Report: Microsoft to face antitrust case over Teams

They should face The Hague for how bad Teams is. Currently I have the "option" to switch to "Classic Teams" (which needed to be a separate application because fuck-knows-why) via a toggle. When I do, it launches Classic Teams and freezes, requires another 2FA approval, or both. Then, it later closes and auto-updates to "New" Teams and I get to do the whole process again. And New 3DS Plus Teams 2024 ME+ Pro U has stupid floaty notifications that take up too much space and annoy me.

Thank you for listening...

Teams also sets itself to autostart with Windows, even if you choose not to, or diabale it from the startup manager, it overrides it upon next launch.
It's the only software I've ever seen doing that crime against humanity.
- Programs that do that are straight up malware in my opinion.
- It doesn't for me, just turn it off.
- You can turn it off
Iirc support for Classic Teams was dropped in March (or earlier). New Teams is generally less buggy in my experience anyways, and I haven't yet found functionality its lacking. Not sure why you're still presented with the option to drop back, as I don't believe I've seen that toggle in a while
- It’s still supported under VDI environments which is why the toggle still exists at all.
  Not the best rollout of a MS product but I give them credit for realizing that they needed to switch the underlying code base completely to be more efficient, and actually committing to it.
- Yeah, I figured it was EOL. But look for the option at the top and the toggle is there, in the current version!
Oh, don't worry. They're ending support for old teams soon. You won't have a choice anymore.
Not only are new teams notification banners annoying, new teams no longer makes a noise for every single notification, like it used to. I rather have a ding than a banner, especially since I tend to use all of my screen space.
- New notification, old notification, either way it auto-dismisses the system notification after 5 seconds. Why? I guess they don't trust the DE to manage notifications properly??
  So my colleagues know if they send me a message I'll get to it when I'll get to it because I probably will have missed the notification.
- You can disable the banner, I disabled the banner and the dings on mine and just rely on the little red dot
I've had to repeatedly switcho "new teams". The selection isn't sticky for some reason. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard to develope a messaging app that does file transfers and meetings but apparently this bloated pile of horseshit proves reason wrong. A second long delay when changing threads? "You'll use it because corporate says you will...and you'll LOVE IT".
- I had the same issue, you're starting the wrong app. When you start old teams you get the selection. When you start new teams (with the little turquoise new icon) you don't get the selection. Change your shortcut :)
My favorite part about New Teams is when it kept telling me I was forced to move from Old Teams to New Teams because our IT department was pushing the update. Cut to everyone in IT being confused as fuck because no they fucking weren't.
New 3DS Plus Teams 2024 ME+ Pro U
…& Knuckles?
I love the naming convention
Outlook -> Outlook (new)
Teams classic -> Teams (new)
...
New Teams is about as successful as New Coke!
New 3DS Plus Teams 2024 ME+ Pro U
Wait are you joking or is this real? That is a ridiculous name/version.
- Sorry, no. I was being facetious.

Can Teams please fuck off and take Outlook with it?

The only thing worse is New Outlook. They took away all of the power features and a good deal of the customization, and so you are left with something that feels like it was designed for a mobile app while you try to manage thousands of emails.
- It's literally their web app put in a Chrome window.
  It's outrageous. The Mac version of Outlook is way better, and it's native!!
- And they absolutely fucked years and years of security training by fucking with url previews and truncating the front of the url.
  What the actual fuck were they thinking?
- I made the mistake of trying to mark 900 unread emails as read
  do not do that if you're in a hurry
- New Outlook is just the old Windows Mail application reskinned. The fact that you can have both Outlook and NEW Outlook installed at the same time is weird. Working in IT, its one thing I check when working with end users.
*and Exchange Servers
I literally have Gmail connected into Outlook at work because of how much better it is than the shitty way that Gmail deals with long threads of emails, emails with attachments, and just finding old emails in general. GSuite in general is just hot trash compared to proper Office.
- Gsuite workflow is terrible. You can't copy paste files in drive because fuck you.
  Gmail chat takes forever to load. And when it loads, it defaults to search contact. So if in the meantime, you pressed the contact you want already because it takes 5 seconds to load, it goes back to the search contact.
  You need to have 5 different tabs to work within the ecosystem.
  Google docs is dogshit. At this point, I prefer markdown with a latex converter over Google docs.
  No desktop clients for their services.
  The Gdrive shared with me vs your drive is terrible.

MS being sued for packaging something with windows? Haven't we seen this before?

Yes, I'm sure the penalties will be so high as to teach them a lesson they won't forget for decades because that's how good the legal system is in dealing with corporations now.
- The early 2000s stuff did end up having some significant effects that lasted for decades.
  They've 100% forgotten all about that or think it won't happen again in the last few years, though.
Nope, this is completely unique

When something is both universally hated and almost always chosen above less hated competitors, that's usually a sign that there's some kind of market failure. Maybe it's anticompetitive conduct by the provider (like Microsoft using its market power on Outlook/Exchange to push other services like Teams over its competition), or a principal-agent problem (like the person paying for Teams not actually having to live with most of the shittiness).
- They bundle teams with o365. The cost to integrate another messaging client is more than simply adding Teams to your already expensive bundle.
- And also all of their competition also kinda sucks. So like, Teams is worse enough that if you're using it every day you'll hate it but not worse enough that if you use it once or twice you'll notice.
Huh, it's funny, my company uses Webex and I'd probably prefer Teams.
Not trying to simp for TEAMS, but what issues are people having? Every now and then I have to go in and change mic and speakers back to laptop, presumably from some update our IT deployed.
Other than that and wanting it to show on MY screen when I'm transmitting sound, I can't think of any improvements. Works better than the conference calls we used to have.
- No markdown support, emojis are typed with a parenthesis, search is meh, notifications are buggy, spellcheck is broken
  Oh and file sharing basically doesn't work
- on android, it is the only app I have found that's not compatible with my keyboard. You read that right. How the hell do you fuck that up?
It’s ubiquitous because it was added for free to Office 365, so companies would use it instead of its competitors
Microsoft changed that for new customers a couple weeks ago and it’s now a separate subscription
The standard make it free until it’s ubiquitous then start charging for it

How about Edge!?

No thanks, I'll stick with my unpatched IE 6 instead.
- If you aren't using Netscape Navigator, what are you even doing?
What about it? Its is some much better than Chrome or Brave
Microsoft
- "USE EDGE OR WE WILL CUT YOU!"
  -Microsoft in 5 years probably

Am I taking crazy pills? Discord and Slack suck just as much imo. They are all a shitty web app repackaged for the desktop. And they are all fine, barely anything to chose betweem them. Teams is probably the best as the calendar integration with outlook and hosting ad-hoc drop in meetings in a room is good, no really, the virtual office is fantastic for pairing and team work.

IM peaked with IRC though, the simplicity was excellent, Matrix the closest thing to it imo. I do wish more stuff integrated with it to offer the same business experience as teams

I hate that it's links are "incompatible" with Firefox, even though if you trick it into thinking it's Chrome, it works just fine.
- this here - fuck that BS. Also, the Linux Desktop app discontinued since 2022 (still works, for now, on my debian)
#IRC4LIFE

Unpopular opinion I guess, but I think Teams is actually pretty good at my workplace.

Have you been forced to use "New Teams" that loves to close itself randomly throughout the day and also doesn't allow you to pin it to the taskbar even though the option is there and selectable? It also has a permanent "Update" button at the top of the window that nags you to update but when you select it, it tells you that you're running a newer version than what's available.
- Mine decided that starting with Windows was like spitting in a baby's eye and disabled it for everyone, now I have to remember to turn it on or write a batch file but I'd rather not because Teams is fuckered
- My main gripe is that the web version only asks that once it spent ages loading the old version... And it's not even a choice because I already switched on desktop. Can't you just load the fucking new version to begin with?
- I can't say I've run into those issues with the new teams. Worst I've experienced is the app freezing during a call, which has happened twice in the last year or so.
Coming from a Slack office is pretty damn painful when you get tossed into Teams. The lack of chat organization and chat threads is painful.
Microsoft also moves at a glacial pace. Terrible bugs float around in their products for months / years. That company doesn’t know how to ship stuff anymore. All they do is reorg product and engineering teams every 6 months, then wonder why they can ship anything on time on time.
- We use both: Teams for meetings, Slack for everything else. Slack sucks for meetings IMO, and Teams sucks for chat. We have to use Teams due to corporate (all the meeting rooms are integrated with it, all corporate meetings use it, etc), and we picked Slack because it sucks less.
  It's a pretty decent setup.
- That may be, but I'm not sure that's a problem for a communication platform. I remember one time when they moved the share screen button around and some less tech savvy users thought the feature was removed!
  Teams has something like chat threads too. E.g. you can reply to a message in a channel and it groups all replies, and you can also focus that thread if you want. But I agree it isn't hidden "off the main topic" quite like slack threads.
In terms of working, I find discord best. SharePoint is incredibly slow for me, all the materials inside teams is dumped there.

Okay but could they please hide the microphone settings a little deeper under menus that are already hard to find such as whatever makes the PowerPoint presentation go full screen? No one has ever figured out that one. It's just that we love the resonance of that beautiful feedback sound. As soon as one of the old farts joins the meeting, we know that beautiful sound that slices thru all mosquitoes in the area is coming. But all too soon someone walks through the procedure for turning off the microphone. If we could have it for another 10 minutes without automatically detecting it like almost any other software from the 90's would, that would be sweet!

Don't forget to change the sound setting location to different tabs every other week too to keep you on your toes.
? You can just mute someone in the call if they can't find the button, which is literally in the top right of the screen, right next to the share and leave buttons.
Maybe my experience is different because I use Teams exclusively on my work Mac, but it tends to work better for calls than anything else I've used (Zoom, Slack, Google Meet). I've literally never had issues in my end with the desktop app. Maybe the webapp is different?
That said, I hate teams. The chat function sucks, especially when trying to post code snippets, or really any form of formatted text. And for some reason, some of our business-y types refuse to use Slack, so I'm stuck having to deal with two separate chat systems at work. But the video has pretty much never given me problems.

sometimes it takes minutes to load the calendar, only to still fail

We have a new manager and she is forcing us to use the calendar and planner in Teams and my productivity has plummeted because of it.

I have to use Teams as a student and we never even do video calls, just sharing files, and there are so many issues we have with it such as bugginess and no one understanding the UI.

Microsoft isn't slacking with teams.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

According to three people with knowledge of the move, the European Commission is pressing ahead with a formal charge sheet against the world’s most valuable listed tech company over concerns it is restricting competition in the sector.

Microsoft last month offered concessions as it sought to avoid regulatory action, including extending a plan to unbundle Teams from other software such as Office, not just in Europe but across the world.

The EU then issued a 561 million euro fine against Microsoft for failure to comply with a decision over the bundling of the Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system.

The company declined to comment but referred to an earlier statement that said it would “continue to engage with the commission, listen to concerns in the marketplace, and remain open to exploring pragmatic solutions that benefit both customers and developers in Europe.”

Microsoft is also part of a handful of tech companies, including Google and Meta, caught as “gatekeepers” under the new Digital Markets Act, meaning it has special responsibilities when trading in Europe.

The tech company has also faced complaints from European cloud computing providers that are concerned that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position in the sector to force users to buy its products and squashing competition from smaller start-ups in Europe.