Everyone hates teams, but every company uses it and will keep using it because it's bundled with office anyway.

And the Office package is a very attractive offering. $36 / user / month and they get managed emails, chat, office, SSO, cloud storage, Windows, etc - basically everything that used to be the domain of a sysadmin.

The competitors are all fragmented; Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack, Teams or Discord and doesn't do hardware management as far as I'm aware unless you use Chromebooks.

> Google probably gets the closest but doesn't have a chat service like Slack

Google is up to a dozen versions of chat, the current incarnation is called Google Meet which includes a video akak Zoom type service as well as a Slack-type chat service.

I thought they rebranded Teams to Copilot 365?

lol you've 'talked' about switching. I'm really surprised that any startup would be on Teams in the first place. I get enterprises but for startups I would think other tools make more sense (Slack, etc...).

The startup I work at uses Teams. It's the whole "Microsoft for startups" package deal they do means we're on all things Microsoft.

Why "talked about switching" is irrelevant. If it is cheap enough, you will take it.

I don’t get the Teams hate.

My experience is that document sharing and collaborative edition work insanely well with Office. Visio is fool proof and quality is ok even with a poor connection. The integration with outlook is perfect. The product ecosystem is great so it’s easy to get room booking and auto-connect. Plus, copilot is good at minutes and transcription.

I can’t imagine going back to a time where I couldn’t just throw an excel file or ppt in a discussion and get collaborative editing straight away.

At the price point, it’s pretty much unmatched in my experience. What would people rather use instead?

The other day I clicked "share" on a PowerPoint presentation saved in OneDrive, and it reverted to a version several hours old, losing that work. This is a typical experience using any of the Office products. Copilot is not "good at minutes and transcription" by any stretch of the imagination. It cannot understand a _simple_ word I say, with an RP-British accent, let alone many of the acronyms and terms used in industry.

Fortunately we have already switched away from Teams to Slack for chat, but since the best way to win is not to play, I just write text in vim and presentations in Keynote. Fortunately I have approximately no need for spreadsheets that aren't simple lists, though that appears to be the lock-in.

I'd rather use literally anything else. Google's stuff is probably best, but Quip was also fine.

Visio was built to be acquired by Microsoft. It was the best office family app pre-acquisition. Every subsequent release is worse than the one before it.

Lucid is a better tool in every way.

Lucid is for a totally different purpose though.

The only thing I really like about Teams is that the AI-optimized audio codec is the only video call audio that doesn’t cause some people’s voices to become physically painful to listen to.

Teams works fine for my limited needs. Though it feels sluggish, sometimes a chat or calendar takes 3 seconds to load.

Even loading a command prompt or the calculator takes more than 3 seconds on Windows 11 so maybe they've just lowered the bar so much it passes internal testing.

Most people dislike their government, they however comply with it in the dimensions that matter.

The difference is that every time a new company is founded, it's a clean slate for which tools are used.

You still need to play to the constraints of the market, which come in hard and soft varieties.

Yeah. I know this one.

Its the same story since like 15+ years now.

Well, with the windows 10 support ending, it is different now. To some extent staying on windows requires more effort than switching, which is an interesting place to be. I have "switched" people to macos or linux that before would not even bother and hear such stories everywhere. The linux ecosystem has matured and windows is no longer the easy/bugfree experience that was. Eg I tried to install linux and windows to some brand new hardware couple of years ago, linux worked out of the box while for windows I had to go troubleshooting mode and find/download/install drivers manually. 10-15 years ago or so it was always the opposite.

> Eg I tried to install linux and windows to some brand new hardware couple of years ago,

I realized this too. I recently installed a dual boot Fedora/Win11. The fedora installation was literally pressing 4 times "Next" and was done after 5 minutes.

Windows took well over 1 hour (offline account) and installing drivers and taming edge & co was over 2 hours at the end.