Let’s not forget that all “return to office” mandates are really just a way for the C-suite to reduce headcount while appearing strong/decisive, avoiding negative press (and therefore spooking investors), and not having to pay severance.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a big fan of Teams. The fact that the software is named after a common organizational unit, and also a feature within the software is named after that same thing, is insane. Also, I haven’t seen such an unnecessary resource hog since the original Microsoft Edge.
Wait till you hear about Word!
Or “Windows App”
I blame people more than Microsoft. People were either duped or too lazy to say “Microsoft Teams” in full. It’s not too crazy to have services like “Apple Music” because people aren’t allowing Apple to control the word by just saying “Music” casually. People need to go back to saying “Microsoft Teams.” Alas, it will never happen. 😒
“Microsoft” is too many syllables to say every time, “Apple” isn’t.
Also:
Gotta keep the commercial real estate market from imploding.
Whole lotta corpo money and financing tied up in that, sure would be a shame if most office space just wasn’t actually needed for most office work.
Also also:
Most managers just personally need the ability to neg employees in-person, even if it is detrimental to actual output, that doesn’t matter, what matters is sating their need to feel powerful and important.
Anyway, Zoom did basically the same thing either earlier this year or last year… yep, Zoom employees, the people who make and sell business oriented virtual collaboration software… all need to RTO.
Found it: https://fortune.com/2024/07/09/remote-work-outlook-zoom-return-to-office-chief-people-officer/
Oh yeah, I totally forgot the real estate side of things.
I work for a midsize company that divides up their office space rental costs between divisions/departments. Our CEO also owns the commercial property management company, and he also owns the holding company that owns the building.
He’s been fighting me for a while now on my division’s “flex work” policy. Finally he gave up, but my division still pays our “fair share” of rent despite several of my team members moving out of state. Oh well.
Yeah thats called you realizing your CEO is scamming the entire business and running it as a franchise that he somehow is both in charge of and also not fully legally / financially responsible for.
That reminds me of how a huge part of why SEARS went out of business was because they broke each building up into the floor space sections per department that each ran as their own mini psuedo businesses and effectively had to pay footage based rent to that building’s GM…
As opposed to, you know, a business leveraging synergies, fostering teamwork and having a solid central leadership… nah, fuck all that, each SEARS location is now its own marketplace of competing fiefdoms, all the departments hate all the other departments, central command is now just Pontius Pilate washing his hands over all the bloodshed he oversees.
IMO that kind of set up should just be illegal, its fraud with extra steps.
It’s also a justification for the millions of dollars they already spent on office space that isn’t necessary anymore.
Yep. And as another commenter pointed out, the “leaders” pushing these return to office mandates usually have substantial commercial real estate investments.
No conflict of interest there…
Well they’re not wrong; Teams is a godawful product and should never be used.
If being proficient at using teams means people can work from where they prefer, it’s my opinion that it’s your duty to do it, so everyone has better choices.
Obviously that isn’t the opinion held here, but that is more indicative of companies trying to reduce headcount because their growth has slowed. Growing companies are meeting people where they are. Broadly speaking of course.
I know a contractor working on teams. It was as eyerolling as you could expect.
Was it Teams or Teams (New) or Teams (School & Work) or Teams…
“Please sign out to sign in”
The only reason people use teams over slack is that it comes bundled with everything else Microsoft makes, why make a good product when you can leverage your position in the market
Makes me laugh additionally because the modern conception of “dogfooding” in tech was popularized by Microsoft itself back in the 1990s. This is the opposite of dogfooding and really is a big condemnation of Teams as a software solution for connected work, at least on paper.
Teams wasn’t specifically built for remote work though. It was built for internal chat/messaging, document sharing, planning, etc. It is 100% used internally at MS even when people aren’t working remotely.
I know because people at MS have been complaining about it since a few years before the pandemic.
This is a fair point, I was being a bit facetious, but I’m sure there are plenty of teams both totally in person and totally remote using it. It is just bad optics I think. Like if Teams isn’t useful enough for them that they have to be in person despite having an ostensibly full-featured videoconferencing and calendar coordination and chat, the hell good is it for my organization?
But github was built for remote async work and since ms acquired it got even more remote work features.
“You want to use teams a bit? We have a session here” “I’d be happy to, actually. Not really, but it wouldn’t be bad” “Not really? If you say so, I have a teams session ready right here” “No. No. I’m not stupid” “People use it every day.” “Tell the truth” “It’s a good user experience.” “So are you ready to use it? For 5 minutes?” “No, I’m not an idiot.”
Microsoft also owns Github which is the best asynchronous remote workplace tool on the market imo. Yet here we are.
Once you get big enough you just fail upwards. Microsoft, Oracle, Google etc all have to get 1 thing right out of a 100 failures and will still continue to succeed.
I feel like this misses the mark slightly: Microsoft owns Github now, in precisely the same way that Melon Husk owns Xitter. Microsoft didn’t “fail upwards” with github, they used the power of unforgivably offensive amounts of capital to make a purchase of an already-extremely-profitable company, in order to ensure that all of Microsoft’s other software dingleberries, hanging from the fetid prolapse that is their own company, continue to hang on and accomplish the only two things they care about:
- that the girth of their proverbial ass does not decrease (and thus continue to keep every market they can firmly under its weight)
And
- that its stench continues poisoning the well for anything that could potentially compete with them.
With these two feats accomplished, they can keep their monopoly going.
Teams isn’t really designed to do anything, it’s mostly just a conferencing app but it’s absolute rubbish at collaboration work because it essentially doesn’t have any tools in that area. Why Microsoft have never bothered to create their own version of slack I do not know.
Why Microsoft have never bothered to create their own version of slack I do not know.
The parts of Slack that Teams doesn’t fail to make usable are available in unusable form in Azure Devops.
The real problem here is thinking Teams is the same as all remote work solutions
But who’s on first?
What?
What’s on second.
I don’t know!
Third base!
On Teams? Kinky!
Teams teams team Teams teams
