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Microsoft's Jeff Teper: Teams 'Will Be Even Bigger Than Windows' 105

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Jeff Teper, CVP for Microsoft 365, has a vision for the company's Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack, Facebook's Workplace, and Google Chat. In terms of reach, Teper wants Microsoft Teams to eclipse Windows. (Windows 10 runs on over 1 billion monthly active devices.)

Our interview took place a day after Microsoft concluded its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, where the company gave business developers new tools to build Teams apps. Microsoft launched a Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extension for Teams in preview, introduced new integrations between its Power Platform and Teams, and announced a custom app submission process to help IT admins. Teper was happy to cover a range of Teams topics, including metrics, growth, competitors, consumer positioning, machine learning, and of course dealing with the increased demand during the coronavirus pandemic.
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Microsoft's Jeff Teper: Teams 'Will Be Even Bigger Than Windows' More

Microsoft's Jeff Teper: Teams 'Will Be Even Bigger Than Windows'

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  • Umm, no (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:20PM (#60106800)
    Teams sucks BALLS. It's like they threw a bunch of random ideas in a raffle bowl and instead of shaking the bowl and picking a few, they took a glue stick and adhered all the ideas to a beach ball that they're tossing at customers.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 )

      And how is that different from the competing products? You have to view this from Microsoft's perspective which is from the point of view of business users. What you call random ideas are things they see as necessary for online collaboration.

      Are those tools well integrated and correctly separated from each other? Not by a long shot. Hopefully they'll fix things along the way soon rather than years from now.

      But at least you don't need to be using Windows to use Office 365 or Teams, which is a weird departure

      • I'm waiting for Teams V2.1.

      • Re:Umm, no (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @03:09PM (#60107542)

        Teams competes with Microsoft's existing offerings. Ie, the team collaboration is just OneNote and Sharepoint. The calendar is Outlook. The chat and video meetings and phone calls are Skype for Business. The add-on "apps" is iffy, but Sharepoint and Azure DevOps have the same hopeful feel that enterprises will be dumb enough to buy stuff from a web store (and MS is probably right). The only thing in Teams that is not elsewhere is the "Teams" button which really is just wiki and sharepoint and posting anyway, so it's nothing new or unique.

        The whole damn thing feels like another Microsoft "me too!" offering, where they feel bad if they're not an industry leader in a certain area they have little competence in.

    • So, in other words, it's now like most of the products in the Microsoft Office suite?

    • Teams sucks BALLS. It's like they threw a bunch of random ideas in a raffle bowl and instead of shaking the bowl and picking a few, they took a glue stick and adhered all the ideas to a beach ball that they're tossing at customers.

      False. You can see multiple glued ideas on a beachball at once, whereas Teams doesn't even allow you to multitask.

    • This is all simply true.

  • I don't see how (Score:4, Interesting)

    by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:25PM (#60106848)
    At work we have both Teams and Slack. Teams is installed by default as part of Office and almost no one uses it. Everyone uses Slack. So on paper it looks like our company uses Teams. Outside of Enterprise Office users who have had it installed it by default, does anyone actually go out of their way to install it? This is important because if Jeff Teper thinks that it would be bigger than Windows that means users of Linux, Unix, MacOS, iOS, Android, etc will all have to install it. I don't see that happening.
    • I second slack!
    • Teams is actually pretty good for conference calls, calendar meetings and such (the skype for business stuff) and we use it heavily for this but the text group chat is pretty awful. I haven't really been able to put my finger on what makes it so bad at this... it just kind-of sucks.
      • I've been using skype for 10+ years and every new version just break stuff for instance have you tried to search stuff you said or someone said? It's dead slow, scrolling get awfully messed up. I had 2 calls getting dropped with no error, no message at all last week alone. Microsoft rebuild the UI for mobile but the old design with 1 windows per conversion was superior..
        • The OP wording of 'the skype for business stuff' is regrettable, teams doesn't work like or appear to have same code base as skype.

        • Maybe Microsoft would rather create new crap from scratch because it's more fun than fixing the broken crap people are actually using? There's nothing inherently wrong with Skype for Business that can't be fixed or added for less than the cost it took to develop Teams.

      • Re:I don't see how (Score:4, Informative)

        by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @02:05PM (#60107154)

        Too many ways to split text chats into groups of people and teams of people. If you use Teams, you'll know what I mean. It's hard to keep track of which conversations are happening in which sections. Also, what they call "Wiki" I call "weak notepad". They basically have all the parts, but they're just all over the place and not powerful enough.

        But since this is Microsoft, we know we only need to wait until they fix it. Unlike Google, who would cancel the project in a year or two and try to replace it with something similar yet completely different.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          The thing that kills it for me is the half-assed threading. It's like marketing said 'you must have threaded chats' and dev team says 'if I have to, fine *technically* it is a threaded chat and it'll be fine so long as no one ever uses it'.

          Either ditch the threaded conversation concept or if you must have the option to 'convert to conversation' as a child of a channel and dedicate a mode of interaction to that conversation, instead of using the scrollbar as your means of swapping between them and never know

        • The thing I hate the most is the microphone defaulting to 'on' when you connect to a meeting. There is no way to configure it to default to off and I can't think of a single reason why you would want to work this way. It's embarrassing if you curse or fart in the middle of a meeting.

        • Team chats is the least used part of Teams for me (not the IM part, the "Posts" part).

          We only need to wait for Microsoft to fix Skype for Business also, but I think that will be a long wait. Chances are they are copying the Google model these days, this is most definitely not the same team that created Windows or Office. Though they still are at their old game of playing Internet catch-upl

      • The set of emoticons, gifs, stickers, etc just gives it a consumer social media feel to the whole thing, making it feel like less of a product for professionals.

        I know people hate Skype for Business, and it has some flaws. But why not FIX those flaws instead of dumping it all out and starting over with this extremely weird and difficult to classify app? It's like there's a battle in Redmond between the VPs and whoever wins the drinking contest on Fridays gets their favorite app funded.

      • One of the big things that sucks about it is that if you want to scroll up and see the history it's....so....damn....slow....for....no....apparent....reason. Yes, maybe excusable if everyone on the team posts keesp posting memes in the chat, but it's the same story when it's plain old text.

    • It's a Microsoft product. So it will be installed by corporations who worship Microsoft and make sure they buy only Microsoft products. They don't care if these products help you out, the VP of IT has spoken and so it shall be done.

    • Outside of Enterprise Office users who have had it installed it by default, does anyone actually go out of their way to install it?

      No, and that's the thing, Teams' popularity rests entirely on the MS ecosystem integration, synchronisation with Skype for Business, built on Office 365 groups, using Sharepoint to store files, embedded basically every office app within itself.

      It's a good idea, horribly executed, excruciating to use, yet brilliantly marketed to the CTO.

  • yea - nope

  • Here we go again. (Score:5, Funny)

    by ITRambo ( 1467509 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:26PM (#60106854)
    Zune will crush iPod. IPhone mock burial doen because Windows phone will sweep the world, along with Windows 10. Microsoft will solve cancer within ten years (from 2016 https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]) Microsoft will never learn to keep their manic predictions under wraps. T
  • just pay Google $1 billion to include the Teams app on every Android device. You're welcome Microsoft.

    • You're welcome Microsoft.

      I can't read "You're welcome xyz" without thinking about Deadpool shooting Ryan Reynold in the back of the head.

      Also, was that murder or suicide?

      • You're welcome Microsoft.

        I can't read "You're welcome xyz" without thinking about Deadpool shooting Ryan Reynold in the back of the head.

        Also, was that murder or suicide?

        Yes!

        That whole sequence of cleanups was one of the best post scenes to come along in a long, LONG time.

  • I hope he didn't bet his job on that!

  • A surge isn't a trend. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:36PM (#60106930)

    With Covid-19 having a lot of employees working from home where they use to be all at the office. Teams was picked because it was available, as most businesses had Office 365 already available. Making it a low hanging fruit to solve a problem that has shot up.

    Once things settle down, while I expect there will be a lot more Work from Home people then before, for the long run. Many will go back to their offices, by choice. As well a lot of companies may demand that their employees return to the office.

    So in the long term the following will happen.
    Teams will be reevaluated to see if there is a better solution, for the remote workers when there is enough time to do a proper product evaluation.
    Less people will be needing the tool.

    So this surge that Microsoft sees, will probably be a blip, and perhaps recover at a new normal level (probably a bit higher than before)

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 )

      Teams was picked because it was available, as most businesses had Office 365 already available.

      I think a lot more places initially chose Zoom because it was readily available and very easy to use. My employer, at least, quickly switched to Microsoft Teams because the security was better. No, that's not a joke. And while I do expect remote meetings are going to be less important in the future than they've been during the pandemic, I expect most people to want the ability to have them, even if they don't us

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by grogger ( 638944 )
      But will all the people go back to their offices or will they choose or be pressured to stay at home? Will companies find it is cheaper for their employees to pay for their own workspaces in the form of home offices and decide to "allow" them to stay at home while utilizing all the great new employee monitoring software and stuff like teams to keep them under their virtual thumb? Will employees, once they experience the wonders of a commute free day, choose to stay at home if given the opportunity? We do

      • The good thing about working from home is that you can replace your coffee breaks by "stimulating audio-visual breaks". It's also a good cardio-vascular exercise!

    • when there is enough time to do a proper product evaluation

      There is never enough time to spend time on something that you can't directly bill a client for.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by dabblah ( 18703 )

      Companies ate up with Microsoft everything will continue to use teams, and its use in some circumstances will be durable.

      It is a more usable interface for both sharepoint and skype (or just has better technology developed since clearly they picked teams as their horse to ride some time ago).

      My company started off saying everyone had to move to sharepoint for all file saving, and that didn't happen since it just wasn't workable. Now they are saying move to teams, and that does seem to be happening since it d

    • With Covid-19 having a lot of employees working from home where they use to be all at the office. Teams was picked because it was available, as most businesses had Office 365 already available. Making it a low hanging fruit to solve a problem that has shot up.

      Don't attribute to a random event what actually has an underlying business need. Sure COVID saw an increase in videoconferencing apps, but they could have been any app. The "surge" started last year already. Slashdot even ran stories about it before COVID 19 was a thing, here from back in November: https://slashdot.org/story/19/... [slashdot.org]

      The reality is, the rise of Teams is taking over the decline in Skype for Business in existing Microsoft shops as MS put a lifecycle notice out on Skype for Business last year.

      Teams will be reevaluated to see if there is a better solution

      No

  • Microsoft tried to kill the web with Internet Explorer but they failed and now just use Chromium like everyone else. Teams will end up being some Google based video conferencing standard in the future.

  • And... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:43PM (#60106984)
    By bigger he means instead of taking up 32GB of storage it will take up 1.2TB of storage.

  • 75 million is virtually nothing. They have a looong way to go.

  • teams (Score:3)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:47PM (#60107018) Homepage Journal

    I've used Teams and I'm as hostile to anything MS as any other thinking and breathing /. member.

    It's actually not shitty and it became rapidly popular within companies within the past two months.

    It is, however, like everything MS, an "also". Someone cobbled good ideas from various collaboration tools together. As always, it'll be a couple iterations until it's pretty good. We will see if the competitors can move ahead fast enough. At least by now everyone know's MS EEE strategy and is warned.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Teams is a disorganized potpourri of services. What MS should do is standardize the Team database schema and let open-source and internal programmers put UI's on it that fit their needs better, and perhaps add custom tables. MS could give starter examples to let people tinker with in their common tool-sets such as MVC-Core, Razor pages, and Azure Web-Apps*.

      I know what I want to search for and see, I just can't write the SQL to give me that view of the data/info (and do the same for local/internal customers)

      • Microsoft so desparately wants to be relevant. So I doubt they'll open it up lest they discover that other people can do stuff better than they can. Microsoft never opens anything up, even their open document standard is closed tighter than the ten year old jar of pickles at the back of my fridge.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          They have opened up a bit over the years. They want to sell infrastructure more than applications these days.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        Won't happen. That's not the MS game.

        The MS game is to give the office jerks something that is good enough and just configurable enough to work for them, but static enough that it is instantly recognizable. See exhibit A: Excel.

        The target audience is MBAs, not programmers. Always has been, always will be, no matter what some Balmer shouted when he had too much cocaine the night before.

    • Yes, cobbled together. Then afterwords an elevator pitch is done to some senior VP. Next thing you know Skype for Business is cancelled, their team reassigned to janitorial services, and marketing comes up with a publicity push involving a novel virus and staying at home. Maybe I just dreamt that last part.

  • It's like Slack, Discord, ...

    It's hard to get excited about yet another implementation of an application. Fortunes were made and lost over spreadsheet software in the 80's and 90's. But it's not exciting, at all.

    • So, Azure DevOps. Just like Atlassian apps, except from Microsoft. And less useful (but I repeat myself). Microsoft REFUSES to be second banana to anyone and will waste so much money chasing their dream of being number one in anything involving a computer.

  • If its so great.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Ubi_NL ( 313657 ) <joris.benschopNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:57PM (#60107094) Journal

    Why does it eat 600MB memory when idle?
    Why does it bring the whole os to a grinding halt, maxing out cpu, when a meeting with 3 people starts?

    Zoom or webex are not nearly such resource hogs in my experience. The only positive thing of Teams is that it has better audio quality than Skype ...

    • Because it is an Electron based application.

      I guess so that it could be cross-platform.

      It is a real hog though and I do hate that aspect of it.

      However, it is definitely my daily driver now. I am in Teams more than I am in my e-mail client or web browser.

    • Re:If its so great.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @02:16PM (#60107224)

      Why does it eat 600MB memory when idle?

      Telemetry.

      Even when you're idle . . . telemetry isn't. Telemetry never sleeps.

      Telemetry . . . all the way down.

    • Why does it eat 600MB memory when idle?
      Why does it bring the whole os to a grinding halt, maxing out cpu, when a meeting with 3 people starts?

      Because of a local configuration issue? Teams is a horrible piece of software, but it doesn't seem to use a lot of memory nor does it seem to have a negative impact on performance on any system I've used, except once, and that wasn't teams but some underlying service shared by Office which caused my IT department to proceed to re-image my entire workstation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )
      I have no idea what Team is. And I hardly have any idea what slack is. Some of my projects 'use it' and I have a page open somewhere in s browser with their slack page. Every Ctrl-Tab in a while I stumble on it and see the 3 messages originally posted 3 months ago and I really wonder what the fucking point is ?!? We have git, email and zoom (or similar). What else would you want and why ?

  • Zoom won't run! (on Windows that is)

    Perhaps that is the new mantra within Planet Zog (aka Microsoft)

  • Great... As if Windows wasn't a big enough RAM and storage space hog. Now Skype will even more resources than a whole OS.

  • Teams stinks (Score:3)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @02:10PM (#60107178)

    The UI is a pile of shit (no Microsoft, menu bars are not optional). It duplicates the Outlook calendar (pointless). It doesn't understand email addresses copied from Outlook (although that's mostly Outlook's fault for making it impossible to copy just the email address). It's a resource hog. There's no way to get notifications selectively (I don't want to be notified every time there's a chat message, but important msgs should be visible).

    But mostly I hate it because it's yet another source of interruptions that I'm expected to have open at all times.

    • I agree that the ui is shit, but it WORKS with outlook. I can't even remember the name of it but a few years ago we used another system and it was horrible and never worked correctly.

    • I'm on OSX, so it is required to have menu bars, you can't escape that. But that is the most sparse menu bar I have seen in a long time. Microsoft is not into UIs anymore, as you can see with Metro and Windows 10, it's all about letting the user figure out obscure stuff on their own.

      Oh, and my company is haviing Teams training. I don't recall being given special training on any other Microsoft application before, except those few times when training was really marketing in disguise.

    • Yeah, the UI is shit, but the calendar being part of it is great, because I have a lot of meetings THROUGH TEAMS now. Being able to join a meeting directly from the application where the meeting is being held is one of the few bright points.

      They have conversation threading in 'Teams' but not in chats, even if it's a group chat. Why?

      It shows a lot of things as links (that are links) but if they're not something common like web or mail links, it eats them. You can click on them and nothing happens except it l

    • All those complaints and you missed the obvious: YOU CAN'T FRIGGING MULTITASK. The only multitasking you can do is minimise the chat window to do one other task. Got multiple monitors? hahahah you wasted your money.

  • Teams is a terrible name (Score:3)

    by jader3rd ( 2222716 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @02:37PM (#60107354)
    By naming the product Teams, it limits people to think that the product is only for use between team members, and don't think to try to use it for scenarios which are not between team members. The name will be what holds Teams back.

  • I'm a Linux user for day-to-day work. In our environment, we have Windows 10 desktops & laptops, MacOS Laptops, and Linux desktops & laptops (Mix of Ubuntu/Kubuntu, Fedora, and PopOS). We started using Slack, but when Microsoft released a Linux native Teams client, we made the decision to move to Teams.

    BOTH apps have their issues and design flaws IMO. Notably, what's up with these apps not having sound notifications for the active channel of the app is in the foreground?

    Anyway, they both have iss

    • Ha, I first see some chat messages or posts weeks after they were sent. A wonderful notification system that it has.

  • To compare a firmly entrenched product that does a vast amount for many people to something with many competitors that are frankly superior is silly. I would sooner believe that Microsoft will disrupt the mobile phone business.

  • ..this has a better chance of sticking around than the stuff Google produces.

    It's sad because a company is supposed to bw building brand loyalty, but Google is doing the opposite with it's vanishware (not to be confused with vaporware)

  • They actually released a client for desktop Linux. The only way to get native calendar support for O365 that actually works is in teams.

    It also shows how easily they could probably port Outlook, the only thing keeping my work machine running a win10 VM. But they already own that space, so windows only and a crappy web client is all you get, there.

    They have both DEBs and RPMs on their download page. The packages also install a microsoft repo so it's automatically updated.

    These are weird times.

    • Re:They're really trying (Score:4, Informative)

      by The1stImmortal ( 1990110 ) on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @06:54PM (#60108366)

      They actually released a client for desktop Linux.

      It's an electron wrapper around a web app. You don't have to do a lot to make it work on Linux as the Electron team (and Chromium project) already did the heavy lifting for you.
      If they weren't afraid of losing higher-tier O365 license sales (the ones where you get the native app rights), they'd do the same thing with Office Web too, since it already works in a browser on Linux.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It is already bigger than Windows. Just look at your Task Manager and sort by Memory. I see 300MB taken by Teams, 5 times more than Skype for Business or Outlook.
    This may be anecdotal evidence, but the boot time my work laptop doubled after Teams was installed on it.
    In terms of CPU cycles consumed, it is also one of the bigger ones - 20-25% of i7-6600U when running an audio-only meeting between 2 people.

  • We need moderation options for the articles on /. Let's face it, TFA is nothing more than flamebait for the demographic here.

  • Until basic must-haves are implemented in Office 365 without the need to install the native Office application side by side, the digital strategy for Microsoft is a joke, and I refuse to use their half-baked products.

    However if MS over the next decade shows that they support open source, do not engage in evil and counter-customer activity and makes the web-platform for all office documents and collaboration a pleasant user experience, I have no problem using their platform.

    In the end I just want to not was

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