Microsoft Teams Adds Free Communities Feature To Take on Discord (theverge.com) 52
Microsoft is launching a new communities feature for Microsoft Teams today, designed for consumers to use the best parts of Teams free of charge to create and organize groups. From a report: The new community feature will allow groups to use the calendar, meeting, and chat features of Teams. Features like group chat, calling, and file / photo sharing are all supported, and groups will also be able to use a shared calendar (which includes Google Calendar integration) to organize community events. This new community integration is really aimed at groups like sports clubs or even virtual community groups for small businesses and simple groups like a carpool for co-workers to organize transportation. Facebook, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, Twitter, and many other services already provide a variety of ways to organize groups online, so Microsoft is entering a crowded market, but it believes Teams has something different to offer.
Another mouldy carrot gets dangled... (Score:2)
Oooh look, another "freebie" to get you to hand over your data for use by advertisers.
Pass.
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A MS license can be very expensive, so a free product is necessary for them. The challenge with free, or even cheaper, product from MS is the strings attached and extreme limits in functionality. Free stuff from MS is almost always a means of upselling
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In this case, it's trying to own the consumer communication experience, because that tends to leak up into business communication.
Microsoft should know this all too well, this is pretty much exactly the direction they came in to take over business IT, own the home desktop and people started wanting familiar experience at work.
So if Microsoft has to be free to be relevant to folks talking to friends and family and gaming colleagues, then so be it. Of course I don't see a huge excited rush of people to drop t
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Or the other way around. If Microsoft manages to get people using Teams routinely in their private life, they're less likely to say things like "ffs, let's just use zoom" to their work colleagues.
I don't think it's going to work. Making Teams not crash every time I turn on video might be a better approach.
More Bullshit! (Score:3)
Can't see why you would copy Discord. Discord is just Gen Z Facebook.
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Can't see why you would copy Discord. Discord is just Gen Z Facebook.
Disagree. Discord is Gen Z IRC with voice. And I can definitely understand why someone would copy IRC, which is kind of annoying to use. Furthermore, there's money in doing so. I'm a little surprised that companies still think there's money in it, now that there are so many near-clones: Gitter, Mumble, Matrix, Slack, Discord, and even to some extent XMPP. Probably more I haven't heard of.
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If it was IRC with chat, I should be to install some kinda software to do that and download whatever client I want.
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Discord (and slack, teams, matrix) functionally behaves a lot more like IRC than facebook. It's live chat based (text/voice/video) while facebook is more of a blog or forum where posts are published for all to see or threaded discussions. Clearly it doesn't have an open protocol so clients and servers are limited, but the way it's used for people seeking out communities to chat is similar to IRC where someone might have joined a chat room on freequest to chat about a topic.
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I think if people mention *facebook* in the context of chatting: they mean the chat app.
And not the blog/timeline point of view.
You know about "facebook messenger"?
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I can't say I'm that familiar with it, but I thought facebook messenger was more directed messages to a person or a specific group of people, not like a chat room you could freely join
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Exactly. Hence your "Discord (and slack, teams, matrix) functionally behaves a lot more like IRC than facebook." is wrong. Facebook messenger works more or less exactly like IRC. Unless you want to focus on the "not like a chat room you could freely join" aspect. Which was not clear from the beginning.
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I think you're missing the distinction of chat communities as oppose to private chat groups (or 1-1). I've never seen anyone say Facebook Messenger is a replacement for IRC (or describe using it in a way like IRC), but I guess it could be made that way if FB pushed it hard enough.
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As far as I could tell, before the pandemic Discord was 99.5% for gaming. Initially it was mostly for voice in gaming (main reason it's push-to-talk rather than mute/unmute) but then caught on as gamer chat rooms as well.
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Teams major problem is it knows the bullet points to hit and once they have sales presentation level checkmark, mission is accomplished.
Search is useless, scrolling is tortuously slow, remote control is glitchy and limited, it really hates trying to let you full screen shared content and is just generally a touch frustrating in every feature it advertises. To anyone that wants to have API interaction with it... holy hell you are in for some gnarly ugly stuff. However, it's enough to be advertised, and 'incl
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You forgot the bugs. Oh so many bugs, to the points that it can be utterly unusable sometimes.
Re:More Bullshit! (Score:4, Insightful)
More than a chat app... I remember installing Teams on my laptop a few months ago. After signing in with my work account, it asked me something along the lines of,
"Would you like your employer to take full control of your computer, or only Teams?"
Needless to say, this is quite a jarring question when you're just trying to install an IM client.
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Well, they did say it was jut the "best parts of Teams", which I believe is the "x" button that closes the application.
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Teams can't even get the most basic stuff right. When new messages come in, it doesn't scroll down so you can read them. Notifications are hit and miss. The last thing it need is more broken features.
Discord is nothing like Facebook or social media. You don't have followers, you don't have a feed. It's like IRC but with GIFs.
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I do understand that Facebook is for posting things and that Discord is for chatting.
My argument still stands. Too much of Discord is locked behind Discord. Same with Facebook. It is not IRC with Chat. It just behaves like that. If it was, like I said earlier, I would have my pick of software and clients.
Followers I don't recall. I do remember a feed thou.
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Hmm, I still don't really see it. Facebook's business model is to harvest all your personal data and laser target ads at you. Discord does have paid features but I didn't see any ads, although that could be my ad blocker. They don't need your real name or put web bugs on other sites either.
It's basically like IRC. There are lots of "servers", although they all run in Discord's cloud. Anyone can make one, and then in those servers there are channels. It's mostly text chat but there is voice and video if you
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This all reeks of them wanting you in their special box for control and tracking. Just like Facebook. Just like Apple. Just like Google. Just like Microsoft.
Sure, people like them now. They are the newest kid on the block. People
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Because Discord doesn't want spammers or people who were previously banned on their platform, and a phone number and email address is one of the simplest ways to do that. Of course you can get another phone number, but it starts getting expensive when they keep blacklisting your number.
As for why you can't install it yourself, because that's their product.
I guess they are "like Facebook" in the sense that they are a business that needs to make money to continue operating... Perhaps you rail against florists
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We are arguing over definitions now, but to me the concept of social media involves two key elements:
1. A network of friends and acquaintances.
2. A feed of new posts.
Users on Discord don't establish the kinds of formal networks that you get on social media sites via the follower/friend structure. They might be on the same server, in the same channel, even DM each other, but it's more like IRC or a forum where interaction is driven by the topic, not by who you are acquainted with.
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I actually started using Bing on a daily basis to earn reward points, which I then donate to charity. Been doing it for years and have come to realize that Bing is every bit as good as Google and even better in some ways (like image searching and built-in widgets). I used to run the same query on Google when Bing wouldn't return desired results, but every time I did, I would get the same results on Google, so I stopped that practice a long time ago.
I am also a fan of Teams (in the office). It's a lot better
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Hah, you can say that about most Microsoft products - "at least it's not as putrid as that stillborn spawn of Satan, Sharepoint." I am utterly baffled why enterprises still voluntarily use Sharepoint. My guess is all those MS Certificate courses secretly brainwash all the IT personnel in the world to make Microsoft mandatory as soon as they get any real power in a job.
Overall though, Teams is just like so many Microsoft products - mediocre, buggy, and always in third place or lower in usefulness compared
Let's see (Score:1)
Normally MS would force feed their products since they're already in almost every offic, or they'd use the line: "well this one's free since you're purchasing windows 14 oem sr x license for 2 years". Now how they'd force gamers and whatnot to teams is something we'll see. I guess they'll play the "you're already using this at your office why don't you switch to it" game.
Beware: This post might intended and unintended puns.
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Microsoft is already crushing Slack and Zoom by bundling Teams for "free" with Office 365.
I guess that the next tools to go after will be Twitch and Discord by bundling it for "free" with the Xbox.
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All Salesforce (Slack) needs to do is complain to the EU and they'll start fining MSFT for its dominant position in teamware.
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They tried hard to put out a Twitch alternative with Mixer, even paying some big name streamers to join but it didn't work out
Why not just by Discord then? (Score:2)
Rather than trying to create something that they know nothing about, why not just buy Discord? Teams is a pile of shit, and piling more shit onto it doesn't suddenly make it gold.
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Didn't they try that? There were rumors that they were trying to buy Discord a while back.
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Only reason it gets used (Score:5, Informative)
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This is correct. Microsoft is using the same tactics that oracle and IBM used for ages. Next they'll just ramp up the fees and your organisation will switch to something else.
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This is correct. Microsoft is using the same tactics that oracle and IBM used for ages. Next they'll just ramp up the fees and your organisation will switch to something else.
My work (large O365 site) recently announced that people who didn't send enough emails didn't need the full version, so would be reduced to the online only licence.
That was done to save money, as MSFT presumably had already ramped up the price.
(The signs were there. In the past, there was the Home User Program, where you could buy a copy of MS Office for about 90% off the retail price, or about the same as a cost per seat corporate licence. A couple of years ago, that 90% off the purchase was changed to "30
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"We don't mind paying through the nose to an asshole vendor, as long as the company ticks over."
"Oh noes, they upped pricing, now we gotta save!"
A little foresight and planning would have gotten the company out of this.
I would consider it a sport to run the company entirely on FOSS and given enough "seats", my salary would yield a better experience for less overall cost. But that's payroll (bad), not opex (droolworthy good).
And as to all the other companies assuming? Put "open standards" in the Ts&C
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You don't have to pay for it anymore, but you need to login every 30? days with your corporate account to keep the product activated.
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Once his organization puts all its potatoes into MS, they won't be able to move to anyone else. The bean counters will see to that. If not the raw dollars and cents, they'll just argue it is cheaper to only support one vendor. After that argument fails due to MS raising their fees, they'll say they cannot move because of lock in, i.e., it will be that they estimate the cost of redoing anything in non-MS malware is too high, that way they can shovel in all sorts of ancillary costs to make it seem more prohib
Why would any consumer use Teams? (Score:2)
Everyone who has used Teams, Slack, and Discord, knows Discord is pretty light on system resources and far more responsive than Teams or Slack. It takes about 15 seconds for a chat window to open in Teams and every message is delivered at a snail's pace. Slack is much more responsive and has an okay API but still pretty laggy (although Salesforce is working really hard to ruin the Slack API). Discord, on the other hand, is basically instantaneous and responsive even in the web browser and the Discord API
Sorry, I don't understand... (Score:2)
..."the best parts of Teams"?...
No, sorry. There are no best parts of Teams. As the great Dorothy Parker would have put it, Teams should not be tossed lightly aside, it should be thrown with great force.
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Or not. Fact-checked myself. Oh well... https://quoteinvestigator.com/... [quoteinvestigator.com]
What it needs is a free Slack license (Score:2)
Including a free Slack license would be much better.
So much FUD... So little FACT (Score:1)