Nobody is forcing me to use Office or Teams, but I’m stuck with a single ISP.
Why won’t regulators even LOOK at the ISP oligopoly? For fucks sake.
Turn it into a utility. Having an Internet connection is arguably more important than a phone line ever was and is up there with electricity.
It’s a utility. Treat it like one.
I only have one option for most utilities. I don’t get to choose which private power company I use and I certainly don’t get to choose from an array of options for how that electricity is generated.
Making the internet a utility is good, but that won’t make it less of an oligopoly.
Here in NL they have a decent system if you ask me. Infrastructure for power is owned by TenneT, a semi-government organisation. Then power is supplied by private companies, from whom you can choose any one you want (aka the cheapest/greenest one, depending on your wishes). They then supply power to the national grid, so you’re technically using power from all companies, but paying your share to the one you have a contract with.
My only power option announced they are raising rates every year for the next few years. Yay for capitalism I guess.
Because you probably do have at least two options for ISPs, it’s just that one option is DSL and lawmakers still struggle with understanding color television.
Yes you can get dial-up, DSL, cell network data, or even satellite! These services are clearly equivalent to cable or fiber in the ISP marketplace.
My ISP overlords added fiber to my neighborhood and have stopped allowing DSL signups. Well they also didn’t replace the copper in my yard (fiber is only available across the street and I’ve spent 3 years trying to get AT&T to come across to my side). So my options are cable, or cable, or T-Mobile hotspot (it would be against their TOS though).
Because the unbundling is happening due to EU intervention and the ISP oligopoly is in the US, and not within the jurisdiction of the EU.
Said oligopoly has those wittle reguwators on a string
The company says Office 365 suites with Teams will no longer be sold to new business subscribers, but will continue to be available for existing customers that opt to continue using the bundled products, even upon renewal.
So if your company already has 365 that includes teams, as long as it renews 365 there’s no additional/separate cost for Teams?
Yeah they’ve rolled it out to everyone, got a defacto monopoly and now they’re increasing the rates for new customers.
This is just capitalism 101 while pretending it’s for the regulators.
Perhaps, but my concern is investing time and energy helping customers learn a system and that system becoming financially unsustainable. I welcome change, but my customers don’t. Hearing that it’s only for new customers is a relief.
This is a big deal for me. I’ve got a MS account for Azure but I use Google suite for email etc. I can’t sign into teams at all with the account that matches my email address because it’s not a 365 account. I end up looking very unprofessional struggling to log into a Teams meeting hosted by a prospective client.
Do not worry, everyone that uses Teams on a daily basis knows the most professional action is to defenestrate the machine running it.
Will this change help your situation?
Just to the extent that I’ll be able to log in to Teams with my account the same way others can log into Zoom. Because I’m usually already logged into my Microsoft account in my browser I generally have problems.
I can understand that.
Seems weird to be honest. I would agree on removing personal Teams from new Windows installations, but if you are locked in Microsoft 365 environment it is very unlikely you will not use Teams due to how well it integrates with whole ecosystem.
It’s almost as asking to unbundle Outlook because Thunderbird exists.
It doesn’t really integrate that well, but it’s included with most enterprise licenses so what company is going to pay for another option when they get it for “free”.
It integrates very well, and gets better over time. You don’t need Outlook Calendar anymore, the OneDrive portion makes more sense than the actual website it’s pulling from, and the new Planner app is actually decent compared to the old one that was buggy af inside of Teams.
Maybe a solution like on Android where users are given a choice of a few app on first setup?
Would be nice for new OS install, including default browser choice and maybe even cloud storage.
What other client choices are out there that let you directly access SharePoint files or Microsoft Planner directly in a team chat?
Probably none because it is a closed ecosystem.
It was a rhetorical question because you were suggesting a choice should be offered.
Stop trying to make Teams happen. It isn’t going to happen.
There’s already way better solutions out there, and Microsoft keeps making their dogshit service even worse.
Decoupling it like this is the first step to it being wound down and then shut down.
as a consumer product, yeah. but teams is ubiquitous in business and govt.
You’d think businesses wouldn’t want to give all their communications to… a bigger business, especially one currently invested in AI training.
It would be like a company doing mapping/GIS stuff using Gmail for communications. You’re just handing your data over to your largest competitor. It’s fucking stupid.
When you’re an enterprise client paying serious money for the service, there are often data protection requirements. They have the capability to support things like export controlled information or HIPAA compliance in office, and appropriate legal agreements ensuring data protection. It’s the power of collective bargaining (they are buying 100s++ licenses instead of just one).
Exactly. If it’s a regulated industry, they’re not just paying for Teams. They’re paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I’m not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it’s a fraction of the available options.
It’s probably more than 100s. One of my Slack orgs has over 300 paid users and Slack barely considers us midsize.
Yeah that’s why I added the ++, the last org I was in had >10k users.
Facebook violates HIPPA (The Guardian 2023)
Really though, what happens when a company gets so greedy they that they even think they can get away with something has probably the most predictable outcome
Facebook is usually not used by businesses which expect it to be in compliance with compex healthcare regulations, the law is spelled HIPAA, and that article is about the UK, which doesn’t have that law.
You’ve clearly not worked in enterprise recently. Everything is about the Cloud, AI, and reducing Opex spending currently.
They already did before this. MS-hosted Office 365 is running the vast majority of worldwide corporate email and hosts a significant amount of corporate files on business OneDrive/SharePoint. I’ll never understand why companies bought into ‘the cloud’ so easily.
For most these things, it is far cheaper to simply use some sort of SaaS than to actually set things up in house. There’s probably plenty of times where it’d in theory be cheaper in the long term, but most businesses are going to see the short term savings as extra capital to try to expand.
In my size of company, it’s simple. I simply don’t want the overhead of running an email system. It’s not just running a server, it’s running a server farm for HA, dealing with domain blacklisting, retention systems, storage and firewalling to name a few.
It already has happened. All companies I work with use teams now. Despite better solutions. Teams sucks, but I came for free… It worked…
Completely. Teams is EVERYWHERE in post-start-up businesses.
I wish. My company and my wife’s company use teams, and we fucking hate it.
Why is it so bad tho?
It’s buggy, the call quality is shit, and it lacks some major Slack and Zoom features.
Specifically, channels, organizing / grouping chats, threads, etc. Not having that hurts.
That said, it does archive video chats in a thread that people can comment on. That’s cool. But that’s the only cool thing Teams does.
Fuck slack though.
I hated the channel organisation, I would always click off a channel where I needed to respond to try and find other information, and then I’d never be able to find the channel I was responding to. Chronological sorting channels at least means I have a chance of finding where I was.
Also fuck their terrible reply options. I generally just wanted to acknowledge that I was responding to a message, I didn’t want to spin up some weird thread.
Basically, I hate everything, and don’t want to talk to anyone.
Complaining about Slack is like complaining about Jira. Jira sucks, and I hate it, but every time I get forced to try the alternatives, I’m even grumpier.
Are you aware that slack has a back button? Makes getting back to that original channel a breeze. Even works with thumb buttons on my mouse like pretty much every browser.
Or ctrl + k and you can just type part of the channel name/person name etc to quickly go back to it.
Also just a emote to acknowledge a message without spinning up a thread is my go to. Just a 👍”yep I see this”
I changed companies and we all use teams now.
But none of that stuff helped when I did use it.
The problem was I was in AWS and needed to be subscribed to hundreds of channels. So when I needed to find something, I’d have to click through maybe 20 different channels all with similar names to find it. At that point the back button is useless.
Thumbs up is good for telling a person you’ve seen something. It doesn’t help the rest of the team know this, unless they like to go back and read old messages.
I mean the real take home message is “don’t work for Aws”. Slack just made some of the dysfunction worse, it didn’t create it.
It is, in my experience, one of the better video call solutions out there. What do you think works better for calls?
Zoom. The video, audio, and stability are all much much better than Teams.
I did not have that experience. Additionally, the ux is so much worse
I do a lot of interviewing and often encounter moments where we jump from Team to Zoom, or vice versa, and everyone gets a side by side of call quality. This usually happens when a candidate hasn’t used one of the products before and they are struggling to enable screen sharing permissions, so instead of wasting time, I jump us to the other product.
Everyone always makes an unprompted comment about how much worse Team’s quality is. It’s really noticeable when you put them side by side. Feels like placing an old CRT TV next to an OLED.
Services like what exactly?
Yeah, everyone always seems to bash Teams, but I haven’t worked with anything that is as good out of the box as teams. I’m no M$oft fan, but besides the first year or two of rollout it’s been just as good if not better than Slack. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that Salesforce (a potentially worse company) owns Slack.
I don’t believe that there are solutions that are as complete as team, for video and voice calls it’s among the best.
But it’s so bad for text ! Why do I have to wait for a second when I change channels ? Why does it not support markdown (the partial implementation that it has is arguably worse than no implementation at all) ? Why is the search so bad ?
Why can’t I make a thread? Why can I only use one emote? Why can I sometimes see a message on my phone but not on the computer? Why is there an “old” and a “new” teams app? Why does each one constantly ask me to use the other one? Why are there god damn Mabalene video filters, but yet my god damn calendar won’t sync properly with outlook. Why when I update my picture, does 1/3 of my team see the new one, 1/3 sees the old one, and 1/3 just sees my initials. I’d continue but my thumbs are tired.
Teams actively makes communicating with my team more difficult and I hope it dies so soon.
[email protected] is a good place to go for stories like this.
Linux mint still going fresh as every day.
And is dogshit in a business environment.
As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990. I wrote my first Fortran program on a Sperry Rand Univac (punched cards) in about 1985. Cobol was immediately after Fortran (wish I’d stuck with Cobol).
I run a Mint laptop. Power management is a joke. Configured it as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead. Windows would never do this, unless you went out of your way to config power management to kill the battery.
There no way even possible via the GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions.
There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people.
Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? In the 21st century?
Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t say “save creds”? Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. Smh.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s of a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
Also, not sure what Linux has to do with Teams.
Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. No, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people.
Am I missing something or isn’t it exactly the same thing in libre office ?
well kinda feel sorry for ya that your job requires excel or any of that office trash. Obviously doesnt work out for you then.
I run mint for some years on desktop and about a year on laptop now. I dont have any issues on either and it just feels good booting into them. I never once had the urge or need to go back to windows. And i think this is true for many people.
And the terminal is just sth thats at its core. If you dont want to learn it then a system like that isnt for you. In all reality, if one learns its, it is much easier than using three different windows setting interfaces with bloat popping up everywhere. Installing software in linux easy. In windows navigate through twenty ads or visit a poor store.
Or windows having a mix of consoles/powershells and more shit nowadays with different command namings. In Linux. Its just sinple terminal. Not to mention command prompt and its siblings taking four+ seconds to open on a new decent windows pc. Wtf?
imo windows bloat makes it unusable. The skill required to learn terminal basics is far smaller than learning all that windows shit.
Office is shit in many ways, but unfortunately there’s nothing that truly competes with it. Not even LibreOffice comes close.
well kinda feel sorry for ya that your job requires excel or any of that office trash.
You mean like hundreds of millions of other jobs the world over?
Microsoft wouldn’t spend money on continuing to develop Office enterprise editions if it didn’t make them a whole lot more than they spend.
naw. You mean all the secretaries would loose their office job
Sure… hundreds of millions of them.
But I’m sure they’ll be able to feed their kids with Linux.
Linux as a whole is fresh asf.
