I used to say the same, but now I have to use Slack + Gmail + Meet + Google Calendar + Drive + whatever else Google has.

All of this has integrations into each other. Somehow a slack bot can show me calendar entries. Why I would even need such a broken UI/experience is unclear to me. I can't see when people usually work. Meet chats disappear once the meeting is over.

At Teams/Outlook you have a million other issues, but all things considered, I preferred it.

My general assumption when I see something that insane is

- some large enough customer had a workflow depending on that existing and it was built to sell them

- someone wanted a visible feature to justify being promoted

And in most cases, at least one of those is true.

It's from the modern "rewrite it in Electron every 6 months" arm of Microsoft, not the "With a clever manipulation of the registers, we can eke out another 4 bytes of saved memory" arm of Microsoft. The former has been winning for years, but the latter also exists inside the company. See Raymond Chen for a classic example of the deep technical skill inside MS

Thats because Teams is just a frontend to SharePoint Online.

SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes. And it's in Electron on top of that, so its 10x slower than a real non-browser application.

Ive only rarely seen Microsoft put out actual good software. The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.

> a frontend to SharePoint

No wonder they just tossed Skype in the trash. This explains so much.

> SPOL is even worse a tirefire than, say, even Lotus Notes.

To be fair, Lotus Notes is what we had back in the mid 90's. There really wasn't much else like it. But comparing that today... (checks notes) ...oh. It's still a thing?!

So, neither Lotus Notes (now "HCL Notes" apparently?) or SharePoint have any excuse being as bad as they are. There are a dozen other far more capable examples of this kind of technology. I'm routinely amazed at how bad MS' user experience continues to be, even with all the money and engineers at their disposal.

Yeah in the end teams is an electron based view of SharePoint in a trench coat pretending to be a chat program and so much more

> The last time was Windows 2000. Now, that was some quality software.

It was good, but IIS had some faults, can't remember what, they wanted to replace it quickly with 2003. There isn't much wrong with Windows XP, objectively speaking.

Prior to iis 9, if you use the GUI to change a SSL cert of a site, it would change ALL sites to that cert.

You had to use powershell iis commandlet to change per site.

The newest IIS finally fixed that.

Has Microsoft built anything in the last decade that isn’t of questionable quality/user experience?

There's no question to the quality of Copilot.

I genuinely don’t know if you mean “it’s unquestionably bad” or “it’s unquestionably good”.

I was under the impression GitHub built and maintained that, but perhaps that’s changed… If not I wouldn’t consider it a Microsoft built product like windows etc (yes I’m aware ms owns gh)

everyone that contributed a project to github built it.

I'm sure there are some people out there somewhere who haven't tried it and so still think it could be good.

Is there? And which Copilot is that? Github? Office 365? Windows? Yet another?

Obligatory link to my comment re: Microsoft product naming and the discussion that followed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40419292

most people like vs code and lots of companies have built on top of it so there must be some quality there that people like.

It's more that there isn't a single credible alternative. So, winning by default, not by merit.

But it didn’t win by default, it beat out the other alternatives, sublime and a GitHub editor (prior to acquisition).

VS Code (Monaco at the time) was developed by a small team largely in secret to keep it safe from other MS departments so it’s really not like other MS software. It has been safe from meddling for a while there is a chance it’ll be a victim of its own success.

The editor itself, Monaco, is nice enough and I’ve built some browser based ides, with it. Clientele consisting of primarily data scientists seemed to enjoy it