It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms.
Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list.
I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another.
The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.
It may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers.
As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare.
After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly, leading to ignored user feedback and a struggle make improvements.
The product mothballs for some years until - in the case of something like Google Talk - momentum is generated around replacing it with the next 1.0 product.
Writing really good software takes years of user feedback, and a team of knowledgeable engineers digesting that feedback to write new versions. A company can afford to do that when its users are its customers. When they are its product instead, you get a steady stream of half-baked and quickly-abandoned software, often installed via forced update.
Most of the industry has settled on the CADT model instead. The GP of this post suggests Google has done a particularly good job formalizing it these days.
It isn't exactly clear how it's managed from the desktop either. Over the years they've really screwed the whole thing up. It's no longer clear whether someone is online, offline, online but hidden, or just lost in a contact list change reorganization. it also isn't clear whether someone is available to chat, or if the IM I send will be inconveniently received on their mobile phone, something I try to avoid doing when possible.
What the hell is going on with groupware? IBM, MS, Google, are they all just befuddled by whatever web fad is current to forget making their stuff actually useful? I feel like there has been nothing but regression since 10 years, ever since Skype brought free and stable group calls.
I suspect that nobody has figured out how to make money on it and that is what is 'going on'. It does make one ponder how to do this stuff in a sustainable way.
Seems like Slack figured out how to make a lot of money out of interoperable groupware. If they'd been slower at it, I'd still be saying they're an acquisition target for those companies.
edit: "All" they did was come along at the right time and make the interoperability easy. The prerequisites to have done it at all? Smartphones, WebRTC, and ElasticSearch.
Calling Slack "interoperable" is a bit much to me, though I admit it's better than everyone else in the "new crowd".
I wonder if we need a new word for "interoperability in the time of SaaS" - the kind of where SaaSes talk to other SaaSes via locked down APIs, under absolute control of the vendor.
I mean, you can call the APIs locked down if you insist, but SaaS is SaaS. Would you count S3 as a locked down API, for example? OpenStack's Swift (and plenty of other products) will emulate it. I chose the term "interoperable" specifically instead of "API compatible" but I agree this gets very confusing when talking about SaaS.
In order to do what Slack is doing, they have to be somewhat committed to open standards. They are just doing webhooks, like GitHub does. We tried specifying microformats, and we tried specifying webhooks, but the "loose RPC" model... Seems to work way better than XMPP server interoperability ever has.
I don’t think so. Cisco maybe, but Microsoft is printing money with this tech.
Capturing email, files and love communication drives subscription revenue for E5 SKUs of 365, plus most companies will need Azure AD to meet their security and compliance requirements.
We ran the numbers at work... taking the blue pill and going all on Microsoft will 3x our lifetime value to them vs a standard E3 shop.
One of my colleagues pointed out that the IM client from Exchange 2003 era (I think it was Live Communications Server) and LiveMeeting were a better collaboration platform than SfB, even given the severe limitations on bandwidth and cpu.
It's really not a high bar is it? Frickin MSN Messenger and Adium was a better platform than what we have now. While never having used it I suspect the best was probably blackberry's platform in its heyday, even though AFAIK complicated to integrate into a business, but at least then it would work solidly.
Teams is an afterthought from Microsoft in its continuing lineage of Collaboration Applications.
We recently switched to it for a world wide support team and it's a step down.
- No direct quoting, only threaded replies in group chats.
- No linking to Threads, even though you can personally bookmark it
- No message indications except in 1 on 1 chats ad hoc chats, so if you're in a large group thread, you have no idea if someone is paying attention or not
- Poor UI decisions (the menu which appears over messages for "options/bookmark/like" will obscure messages if the same user sent two messages in a row; because it appears over the right-most part and the second of two messages from the same user doesn't include the user info, the menu will hide whatever's at the end of the message).
- Scrolling back in a message thread (group or personal) is pointless, as messages take so long to load, and it seems to load sequentially. (i.e., you can't just scroll to approximately where you think the message is; if you scroll for 10 minutes, it will still just load the most recent messages before continuing)
- Search has no proper way of search only one conversation, it's all or nothing.
- The mobile app is incredibly slow to sync regardless of whether it's on data or wireless.
I could go on for awhile on this. I honestly wonder if anyone at Microsoft even tried to use Teams before they released it, since everything about it feels like it was just tossed in there and the devs weren't allowed to look at what other collaborative chat apps did to make them good. Even their "me too" implementation of things like giphy integration or inserting photos in to the chat is very poor (dragging a photo from desktop will insert it into the thread, but dragging it from the web will upload it to sharepoint, though both take very long to upload). Accessing Sharepoint content takes a long time because Microsoft's login to the Office 365 space takes a long time. All text is actually rich text, but for some reason they included a pseudo markdown syntax which just toggles the rich text functions (bold, italics, etc) whether you mean to or not. You can't just escape these characters either since it's not that well thought out of a function.
When we briefly had Skype For Business, I thought that Microsoft couldn't do any worse, but they really did their homework for Teams and made a real horrible product that works for basically no one.
On Linux it does not even show the screen shared by others (Windows) users. In the old Skype (not for Business) client Linux users could even share. For corporations progress means removing working functionality.
Teams is a joke. It’s an alpha level product at best. At worst it’s black hole on the user voice forums for features that were in IRC and a constant memory leak. The vscode team needs to teach the teams team how to properly write an electron app.
If I move the teams window from one monitor the my other slightly different sized one the close and maximize buttons don't work until the window gets minimized and then re-shown. smh. (win8)
> The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.
You also cannot manage contacts in any app on android besides the contacts app, or, probably better for you: http://contacts.google.com
Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list.
I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another.
The most recent baffled was finally understanding that there is no way to manage contacts from within the iOS Hangouts app. I’m actually not sure how that contact list is generated.