this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Since I just had to deal with a Teams issue, I'm going to list some reasons I dislike it. Obviously, everyone's mileage is different and something that bothers me may not bother others. However when people complain about Teams, it's generally because of the following:
The majority of the above comes down to bad design leading to bad UX and performance. Why are they using a Streams instead of rendering the video in-app natively? Because it was cheaper to just tie into their Streams service. Why is it that only Teams randomly loses the ability to function? Because for some reason it relies on a legacy registry connection key because...reasons?
There isn't a single bad thing about MS Teams, it's a bunch of kinda bad things that together make the product terrible. We should demand better of our software products but all leverage has been given to the people who already control these things so we're just screwed from getting actual good software made.
Also, screen sharing seems to take up most of your available RAM for some reason. When screen sharing, your chat window pops up to show everyone all your chats. The annoying ass top bar that needs to be moved every time and can't remember its last location. Is teams a group chat, channel a group chat, or is group chat a group chat? Most add-ons are useless. Why does setting up a web hook notification with Teams require Power Automate? And why does it need a fixed schema? Just let me send any message I want!!
Yeah the entire piece of software is just really poorly optimized, they use ambiguous language and labels, their controls are constantly in the way (when sharing), and so forth. It is objectionably a bad experience because so many fundamental things about it could be improved drastically.
Instead they needed a modern messaging application and Skype was poisoned by their handling of it so they took a bunch of individual things they had lying around and jammed them all together into a product they called Teams. If you actually look at how it works that is what they did. It's why MS Streams is used for video, Sharepoint is used for network stores, AD is used auth, and so forth. It isn't a single product but rather a shell of discrete things that were made to work together but clearly not originally designed in that way given the performance.
What about it using at least 1 GB of RAM, and growing continuously while you're using it until the OOM killer has gotten enough and kills it?
Yep 100%
Ah I see. So the complaints aren't really in the feature-set or design of the app, but rather the optimization.
That makes sense to me now. I was coming from the perspective of "I really like how information is organized and how collaboration works" not from a "does this app function well."
I've never really had any performance issues, personally. Perhaps that's bc I always used the Linux app back when I used teams and had a beefy PC. It had its own issues, but they were really with getting it to run in the first place. Once I could get it running, it always worked well for me.
Also, I was using it a couple years ago, pre-copilot, so maybe that's added to the crappiness
I never used it on Linux so I can't speak to that but it's pretty bad on Windows. It wasn't great a couple years ago (on Windows) and it's only gotten worse. The downward slope of the product quality seems to be steeper each year as well. It's really frustrating to witness since they could have put out something great.
They were already sunsetting Skype, MSN Messenger was basically gone (or was it previously rolled into Skype? I can't remember). They could have started from scratch and built a really great communication tool using all of the knowledge they gained running the aforementioned products and not carrying forward all of the tech debt and glue they had to add to make the older services work with modern architecture. But they didn't and now the majority of the corporate world suffers relentless little pain points while using the software.
Not to mention it's poor quality has splash damage: loss of productivity due to issues and performance, increased IT tickets, increased computer specs to run the new features MS thinks we all need despite people not asking for. All of that amounts to millions (billions?) of dollars more spent each year for products that are themselves subpar. That cost is only growing as well.