There is value in being in an Excel spreadsheet, sending a link to someone on Teams, everyone in the channel opens it and you're all collaboratively live-editing the same spreadsheet, some using desktop Excel and some using web Excel, and you add a comment to a cell and @coworker in it, and something inside Office Cloud emails them a notification.
Quietly, Microsoft have turned a world where EditPad was a hot new thing, to a world where a few people could open the same OneNote notebook if it was on a local fileshare, to a world where Office365 is all of your company sitting inside a collaborative cloud-based Microsoft Office environment where everything is connected to everything and you can embed any kind of Office program into Teams channels, access all of them over the web, notify coworkers through the Graph, sync files through OneDrive, search accross all your employer's data with AD based permissions, and do similar with other companies using Microsoft tools, and it's all pluggable with things from Adobe and Trello and whomever, and you hardly have to set anything up for it, no web servers, no database schemas, no daemons, etc.
And it's completely passed the Linux world by. Head-in-the-sand "nothing has changed in computing in decades I can edit text files any way I like" obliviousness that there's any other world out there.
Teams is horrible software, sluggish, buggy, RAM hungry, and yet it could be the greatest strategic success of Microsoft for the 2020-2030 decade. Much more impactful than Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022. It's more immediate than Outlook email, simpler than any VoIP phone system, easier to search than any network fileshare, simpler to setup than Exchange, and yeah you're doing the "no wifi less space than a Nomad, lame" response because "chat programs existed before", and you're wrong to do that, it's more easily remotely usable than any VPN client, pluggable, connectable, bot-scriptable - and right there in every company that uses Office365 unlike (Slack, Discord, Zoom, et al). It's what they tried for with Skype and Lync and LiveMesh and SharePoint 2007 all merged together and they've done it this time and that should make you pay attention. Any ordinary employee who can use Microsoft stuff can use it, it doesn't need an Org Mode tutorial or a `git init` or an email from IT telling you which server address to put in which settings dialog, or a signoff to buy from yet another SaaS vendor.
Outlook will let you make a new Teams meeting from the same place you make a new email. When you write the recipient's emails in the To field, LinkedIn profiles appear for the names you hover over. There were no Zoom plugins, no LinkedIn plugins to install. I don't like it, business people love it. Office quietly gained the ability to search text in pictures, and handwriting. And it is cheap with a lower case c, Office, all of it, desktop and web, and cloud file store, and integrated services, for the price you might pay for a Zoom or a Dropbox or a 3rd party single-purpose cloud service license.
It's not exciting, it's not going to convince anyone who hates Microsoft to switch, it's not great quality software, but Microsoft have not been resting on their laurels; they have been cementing their place in the heart of business IT, putting down roots, and building things people want. It used to be the case that if you wanted Microsoft Excel, other things were polished but nothing else was quite the same. Now it's more likely the case that if you buy from a competitor you get a pile of janky sluggish cloud awfulness just the same, but from another vendor and it's more expensive and less interoperable. Now to make a good all-purpose Excel competitor it needs Windows and Mac and iOS and Web versions and cloud file storage service and good integration and start from $0 for personal use.
"Microsoft doesn't know what they're doing" is not the right response.
Yeah, I can't stand the Teams client experience, in spite of them nailing the threading model--it's just horribly sluggish--but it nails the "it just works". And for large organizations where the majority of folks don't notice 500ms response times in the UI, it's everything they need. And at PAYGo rates, and at uptimes your IT department can only dream of achieving (yes, there's downtime, but at some point it's unavoidable).
"Productivity" is at Microsoft's core here, and for the large majority case, they're nailing it.
Quietly, Microsoft have turned a world where EditPad was a hot new thing, to a world where a few people could open the same OneNote notebook if it was on a local fileshare, to a world where Office365 is all of your company sitting inside a collaborative cloud-based Microsoft Office environment where everything is connected to everything and you can embed any kind of Office program into Teams channels, access all of them over the web, notify coworkers through the Graph, sync files through OneDrive, search accross all your employer's data with AD based permissions, and do similar with other companies using Microsoft tools, and it's all pluggable with things from Adobe and Trello and whomever, and you hardly have to set anything up for it, no web servers, no database schemas, no daemons, etc.
And it's completely passed the Linux world by. Head-in-the-sand "nothing has changed in computing in decades I can edit text files any way I like" obliviousness that there's any other world out there.
Teams is horrible software, sluggish, buggy, RAM hungry, and yet it could be the greatest strategic success of Microsoft for the 2020-2030 decade. Much more impactful than Windows 11 or Windows Server 2022. It's more immediate than Outlook email, simpler than any VoIP phone system, easier to search than any network fileshare, simpler to setup than Exchange, and yeah you're doing the "no wifi less space than a Nomad, lame" response because "chat programs existed before", and you're wrong to do that, it's more easily remotely usable than any VPN client, pluggable, connectable, bot-scriptable - and right there in every company that uses Office365 unlike (Slack, Discord, Zoom, et al). It's what they tried for with Skype and Lync and LiveMesh and SharePoint 2007 all merged together and they've done it this time and that should make you pay attention. Any ordinary employee who can use Microsoft stuff can use it, it doesn't need an Org Mode tutorial or a `git init` or an email from IT telling you which server address to put in which settings dialog, or a signoff to buy from yet another SaaS vendor.
Outlook will let you make a new Teams meeting from the same place you make a new email. When you write the recipient's emails in the To field, LinkedIn profiles appear for the names you hover over. There were no Zoom plugins, no LinkedIn plugins to install. I don't like it, business people love it. Office quietly gained the ability to search text in pictures, and handwriting. And it is cheap with a lower case c, Office, all of it, desktop and web, and cloud file store, and integrated services, for the price you might pay for a Zoom or a Dropbox or a 3rd party single-purpose cloud service license.
It's not exciting, it's not going to convince anyone who hates Microsoft to switch, it's not great quality software, but Microsoft have not been resting on their laurels; they have been cementing their place in the heart of business IT, putting down roots, and building things people want. It used to be the case that if you wanted Microsoft Excel, other things were polished but nothing else was quite the same. Now it's more likely the case that if you buy from a competitor you get a pile of janky sluggish cloud awfulness just the same, but from another vendor and it's more expensive and less interoperable. Now to make a good all-purpose Excel competitor it needs Windows and Mac and iOS and Web versions and cloud file storage service and good integration and start from $0 for personal use.
"Microsoft doesn't know what they're doing" is not the right response.