I suppose I work in an organization with few true "technical" folks, and everyone is under Microsoft licenses so it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
I've used both slack and teams. What am I really missing out on here?
* You expect to enter nickname and connect as a guest (my company doesn't use teams)
* F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account. No option to abort.
* Personal account doesn't work (bonus points if you already have private office 365 logged in and it defaults to this account, then takes you straight to the error or tells you after 2FA).
* Kill app/reopen? 50% success rate.
After a few times I figured out that best way is to nuke the app data the moment it shows you login screen. And got PTSD.
Actually I found a solution for this (on android). Open the settings, apps, find teams app and force stop it. Then try to open the link again. You should get the guest prompt. Sometimes this needs to be repeated few times, but so far this approach works for me reliably.
Most likely you don't use a conference software bad enough.
That being said, having useful search, a quick UI and actual availability shown is massively helpful. A great comms tool also makes inter-department chats easy and fun (for example via #random). Lastly, the amount of time wasted with "can you see my screen?"/"can you hear me?"/"Doesn't work for me, I'll restart <software>" varies vastly between tools. Having communication, including discovery and screen sharing, just work makes things so much easier.
Fair; I could definitely believe that.
But among Zoom, Teams, Discord, and Slack (there's probably another one thrown in there,) I haven't had issues that really stand out to me. I've seen social workplace issues that made comms suck, but they transferred between chat apps.
For a more detailed take:
Slack is far from perfect but Slack is generally clean, quick, simple and compact. Slack feels like a purpose built tool for chat. Even when they add stuff like huddles it never feels like the priority is anything but the chat. When they roll out updates that make typing or formatting jankier I find they often get a fix out quickly.
Teams feels like it is doing a little bit of everything and is slower, wastes screen real estate, has poor UX all over and does a lot of things so-so to decent vs. one thing really well. Why is chat so different in a Teams/Chat vs a Teams/Teams/Channel? You can't even do the same markdown formatting in those places. And speaking of markdown, you can type a backtick around a string to monospace it like in slack but if it's at the end of your message it won't format it. You need a trailing space for it to kick in the formatter. Little details matter and a lack of attention to them as an organization makes bad UX and weird behavior leak into your software.
If your company is large enough that a flat, open channel namespace is overwhelming, then you might think this is a feature, but I was at Walmart with tens of thousands of people in Slack and I didn’t feel that way.
