In a move undoubtedly designed to quell any further antitrust complaints without actually making much of a significant impact, Microsoft recently announced that they were unbundling Teams from Office 365. New Office 365 subscriptions will not include Teams, though it will remain bundled for any existing customers… which is a lot of them. My first reaction to the news was disappointment that this couldn’t have happened earlier before my current company moved to Office 365 so that we wouldn’t be saddled with the nightmare that is Teams.
The History
Other than a 13 month break, I’ve been using Teams since it’s inception when it replaced Skype for Business in Office 365. I started using it immediately at that point. In 2019, I switched jobs to a company that was on G Suite (at the time… now it’s Google Workspace, and who knows what it’ll be next year) but was moving to Office 365… which immediately meant more Teams. In 2022 I took a new job where I finally got to use Slack. I loved the Slack experience, and while I had always been irritated with Teams, using Slack daily made me realize why the Teams experience feels so janky. Then in 2023 I went back to the company I had started with in 2019, forcing me to use Teams once again, only this time after I had seen how much greener the grass was on the other side of the fence.
The Experience
A big question anyone likely has when using Teams for the first time is what it’s supposed to be used for. Chatting? Audio/video conferencing? File storage? Meeting scheduling? Calendaring? The answer from Microsoft is basically “yes” as they’ve tried to make Teams do everything, which means there are few things it does well.
I’ll start with what’s good: audio and video calls in Teams are pretty okay. They aren’t great, but everyone hates video calls anyway, so that could definitely be a factor. There’s also been a bug on macOS for the past month where answering a call will actually decline it for some reason, but maybe that’s a feature? Regardless, Slack, by comparison, does calling very poorly. In the year I had access to Slack, I used that aspect exactly once and then never touched it again.
What Slack does great, though, is what it was originally designed for: chatting. Chats in Slack are terrific. One-on-one, in a group, or in a channel, everything is fairly seamless and just makes sense. Chats in Teams, on the other hand, are a mess. The way you’re arguably supposed to use Teams is to make… Teams in it. Yes, within the application “Teams” there is the concept of creating “Teams” of people. It may be tempting to think that Teams in Teams (see how confusing this naming immediately becomes?) as the equivalent of Channels in Slack, but that’s not the case. A Team is simply a collection of people, files, and channels that people can use. Each channel within a Team is then supposed to be for a separate purpose. But it gets better! Within each channel, conversations get broken down into threads, so each discussion within a channel (within a Team) is supposed to go in a thread, and there can be multiple threads happening at a time in the same channel around different (but related) topics.
If that makes no sense to you, then you already understand why Team is so painful to use. As a technical person, I understand the layout but find it extremely clunky and unintuitive. Less technically savvy people have no hope of using this properly. Conversations in a channel instead immediately turn into people trying to reply to a thread by starting a new thread of their own, causing annoyance at best and missed messages at worst.
Instead of dealing with this, every organization I’ve worked at that leverages Teams (the application) instead just chats within group chats people make. Teams (the organizations in the application) are just used for file storage as something that serves as an overlay to SharePoint. This causes plenty of problems in itself if some people are accessing the files via Teams and others are accessing them via SharePoint (which is what I always do since the Teams experience is pretty awful) since that can impact which files are visible to which users, but that’s another topic for another post.
Group chats are fine, but it just feels silly to have a group chat for my team (the people that I work with directly) where we actually chat and to also have a Team (the organization in the app) that’s just used for storage. In Slack I would either make a group chat or I would make a channel, and that would be the end of it.
The Outcome
If Teams is such a rotten experience, though, then how has it attained such popularity? The simple answer is because it was bundled with Office 365. Even if it was annoying, it worked and meant that companies didn’t have to spend more on other applications like Slack and Zoom. Being passable was good enough. At this point, though, I don’t really think unbundling Teams is going to make a huge impact because so many organizations are already in the Office 365 ecosystem. While there are undoubtedly still organizations running some sort of ancient, on-premise email system that will eventually want to move to a SaaS service, most companies embraced this long ago.