Comment by tedggh

Your claim that "if it was consistently bad, it would have been replaced already" just... totally misunderstands how enterprise software decisions work, even in organisations where people value their time.

Switching costs are enormous. Your organisation has Teams integrated with your Office 365 licensing, which means you're already paying for it. Replacing it with Slack means paying $8-12 per user per month on top of your existing Office costs, because you still need Outlook, Word, Excel, and SharePoint. For a 500-person company, that's an additional $48,000-72,000 annually for a tool that overlaps with something you've already paid for. Finance departments kill these proposals before they reach decision-makers, regardless of how much time is wasted on Teams' inefficiencies.

The IT burden to move is quickly substantial. Migrating chat history, file repositories, and integrations takes months. You need to retrain users, update documentation, reconfigure SSO, and migrate bots and webhooks. Most IT departments are already understaffed. Unless Teams is completely non-functional, that project never gets prioritised over security updates, infrastructure maintenance, or business-critical requests.

Organisations don't optimise for employee time the way you seem to think they do. The calculus isn't "is this tool good", it's "is this tool bad enough to justify the cost and disruption of replacing it". That threshold is extraordinarily high. People tolerate inefficient tools because the alternative is fighting procurement, convincing IT, and enduring months of migration pain. Lotus Notes persisted in enterprises for over a decade despite being universally despised because the switching cost was too high. SAP is notorious for terrible UX but remains entrenched because migration is a multi-year project costing millions.

Your workflow actually proves the point. You use email as your source of truth because Teams' search and organisation aren't reliable enough. You manually distribute meeting minutes and transcripts because you don't trust Teams as a system of record. You've built workarounds to compensate for the tool's deficiencies and normalised them as standard practice. That's not Teams working well, that's your organisation adapting to work around its limitations.

Let me address the specific issues you haven't encountered:

- Teams' resource usage is measurable and documented. PC World's 2023 benchmarks showed Teams using 1.4GB RAM at idle compared to 500MB for Slack and 350MB for Discord. ExtremeTech's testing found Teams taking 22 seconds to cold start versus 4 seconds for Slack on identical hardware. r/sysadmin consistently reports Teams causing performance problems on machines with 8GB of RAM, forcing hardware upgrades. Microsoft implicitly acknowledged this by completely rebuilding Teams in 2023, promising 2x faster performance and 50% less memory. The fact that they had to rewrite the entire application is an admission that the performance problems were architectural. (it didn't help though)

- Microsoft's own documentation acknowledges search limitations. The search index doesn't include all message content beyond a certain threshold. Results ranking is poor enough that Microsoft published a support article explaining how to use advanced search operators to find messages, which rather proves the basic search doesn't work. The r/MicrosoftTeams subreddit has over 3,000 posts about search not returning results that users know exist. IT administrators on Spiceworks report having to advise users to "use Ctrl+F in the browser if Teams search doesn't work", which is a workaround for a broken core feature.

- Files uploaded in chat messages don't appear in the Files tab automatically. They're stored in a hidden SharePoint folder that most users don't know how to access. Microsoft's official guidance for this is to manually move files to the Files tab or use SharePoint directly. Is that an edge case? Is it FUCK, it's documented in Microsoft's own support articles as expected behaviour. If your organisation hasn't hit this, it's because you're not using Files tabs or you've trained people to work around it.

- Microsoft's Tech Community forums have literally thousands of threads about notification badges showing unread messages that don't exist (5,000+ when I last checked), or notifications not appearing for actual messages. Microsoft's official response, posted repeatedly since 2020, is "we're aware of this issue and investigating". It's six years later now, it's still not fixed. The fact that you haven't noticed might mean your notification settings are configured differently, or you've unconsciously learned to ignore the notification count as unreliable.

- Going back to r/MicrosoftTeams: the community continually documents persistent issues with the mobile app... notifications not syncing with desktop read state, automatic logouts requiring re-authentication, messages appearing in different orders on mobile versus desktop, and the app draining battery faster than comparable applications. GitHub's issue tracker for Teams mobile shows hundreds of unresolved bugs (then again, I suppose what popular app doesn't). You mentioned you don't use mobile, which explains why you haven't experienced this.

- Regarding Chat versus channel architecture, Microsoft's own UX research lead, cited in a 2022 Verge interview, acknowledged that the distinction between chats and channels confuses users but can't be changed due to early architectural decisions. The duplicate groups issue I mentioned isn't a bug, it's a consequence of treating "Alice, Bob, Charlie" as a different entity from "Alice, Charlie, Bob". This is documented in Microsoft's developer documentation as intended behaviour. Your organisation either hasn't hit this scale yet or has developed unofficial naming conventions to work around it.

You've been using Teams for four months. These issues emerge over time, at scale, or in specific usage patterns. When you're managing multiple projects with overlapping team members across different time zones and need to reference decisions made months ago, the organisational problems compound. When you're working on older hardware or need reliable mobile access, the performance issues become blocking. When you need to find a specific technical discussion from six months ago buried in one of 40 channels, the search deficiencies become critical.

The question isn't whether Teams works for your specific, constrained use case after four months. The question is whether it's good software compared to alternatives, and whether the problems people report are valid. The evidence says yes, they are valid. The performance metrics are measurable. The bugs are documented in Microsoft's own forums. The UX problems are acknowledged by Microsoft's own researchers. The antitrust case is real.

Your experience is one data point. It's not invalid, but it's also not representative. Saying "I haven't personally experienced these problems in my limited usage" doesn't refute the documented experiences of millions of users, the measured performance benchmarks, or the systematic issues that Microsoft itself acknowledges. It just means you haven't hit them yet, or your use case is simple enough that they don't matter, or you've normalised workarounds as standard practice.

And, I haven't even started talking about what happens if you dare to work across multiple organisations.

I get the same issue on Mac, if it's any comfort. I had to close and reopen the app 7-8 times to have my microphone recognized, despite it worked reliably on every single tool I ever used, both on Linux and later on Mac. Teams couldn't do that either with the native client or with the web client.