O365 subscription. I wonder how that will shake out for new customers? I guess it's still cheaper than meeting+chat alternatives like Webex and Zoom.
However, Team's video is horrifically bad compared to Zoom's. At $5 a seat, it's much less of a direct win over paying a few extra dollars for better tools. It's real easy for me to justify paying a few extra dollars for Slack over Teams now.
Zoom is easily able to handle 50+ people streaming video in a large conference call. Teams starts faltering after like 15.
I can do Zoom video chats over RDP with minimal lag, Teams just stalls from the heavy CPU use and induces incredible latency.
Yeah, I've never used it (we use webex) but I've heard lots of complaints like yours. Microsoft charging anything for Teams makes it easier to justify the cost of going to something better.
Whilst I hate teams chat, I vastly prefer its video to zoom or webex, which both manage to have even worse performance than teams somehow, and miss out on a couple gimmicky but fun features. Seems as though we and our bubbles have significantly different experiences and views regarding this stuff. Interesting...
Slack video seems fine, but I've never used it for bigger calls. Slack chat is dope though.
I'm too far removed from Webex to speak to it, but your experience with Teams and Zoom baffles me.
The only quirk I really have with Zoom is something about the participants and chat buttons in a call not working correctly. But I presumed that was just something about running it on a KDE wayland desktop.
Hope it makes lots of clients drop Teams. I even don't remember the last time a "full", "finished" product from a large company had such an alpha version vibe.
Official Microsoft post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-teams-ww