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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

> 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?

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.