VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong

The bigger issue is, if you're refusing to honour a contract as a vendor, not only do you risk a lawsuit like this one. But more importantly, who is ever going to sign up for another contract with you? You just proved it isn't worth the paper it's written on.

Unwritten terms like "valid until I decide to tear it up haha lol" are not generally appreciated by companies that depend on your stuff for their business. Of course you can extort your existing customers until they manage to move away but basically in the longer term you're suiciding your entire business.

So switch to openstack or kubernetes (with kubevirt if you want VMs). Open source. Way more beautiful design.

With Kubernetes, actually fast storage if you need it. Can scale up to AI demands if you need it.

Or proxmox or the like if you're small enough.

that doesn’t seem to be an issue in this case, since it’s exactly what everyone expects Broadcom to do in any given situation. their victims/customers are people stuck on the platform from before Broadcom bought it.

It feels like that's the direction most people are going in, but that doesn't change the fact that no one is going to trust Broadcom again after this.

This.

I had to tell CurrentCo that I cannot reinstall their vSphere deployment at a client site because they bought a perpetual license, didn’t migrate it to Broadcom before they cut it off, and now we cannot simply go get the latest patch or appliance for that version number without inviting an audit and a sueball from Broadcom.

“Good thing Microsoft would never do that to us.”

Ha. Hahaha.

My beef with K8s (and to be clear, it’s the leanest cut of beef from the deli - so not much substance to it) is that unless you pay someone else to manage the Control Plane for you, you’re not only going to need to upskill your workers on K8s itself but also administering the components of the Control Plane, like HA, etcd, storage, network plane, etc.

Compared to standing up literally any Linux distro and KVM, K8s remains an overly complex PITA to get off the ground and integrated into an org on the cheap/free. In that area, it handily loses to even Microsoft Hyper-V in the “just get us going” category of business adoption/velocity.

I’d really, really like to see K8s more streamlined for initial deployment than it is. It’s getting better, but I generally still have to grudgingly recommend a premium, managed control plane for any serious deployment.

Isn't their whole strategy that they want to squeeze the customers they got by the balls?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpE_xMRiCLE

Mostly they seem committed to drop smaller customers and pursue very lucrative deals with large companies only. But to do that they should be valuing those relationships with the big customers, and they clearly aren't doing that either.

At least VMware isn't user-facing and it can be removed without riots. Imagine trying to tell someone they don't need Excel. I try to maintain at least plausible flexibility to go tell vendors to shove it, but if you have some enthusiastic fans of Microsoft Teams (they exist, who knew?)... Teams is one of those things that is inescapably tied to an incredibly deep well of platform lock-in.

Ops person here, VMware is so embedded at these companies that switching away would be like Google saying, no more gRPC, everything is now SOAP. The amount of impacts is just too mind boggling to even consider.

2 companies ago was heavily invested in VMware. It impacted monitoring, backups, deployments, networking, cloud migration and more. I can only shudder at level of effort they might be going through to get off VMware.

Because of that, they probably won’t for years even as Broadcom screws them over.

Pretty sure in Tesco's case switching to openstack is a decade long project.

The bias with technical people is thinking every problem is technical

VMWare may have hiked the prices and might be an important dependency but at a certain point it is cheaper to sue and/or switch from them.

Seems that they have gone way past this point

Really? Teams?? We went teams abd microsoft ecosystem fully because we needed extra windows management stuff as we have grown and users had software that required windows and excel and the biggest pain point has been teams. As near as i can tell it tries to do everythibg wrong and the things that are so blindingly obvious that it can't do them wrong, it finds a way to do them suboptimally

I would never invent a lie as implausible as this. Yes, there are fans of Microsoft Teams. They're out there and they make decisions.

I... I like Teams...

So, in the spirit of intellectual curiousity, and I will avoid making any judgements in any of my responses, I have 5 questions:

1) Have you ever been exposed to alternative communicators?

2) What features do you enjoy about teams

3) What platform are you using it from (Windows Desktop / Laptop? What spec)

4) Have you ever written a bot or integration?

5) Can you take me through a very brief working day for you, with a focus on collaborating with others.. (file sharing, online chats, IRL chats, meetings?)

Switching away today is too mind boggling to consider, but switching is purely a technical problem. We can put a price on the costs, and the time. VMWare was founded in 1998 - that means 27 year ago nobody was using it, and in turn we can say took you less than 27 years to get dependent on and - surely you can switch to something else in 27 years. More likely you can switch in 2 years - that is about what it took one company I know of.

After this? Many people didn't trust Broadcom even before they bought vmware. This isn't something new on Boardcoms part, though it is high visibility and so people not even aware of Broadcom before are now.

I think they can do it in 5 years with some investment. Which is how long they need Broadcom to honor the current contract. The effort is mostly technical, and much of it you can just hire contractors to help.

I'll give my own interpretation. Not that I love Teams, but the alternative in a dinosaur corporation is basically email.

1) WebEx and the open source chat that Oracle appropriated. Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

The only way you could be a fan of teams is if you've only ever had to use stuff like cisco connect or lotus notes chat. It really is just terrible. Teams on my window laptop makes the fan go more than running a pretty massive compute cluster, its crazy how non performant it is.

I’ve got users rioting over the fact that we might remove Mattermost and move them to Skype/Teams. Note that I am in airgap and can’t use Slack. I am looking at Rocket.Chat though since MM is $$$$$!

For small on-prem shops that don't really want to learn about running k8s, and have under a few dozen nodes, there are definitely slim options, like Talos is basically boot to k8s, and for single app level, there's things like multi-node k0s. Tech like this means you can reduce the control plane labor and focus on the workload.

https://www.talos.dev

https://docs.k0sproject.io/v0.11.0/k0s-multi-node

You didn't really say much of what does it do wrong or right, you seem to just try to convey a for-granted idea.

I've been an msft employee for a couple of years and teams... Was ok. I prefer slack, but meetings, video, messaging, formatting, etc. was just fine in teams.

> 1) WebEx and the open source chat that Oracle appropriated. Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

Ok, then I can see why Teams ranks among them. I would invite you to try something like Zulip or Mattermost but I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

> 2) Searching the Exchange corporate directory. BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Appreciate the list, the only one of these that's Teams specific is searching a corp directory. Do you use the "Teams" functionality, or do you use the chat exclusively?

> 3) Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes, it's very slow. It's also very slow from laptops, the best "Teams experience" I've ever seen has been in GameDev where we all ran Windows 7 on dodecacore CPUs with 128-256G of DDR4.

It was still slower than Slack on my macbook air though.

> 4) Ha! Imagine the nightmares for the person linking Atlassian and Teams.

Yeah, people do. People also use Excel from within Teams.

Writing bots for Teams is a special nightmare, but webhooks can work.

> 5) Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Do you spend a lot of your day face-to-face or more of your day in Teams?

Do you find yourself arranging meetings to sync rather than using the chat functionality?

Do you find that people have to ask around a lot to get an answer and then ask again later when it's forgotten, or can they find their answer in history?

> 3) Can you even run Teams from Apple

Unfortunately. Teams is just as performant on MacOS/iOS as it is on Windows.

... Google did say "No more Oracle EBS" and switched entirely to SAP. It took multiple years, and it was not a small effort, but there was the will, and a way was found.

AI-assisted migration of glue boilerplate code transforms this mind-boggling amount of impact into a two-year project, max.

Is native Teams on Linux still a thing? I had it installed but the package disappeared from the MS repository. I currently use the web version.

Word for word my experience with operating k8s.

Sure but old company cut Ops team to the bone, which is why I don’t work there anymore. So CTO is faced with, pay VMware or cut back on deployments so Ops team can have some breathing room to work on migration to whatever they pick.

The bigger issue is the lawyers get the money so go back to school as a lawyer and choose better parents.

sigh I didn’t work at FAANG type, we don’t hire FAANG skill level. Whatever Google did is completely irrelevant to this conversation and most other conversations.

Quite right, it seems that Teams for Linux is discontinued.

Guess this means I wont' get to run Teams in the company I'm joining, which is doing all its security attestation via Microsoft;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32678839

> someone they don't need Excel

well I have news for you ;=)

I pity the people who have to deliver news like that from time to time.

Someone patiently explained and introduced the "Teams" feature of "Teams" to me. It's easy to ignore. Here's a tough one: ever used a Microsoft Loop component?

My preference is text chat but we do a lot of unscheduled voice chats when screen-sharing is involved. In-person meetings are nice when possible, it's been easy enough to connect a Teams meeting from a conference room phone.

Before Teams I set up a Mattermost instance, and I think RocketChat integrated to GitLab? Nobody used those. As we all know the value in these things comes from network effects; with Teams corporate IT can set Teams as a startup app by Domain policy, now everyone in your company has to be online. That's the real killer feature.

As someone who only knows Broadcom's silicon business: there, they're just used to people having no other choice, with their quasi monopoly in some fields. Are they (mistakenly) transferring that attitude to VMware?

Talos is on my shortlist but its core “grease” features remain locked behind a (reasonable, but still existent) subscription, which throws it into “premium management layer” territory for me and my odd slide deck for executives. The narrative for the past fifteen years has consistently been “we have no money for what we need because we spent it all on what Gartner suggested and a consultant told us we should have”, which means we’re constantly having to not only do more with less, but also rely heavily on “pre-greased” products like hypervisors.

I don’t like it, but that’s how the current technology environment is unfortunately setup.

God help the enterprise software segment if customers realize 90% of their needs are served perfectly well with KVM+QEMU and VMs.

You don't need Excel. Have not used it in over 10 years.

Teams, that application IT is forcing me to use because they are a "Microsoft" house. Same application currently stating I'm on the _Calendar_ screen on the Task bar but actually in the _Chat_ screen; _Calendar_ bloatware feature and others have been removed and will always. Even when _Microsoft_ screws the user and force a reinstall of features after a Teams update.

Microsoft is a trillion dollar company that rejects quality user experience, QA, and is great at producing crap-ware. There is not a single product sell that I will spend a penny on. Still waiting on that 7+ year request to destroy | delete dangling pull request in Azure.

To be clear: I like K8s! It’s fun to be able to write some YAML, apply it, and be done!

But the sheer work of getting to that point, safely and securely? It ruins the experience for me, personally.

Only to the extent that the team is competent enough to properly test all that boilerplate code, which is very far from a given. A relative of mine in IT has had a large internal-tooling migration get dragged on for years by the persistently bug-ridden code of one of the groups working on it.

Teams is a React App. Teams classic uses Electron - so perf was identical. The New Teams uses native platform web-view, so mileage may slightly vary. Still a React App, though. sighs.

There is a PWA you can install, with it's own icon and everything. Yes, it's a not-even-glorified-web-browser, but meh, it works (for some definition of works).

Yeah, I’ve seen this play out before in a past role when we were dealing with a smaller SaaS vendor who suddenly decided to “reinterpret” our agreement. They didn’t outright tear up the contract, but they quietly shifted what features were included in our plan and suddenly started putting core functionality behind a new “premium” tier. Technically they argued that they were within their rights, but for us as customers it felt like a bait-and-switch. It created this immediate sense of distrust — not just with the product, but with the entire company. Even though we depended on them at the time, we started actively looking for alternatives, because who wants to be stuck building a business on top of a service that can just change the rules on a whim?

The web version runs fine in a chromium based browser.

Teams works better in a browser window in Linux where if it hogs too much CPU Cromium pulls the plug.

That's how I run it.

> You don't need Excel

This is the kind of thing that gets tech people a bad reputation. YOU don't need Excel. I don't need excel - but that guy? You have no idea what he needs and if the people he's supporting need (or just want) Excel to get their jobs done it is incredibly arrogant to tell him what he does or doesn't need.

Now, I've loathed Microsoft since the 90s, but that makes me a weird and special little petal - it doesn't count for squat in business.

These days it is really hard to figure out if comments like these are real or satire.

What would you like setup to look like?

Would there be real interest in a kubernetes distro that takes IPs and a (set of) domain names, and boots up on N nodes, installing letsencrypt, so that you can do a deployment and have ingress actually working?

The AI can’t migrate the knowledge of all the people that have to operate your on-prem VM deployments.

It also refuses to run well in non-Chromium-based browsers.

Yet more vendor lock-in.

Yes.

Our 5 year ELA for vmware went from 1.5M USD to 12M USD. Higher ed.

Our Hyper-V environment is coming online this month. It was already included with our ELA with Microsoft so we were able to splash out a bit for some higher tier support.

> Fortunately Zoom came and went too quickly.

I've used both Teams and Zoom (and others). Honestly, I'd rather use Zoom instead of Teams.

> BASIC features: status, embedding pictures, attaching files that Outlook would block. Sharing links that aren't obfuscated.

Status is settable by just about any competitor to Teams. Slack and Zoom both can set your current status.

Embedding pictures and files is also not unique to Teams.

Obfuscated links? Just a matter of time before Microsoft changes that to some microsoft link for a "vulnerability scanner" and then charges the company for the privilege to block random things it doesn't understand how to scan.

> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

Yes / technically yes (not supported any more)

> Group texts, file shares, voice calls, recorded meetings. Meetings with groups from other companies is almost painless.

Slack and Zoom are better at all of these.

i agree. teams is "ok", for my purposes at least. don't really understand the hate it gets in certain forums

Teams is fine, especially as others are so expensive for small non-US shops

We already have to bite the bullet and pay for office, at least we get free chat

I wish Teams integrated better with Github Issues/PR, but it works well as a company-wide chat

No, Teams is not fine.

If cost is your concern: SaaS Zulip is free.

> who is ever going to sign up for another contract with [VMware]?

Oh geez I dunno, surely now it's over for them

Right, and even "that guy" might not need Excel but the second he opens up Libreoffice or Google Sheets and something doesn't work the way he's used to, he will say it's broken. He's not interested in learning how LibreOffice or Google does it, he's just trying to close a $5m deal. And he's not wrong.

Yeah, it's fine. It's apps in a browser. It basically works. It's as good as anything else I've tried.

In my experience, FAANG are no more skilled than anyone else. The main thing is that they seem to do a better job of not hiring complete duds, so their average cleverness may be higher, but I’ve worked with brilliant people at every regular shop.

What code? An on-prem VMWare deployment is all about hardware, storage, networking, and fuck-tons of planning, budgeting, and approvals. There is little to no customer-written code in a typical VMWare farm, except maybe some Ansible or whatever for minor customizations and automation.

Mistakenly? No, Broadcom was very up-front about their plans to offload small customers and massively upcharge large customers pretty much the same week the purchase was announced. It's stupid, and Broadcom are certainly assholes, but they did give a LOT of advance warning.

Teams brings back a sense of adventure into boring online meetings since you never know what works subtly different than id did last week and who will be made to act the clown due to strange glitches.

Poor mac users.

I agree but complete duds can really drag your team down as you end up spending a ton of time trying to fix their shortcomings and amount of code written on the Ops side to prevent them from completely screwing everything up is mind boggling.

I thought it was “intellectual curiosity” but it turns out it was a segway into insisting with your own preferences and eventually when being contradicted by others with their own needs and preferences, becoming plain insulting. Will leave your words here for reference:

> I think ignorance is bliss and you should avoid knowing about anything that could be better. Your mind might do this for you (rejection) but best not to tempt fate.

There’s nothing intellectual about fake curiosity, passive aggressive remarks, or insistently pushing your opinion just for the sake of sounding smarter than the next guy.

Honestly, these alternatives just don't stack up against Excel. Even setting aside the advanced stuff like complex data analysis and macros that some organizations rely on, Excel is simply more robust and user-friendly. Google Sheets feels like a toy in comparison.

I’m curious, why does higher ed need VMWare? Is it because you have some supercomputers that you want to share among your employees?

I’m asking because for $12m I’d just buy all the employees some high end commodity hardware.

It will be for ordinary administration, employees, students, finance etc.

The academic work (including the supercomputer) will run Linux and open source systems for job scheduling etc.

And a toy is all most users need. BUT (as has been the case with me at various points in my career), some need a lot more.

> Can you even run Teams from Apple / Linux?

I can tell you I've successfully been in Teams video conferences from my Linux desktop, in the browser. I was surprised too.

Something is misconfigured on your machine or you have corporate spyware like Carbon Black driving up processor load.

Theres definitely corpo spyware. Id never use windows on my own machines. Using windows and wsl is just path of least resistance right now.

There is a native Teams package in the AUR which worked well when I had to use it. I assume it will get outdated eventually from lack of MS support. Web works of course.

There's a bunch of annoyances in teams. The text editor is awful if you try to paste/send code for one. The screen sharing is shit by default and only lets one person share at a time for no good reason. It's fairly slow. And it doesn't have a global fucking hot key for push to talk/muting. Despite being integrated with the damn task bar(which is broken if you're on hold in one call and active in another, then it's too stupid to figure out that the mute button is intended to mute my active call, not the one that's on hold...). Also the teams feature gets out of your way, which is an issue if you're trying to use it like you would channels in discord or slack. Would be nice to at least have a notification pip there.

Indeed, or in my case where I don't need Excel, but can't tell someone else they don't. Telling me in this discussion I don't need Excel is very much misreading the conversation.

Perhaps I'm ignorant but why would you NOT have someone else manage the control plane? It's relatively easy to switch providers and there tons of options. It's also pretty cheap.

I havn't looked about but I'd be suprised if there wasn't also a large number of companies providing on prem control plane support.

For homelabs and SMBs, that is definitely an opportunity. Other areas I’d like to see more growth in:

* “No-Code Kubernetes”, that lets staff design basic (or even not-so-basic) deployments using a web-based GUI. We’re seeing more of this from a “understand how things work while they run” perspective, but I haven’t personally come across any “here’s your building blocks and explainers of the environment variables, go build” solutions.

* An “ESXi-ified” K8s. Talos comes so, so close to this, but I’d love something that was as easy to deploy into production as ESXi was on SD cards. Deploy as an appliance on bare metal or as a VM, and voila, Control Plane with an IP schema, network layer, AD CA/ACME support (including Let’s Encrypt), and a basic load balancer/ingress. Changing the setup is as simple as adding a basic text file with the control plane IP and join string (worker nodes), with a simple flag to add it as another control plane node for HA.

* Renewed focus on etcd management ease. A lot of the cert track focuses extensively on etcd management through kubectl, which is an unnecessary abstraction layer for things like backups, failovers, and redundancies in smaller IT departments.

* Automated migrations. The K8s evangelists hype it as being able to manage VMs, which would be great if kube-virt was standard (it’s an add-on). I’d like to see K8s either formally integrate it into the baseline or more distros make it a checkbox option at cluster creation. Part of that should also be support for automatic deployment creations for existing VMs in a hypervisor, by analyzing current settings and suggesting the YAML or JSON to replicate that VM in K8s with appropriate IP address, current storage, and ACLs

From a tech standpoint, the foundations for K8s success have long been polished into a mirror shine. At this point it’s usability and accessibility that remain broadly unaddressed, especially if we want more people and companies using iterative, composable infrastructure.

Zoom FTW, big-time.

Imagine an accounting person telling you: You don't need version control, have not used it in 10 years. This is a _shockingly_ arrogant and ignorant comment and if you actually believe this I fear for any organization in which you have significant power

Why does any of this use VMs? Not familiar with the space at all

I would bite the bullet and begin any switch from Broadcom now on the principle you can never trust the vendor again and you will just be kicking the can down the road.

I find that MS Teams works pretty well if you don't put too many channels in a team, or at least don't use the extra features in the sub-channels. Nothing like having wiki/files spread across multiple channels under a team as opposed to a directory structure.

To me, what I really don't like is that you can present the files and wiki via network file share, but the format of the wiki is read-only in that mode... it would be significantly better as user editable markdown with front-matter. It's some strange quasi-html extensions that you aren't going to be able to really even use.

I don't like that they separated the chat channels out... you now have unread, channels, chats, meeting chats... going between them is now a mess as I'm usually in a combination of meeting chats and 1:1 chats mostly.

While I do appreciate the integration of outlook's calendar, I really don't want meeting notifications for anything more than a couple days out... it can wait until I check my mail.

The real time video chat is okay... I think Zoom and Slack both have lightly better video quality and features though. I don't like Zoom's chat/discussion features nearly as much... I like Slack overall slightly better, but don't think some of the externalized integrations are as good as Teams.

Overall, it's "okay"... I don't love it as I think it's gotten worse over time while Slack is getting better, slowly. I'm not vocal enough to raise hell one way or another for/against it. I've used it on Linux without much issue... so it works well enough.

Uh? IT for higher ed is not that different from any other enterprise IT.

I used to work at a university, although I worked on the Linux/HPC side of things we did have regular contact with the IT department. So things the IT department used VM's for of the top of my head:

- Web servers. Yes, the official university web pages, with fronted servers, database servers and whatnot. But also a lot of departments had their own servers, even some research groups ran their own. To get rid of the zillions of ad-hoc servers running in closets here and there IT gave out VM's pretty freely to staff members.

- Email. Yes, this was before everyone + dog outsourced their email, so they ran their own in-house email servers.

- print servers

- (I think file servers were mostly non-VM appliances, my university used netapp's a lot)

- All kinds of management systems to manage the campus workstations and network. And things like Active Directory and other directory services type services which are critical.

- A zillion in-house applications for things like signing up for courses and other things necessary for handling thousands of students.

- A lot of bespoke systems given out to research groups for whatever purposes they needed, again in order to get rid of the zillion repurposed old pc's running in closets acting as servers or running some experiments etc.

- Critical services and some not-so-critical services as well had test environments to test changes before rolling out to production.

- Finance/admin stuff like payroll etc.

- Shell servers (ssh), RDP servers, VPN servers etc. to enable staff to access university services from outside.

All in all, it was hundreds and hundreds of VM's. Wouldn't surprise me if there were actually thousands.

None of it needs to be on VMs, but it's generally more convenient to manage when it is. You could also use something like Kubernetes, but then you're administering Kubernetes.

Higher Ed is really just Enterprise IT at a giant non-profit, sometimes state funded, sometimes not.

The HPC side of the house actually used VMWare _less_ than the enterprise side. Mostly due to funding restrictions.

There seems to be a "squeeze" phase in several of the software's life. When the organization goes from engineering oriented into sales oriented. Mostly true for those acquired by investors, wanting more money on spending no more. EBITDA and other related matters becoming paramount having no decade long perspectives, not even half in some instances. No long term there. Of course, you have to find the gold mines, those with locked in users.

Check out Harvester: https://harvesterhci.io/

I have never understood how Oracle remains a big company. Seems to me they have this type of reputation and just nobody will ever willingly buy anything from them ever

I was curious about why someone would have a preference, what does Teams serve that alternatives do not.

But you blanket claimed its fine, its not fine.

I won’t work in a company that forces me to use Teams- its a good proxy for how they think about internal communications and how they feel about staff.

You can claim what you want, I was curious, but don’t come in here telling people its ok to use teams- we’ve established that his options were fucking WebEx- which is also not fine.

I wouldn’t say Zoom is better to be honest with you, for just meetings the UX of Teams is pretty bad but the UX of Zoom is almost as bad; there’s not much in it.

Last time I checked Zoom was a pig on resources and required a weird background worker- and you couldn't even send files.

Some of us deal with the 95% of users who don't give a steaming crap what some condescending IT droog thinks about Microsoft. Excel is not optional out here in the real world with the unwashed masses.

Controversial choice (UX isn’t super pretty) but I recommend Zulip wholeheartedly.

Messaging is not fine. There are 15 million group DMs and zero way to organize them outside of a giant list and a favorites. That's where Slack shines.

And uhh you don’t need visual studio or pycharm. Just open notepad and learn how it works. It writes code.

Maybe, but teams is really, really, really non-performant. Its actually kind of impressive of dog shit slow it is.

To be fair, zoom is somewhat slow too. Not to start up, but joining a meeting is like 5-10 second delay. Lord help you if you turn on your webcam.

The text editor is hilariously broken. Copy/paste eats formatting for breakfast... Unless it's Word, but only sometimes. But who the fuck is pasting a WORD document into teams?? Don't do that!

Seriously, it's outlook levels of broken. Markdown doesn't work, I don't know what markdown engine they use but it's certainly not compliant to any sort of standard. Copying whitespace is just unbelievably fucked, your code becomes unreadable.

Which would be fine... If we could bulk indent. But do you know what highlight + tab does? Not indent, no, it selects the send button.

Teams, fuck you.

> And it doesn't have a global fucking hot key for push to talk/muting.

It's control-space. It is global on Windows as far as I know. Unfortunately you can't change it because I would love to have a single key I don't normally use assigned to it. I use a Mac keyboard with 19 function keys so there's plenty that I would never touch.

I agree with all the other criticism by the way, it's a messy slow clusterf*k.

I hate to be like this, but no it's not(at least not on my windows 10/11 work laptop). It is not active globally, the Teams window containing the call has to be active(on my system).

And it would be a problem if it was, as ctrl shift is the default binding for show suggestions in IntelliJ and Rider.

All of the following you've already mentioned but I forgot you mentioning them in my rage at MS. Figuring out if I'm holding it wrong or not revealed another silly issue however: the push to talk button is hard coded to ctrl space, unlike other keybinds it doesn't show up in the keybinds dialog.

> you blanket claimed its fine

You’re talking to different people and didn’t even care. This is not fine.

> which is also not fine

You act like your word is law. Which is also not fine. You shouldn’t need someone on the internet reminding you of this.

My word doesn’t have to be law, however anyone who has touched any system outside of Teams is universally stating that Teams is bad.

That is an important consideration to have if you’re going to be telling people that its fine to inflict it on your workforce. You used cost as a reason but:

1) Teams is a seperate paid license now (since it was anti-competitive- the only way they could have grown such a market share with such a terrible product).

2) There are superior free alternatives.

Don’t come up in here, (in a thread where I am asking, genuinely, about what makes Teams a viable and active preference for people) saying its fine without any fucking follow up on why and then get bent out of shape when challenged.

Teams is not fine, if you’re working on the product or you have inflicted it on your workforce you should be better- I won’t pretend its ok so that you feel better.