A Company That Runs on Microsoft Teams Is Telling You How It Makes Decisions
Microsoft Teams is a red flag
Teams came bundled with Microsoft 365, so most companies landed on it by default rather than by choice. Switching tenants is slow, file sharing routes through SharePoint, and search is abysmal. The author argues that when a company picks Teams to save a few euros per seat, it reveals who made the call and what they optimized for — and bets the same spreadsheet logic chose the laptops and the VPN.
Microsoft priced Teams so that it looks free. It only looks that way to the people who don't have to use it.
- kstrauser
I documented a recent experience joining another company's Teams instance:
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To log into the Teams website on my Mac:
* Use Passwords to log into Okta.
* Use Okta Verify + Touch ID for MFA.
* Log into Teams with Okta.
* Install Microsoft Authenticator on my phone because Okta’s SSO isn’t enough for MS.
* Log into my work account in Microsoft Authenticator. (Bonus: typing an Okta password into some random app’s webview gives me the warm fuzzies!)
* Bounce to Okta Verify + Face ID on my phone for MFA.
* Scan the QR code on my Mac with my phone.
* Enter the 2 digit code shown on my Mac to double-plus authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator.
As punishment for doing all this correctly, finally have to use Teams.
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This is 100% accurate. Halfway through the hoopjumping, I realized it was ridiculous and started over from scratch so I could record each step of it.
I'm certain some step in there is necessary to support Outlook Express, and they can't clean up the process without annoying some bank paying for enterprise support of their Windows Server 2003 setup. These are the downsides of eternal backward compatibility.
- pluc
What I conclude from an organization using Teams is that they're running Microsoft stack, which affects my opinion far more negatively. Microsoft sales are powerful. If you use Teams, there's a chance that:
- You use Windows for OS
- You use Sharepoint for documentation
- You use Outlook for Mail
- You use OneDrive for storage
- You use Azure for hosting
- You use Copilot for LLM
- You use GitHub for scm
- etc
all of those are things I actively want to avoid. they're all sub-par, they're all managed by button-clicking pseudo-sysadmins, they're all red flags.
- penultimatename
I’ll touch on two areas that the article and many comments didn’t mention. We switched from Slack to Teams at a previous company.
- The loss of institutional knowledge was absolutely punishing and costly. Overnight, we lost access to an easily searchable knowledge base. A solution was available, but the search was awful and you had to know what you were looking for. While this isn’t really a fault of Teams and the vendor lock-in trap was unavoidable, the sheer monetary amount in wasted effort must have been massive. Additionally, many teams began to default to closed channels. Even future info was difficult or impossible to search.
- The loss of community was palpable. This was mid-pandemic and the formerly in-person work environment was all online. The Slack UI lends itself much more towards “casual” conversations in general chat rooms. It’s a bit difficult to put into words, but posting a funny link or a picture of your cat in Slack feels personable, while doing the same in Teams’ threaded UI feels one step away from writing an email. Even the reaction emojis were bland. It’s difficult to keep people engaged and sticking around if they don’t feel part of a team or community.
- mlsu
There are plenty of serious businesses doing serious things, complex things, that use microsoft teams for chat. My work uses it, it kinda sucks, but honestly there's way more things to bikeshed than chat apps. You can send text messages and make video calls and do presentations in microsoft teams.
- esperent
My company is using Teams. I chose it, and I do regret it but we're not using anything else from Microsoft and I've gradually reduced the surface to where we are just using it for messaging/large file storage, both of which it does fine actually.
My reasons:
- critical reason: it was half the price of anything else which was important when we were starting, less so now
- probably much less than half the price when factoring in storage allowances actually
- critical reason: it has built in translation without extra charge
- the only real alternative close to the price and with translation was Google workspace and I've had such bad experiences with Google that I'm still glad I didn't choose that
- inexperience: it was sold to me as a messaging and storage app that also came with a suite of other apps (which have ALL turned out to be useless) and I didn't know I was inheriting a heaving mutated behemoth built on the stinking undead corpses of SharePoint and AD.
So yeah, wish I'd had more info at the time. But at this point now that I've limited the surface we're using and it's all settled in, the only real problems we have are the tedious 2fa issues that crop up whenever a new person joins.