In defence of Microsoft Teams

Now, I suspect out of everything I write, this is potentially the most controversial opinion I have.

Microsoft Teams is actually brilliant.

Right. Let's try to explain this...

The dark old ages

I first started office jobs in environments where you'd have a VoIP phone and a PC. Before then, people wouldn't even have VoIP phones!

It would look broadly like this (this is a little later, but illustrates the point):

In one case in a job prior to this photo, the PC didn't have internet access! Email would work internally, but external email would be sent from one of the 4 internet connected PCs in the photocopier rooms accessible by the department I worked in.

If you weren't lucky enough to have a job where you were allowed to install software your options for communications were:

• call someone on that phone (or a phone like a blackberry if you were Sales)
• email someone
• physically walk to their desk (if nearby)

In those days, people frequently used email as instant messaging, and might have used their work email for personal items as well as they may not have one at home yet.

Now, messaging did exist in this era. People did SMS, and msn messenger was a thing, and AOL Messenger was old by then. But these were broadly seen as consumer tools, not business tools, unless you were an "executive" or a salesperson.

I recall an interesting conversation from this era where someone was speccing a high end phone system and explaining that people can have messages sent to their PC as instant messaging via their VOIP phone and the response was "no, can we switch this off - that's not work, that's play, we don't want people nattering".

And the transition to VoIP telephony... was happening in the background.

Those tech companies

In the meantime, all those software-first companies were doing their thing and adopting skype, then things like hipchat and slack (the old school ones were using irc but this was pretty niche) instead of bothering with VOIP phones and calling someone. Someone was an office and ready to work as soon as they were given a laptop. No desk or phone or PBX required. And a whole generation of young people using things like AOL messenger in the 90s wanted to do the same for business communication - a quick "do you have a minute" didn't have to interrupt someone in the middle of a big engaging piece of work...

It was asynchronous. And less formal than email. And it increased a certain type of productivity hugely.

Positioning

So, back to the present day.

What do you think the competitors to MS Teams are?

• Slack? Nope
• Discord? Nope

It is actually competing with these companies:

Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, Unify...

These days, they are VoIP and telephony providers. And none of them would have wanted to offer a messaging style system at all without Teams doing it - that cuts into their advantage that focuses on on low latency high quality audio conversations. And they have differing demands on reliability, latency, enterprise needs, regulation and so on compared to a discord server.

And compared to the user experience of the tools from these companies, and the sheer wealth of integration, including back to existing phone systems, it's fantastic.

And the user is not the person at the phone... it's an enterprise tool so it targets the buyers and the buying stakeholders like IT departments and so on.

And we, thanks to a set of fairly complex set of acquisitions and technology mergers (Lync, Skype, yadda yadda), got instant messaging alongside voice calls introduced into mainstream enterprise businesses.

Why did it have to be Microsoft? Because they'd lived through all these companies adopting DOS, then Windows and Office and knew how to get into these businesses and stick. They very much are the establishment.

Enterprises and Regulation

Another angle - why is it so hard to crack mainstream enterprise?

Slack now has HIPAA support but it did not initially. These newer alternative tools did not consider the laws and regulations that legacy mainstream businesses just have to "deal with" as part of doing business - they went for tech companies first who had lower barriers to adoption.

In addition, things like uncontrolled communication can be extremely scary for a business that might have had their comms subpoenaed into a court. Any action that encouraging staff to just natter away in a recorded manner, even water cooler conversations, impinges on that risk, and increases chances of situations that might be unlawful or potentially embarrassing, including situations like employees sexually harassing other employees.

To use an extreme example, my school in the 90s had an all@domain email set up in the days they were using Acorns (and it couldn't be blocked like it can via MS Exchange). It would email everyone, staff and students, at the school. About once a year a student would discover it and use it, and get pulled in for a telling off. (Yes, I was one of those.) Every communication option opens a risk that it can be misused - for good and for bad.

Slack's "random" channel seems like a wonderful place until you think that every meme, every comment, every statement is a new potential risk for a large enterprise - and one they'd covered already in existing comms eg email, phone, etc. And it can't as easily be turned off. It's not considered "ok" to block your phone with water cooler chat, whereas in the age of async comms you can be chatting all day with a colleague on a topic. That increases risk, and why adopt that if you don't have to? This is why messaging took so long.

Enterprises and IT

And... your friendly sysadmin. They already have tools to deploy software and maintain it en-masse it groups of people and computers. From the pov of an enterprise, it makes sense that you'd lock down by default and instead set up corporate chats based on topics or teams, as that's broadly how they manage their IT policy and governance already. In addition, they are slow to adopt new technologies because ultimately, they are responsible for ensuring these technologies can follow the company's policies and the various regulations and laws they need to follow to operate in the countries they operate in.

Ok but Teams is still crap

Yep, fair. My personal bugbear with Teams is just how much real estate on your screen it insists on taking. I'm sure you have plenty more.

But Teams did something extremely important:

It made instant messaging a must have for enterprise businesses.

It moved messaging from an early adopter or niche facet of some workplaces into mainstream. And tried to stop people from sending those pesky one or two word emails, or send lengthly personal information to a colleague.

And it did that while also continuing to support legacy phone systems, following all the regulations that enterprise businesses are beholden to. And whoever came up with packaging it with that other enterprise must have, Microsoft Office... I hope they did well out of that. Because that was why they managed to finally gain market dominance. And somehow accidentally become one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.

As an elder millennial who grew up on text messaging, I will remain eternally grateful.