Microsoft Teams Surpasses 270 Million Monthly Active Users (geekwire.com)
- Reference: 0158059945
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/22/01/26/1753259/microsoft-teams-surpasses-270-million-monthly-active-users
- Source link: https://www.geekwire.com/2022/microsoft-teams-surpasses-270m-monthly-active-users-as-growth-slows-from-early-days-of-pandemic/
> Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, revealed the latest number Tuesday afternoon in conjunction with the company's quarterly earnings. The number represents an increase of 20 million monthly active users from the 250 million that Microsoft reported six months ago, in July 2021. Prior to that, the company used the metric of daily active users, so the numbers aren't directly comparable, but they do show how the growth has slowed. Monthly numbers are more forgiving because users don't need to use the product as frequently to move the needle. In daily active users, Teams jumped from 75 million in April 2020 to 115 million in October 2020 to 145 million in April 2021.
[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2022/microsoft-teams-surpasses-270m-monthly-active-users-as-growth-slows-from-early-days-of-pandemic/
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You realize that if functionality is built into a piece of software it shouldn't be total shit, right? That's one feature, and Microsoft needs to be held accountable for the quality of their software
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It's not shit. It works pretty well, and integrated shared files into Sharepoint automatically is genius in the corporate world
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Try doing simple things like uploading a textual error log that has JSON blobs in it... it sucks rancid donkey dong.
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I can't speak for a dev team, but for product teams and implementation teams? Certainly very useful
Re: Do I count? (Score:2)
Shit at screen sharing though, isnâ(TM)t it? Canâ(TM)t draw on the sharerâ(TM)s screen to highlight something youâ(TM)re referring to. It feels like a step back to 2005. And then whatâ(TM)s up with all the crap around the edges you canâ(TM)t get rid of resulting in a scaled image of the other personâ(TM)s shared content?
And the twisted overly complicated UI that hides the important things. Yet they thought it a good idea to put all your recent chats on one page with a
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> You realize it's not primarily a file sharing tool right?
You realize that every single person that uses it wants to send files to each other, right?
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> You realize that every single person that uses it wants to send files to each other, right?
No, I don't.
At my work, we almost exclusively use it for video calls / conference calls. It's there, everyone has it in our office, almost every other company/agency we deal with with has it, and it works, more or less.
Occasionally, someone will message me on it, half the time I won't see the message.
Just today I heard this on a Teams conference call:
Lighting Designer: "I just sent it via Teams chat."
Electri
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if you touch it once in a month, then you are "active".
The old version of Teams has a user interface more like Slack. At some point they decided to track "recent" conversations including every meeting you've ever been invited to for seemingly the last three years. The whole thing has become pretty unwieldly.
For 99% of what I do I feel like XMPP/jabber and a plugin/bot to hook into corporate resources like the bug tracker and document control is all I want. And easily cheaper in a single quarter than whateve
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I use Teams for work and it's a lot like Outlook - lots of little UI issues that never get fixed, crappy workflows to do simple stuff.
Classic Microsoft product.
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And since it's a Microsoft product, those crappy workflows and UI issues are now the "standard" and the can't remove them for legacy reasons
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Teams replaced our old Skype for Business. Which wasn't terrible. Or at least it wasn't as terrible as Teams is. But once Teams was around it honestly felt like they did something to sabotage Skype over time because it buggier and bugger and soon everyone wanted to use Teams because it sucked ever so slightly less.
Teams is way too bloated though. All most organizations need are two things from - conference calls (audio or visual) and chats. Not phone calls, not file sharing, not integration with the ab
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Yeah, and they claim it works for Linux. A team I'm part of uses it and I tried to install it. You need a MS account and a whole other lot of shit. In the end it didn't work without using Windows for at least part of the install/config process. Fuck it.
Re: Do I count? (Score:2)
How to tell someone you don't know what Teams is without telling them you don't know what Teams is.
Of which... (Score:2)
... a few people actually like it.
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I use and like its core function, but it seems to be sprawling into an "everything" replacement. The whole home window thing seems superfluous - chat (OK)... calendar (a purple second copy of Outlook?)... "brainstorm"(?)... "apps"?
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I am on Teams (Mac version) daily. I semi-regularly have to restart it because it freezes or otherwise stops functioning correctly.
It's not my favorite app - seems like a bloated unoptimized mess. I would have preferred something else. But it's what my group uses.
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I have to do the same thing on Windows. Teams seems to believe in equal opportunity for ruining your day.
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The apps section adds functionality like Jira and Smartsheet integration, which I find very helpful, as it means I get all my notifications in one place. This type of integration also exists for products like Discord.
On by default (Score:1)
Nevermind the fact that it is enabled and active by default on all versions of Microsoft/Office 365.
What do you want? A medal? (Score:2)
We all know Microsoft is Number 1 at being Number 2
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"Who does number 2 work for?"
ohh ok (Score:1)
that's why it's so slow racently
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I assume it is slow because of the vast amounts of memory it gobbles up whenever I use it.
How or why? (Score:2)
Teams isn't stable, at all, period, full stop! It's not stable on Linux, it's not stable on Windows 11 or 10, so where or why is anyone using it?
I've had Teams crash while on a call with Microsoft, about Teams issues! When I reconnected, they laughed and admitted Teams is a pile of broken garbage. In the last 3ish years of the pandemic, I have never seen Teams run in a stable, or glitch free fashion. I've tried it on multiple operating systems, and Linux distros, to no success. I'm currently using
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It's free for most businesses that have other Microsoft products and it's stable-enough. I've been running it for years and haven't seen that many crashes or problems. Lots of little annoying things, weird UI, and terrible at updating notifications, but it does the job. Maybe you're using it on Linux and they didn't do any testing there or something
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To be fair, I'm on Windows 11 right now, and it's just as bad. They absolutely ignored Linux, and they'll admit as much, but for it to be a mess on Windows 10 and 11, that's just insane.
Teams is often unusable (Score:2)
After having worked at a company that used Mattermost, I thought that things couldn't get much worse until my next place of employment used Teams. At first, I thought the issues were because of the Mac client, but the Windows one fared no better. The bugs were one thing - grossly delayed notifications, markdown that never reliably works, terrible UI lag, and random things such as files being shared in chat suddenly being rejected or not visible to anyone else. Then there are just the design issues - it's pl
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I completely agree. I have found Slack to be very usable when I had the fortune of using it over Teams, but the bar has been set so fantastically low with Teams that emails might seem more pain-free by comparison.
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Even if Markdown worked reliably as designed, it would be atrocious. They utterly missed the point of having Markdown. It shouldn't be a one-way street to a dead end. In Teams, it's a barely-functional real-time format-guessing machine. Once the text has been formatted, you can't get back to Markdown syntax, so good luck editing anything. Pasting Markdown into Teams doesn't work at all -- you just get plain, uninterpreted Markdown. Which in a way might actually be better than what they do with it.
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Yes, exactly. I don't know how many times each day I try to edit markdown and it either reverts to regular text or seems to think I want the entire message written as a code block. Oh, and let's not forget the oh-so-Windows-y preservation of text formatting and color when you paste something in from a different source and it looks incredibly fugly inside Teams as a result. Using this app beyond pecking out simple messages feels like you're wrestling with an oiled mongoose that really wants to maim you in an
All these posts saying it was "forced" on people (Score:2)
That was not my experience. We use Office 365 and when Teams was introduced users in our organization gravitated towards it on their own.
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Same here. Once the subscription to Zoom ran out.
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We actually still use Zoom for video conferencing, but that has some to do with inertia as we had just completed a project where all of the video conference rooms were updated and built around Zoom. I think Zoom is still a little easier to use than Teams for video conferencing anyway.
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Gravitated towards it from what? Zoom? Emails? Pen and paper? Using teams over almost any other modern chat client is taking a massive step backwards in both functionality and ease of use.
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> Gravitated towards it from what?
A mixture of email, local file shares, personal OneDrives and a SharePoint portal that we want to migrate away from. Teams brings the functionality of those things together.
> Using teams over almost any other modern chat client
If a "chat client" is what you think Teams is, then I see why you are confused.
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Teams at its heart is a "chat client" (collaboration platform, video calling applet, whatever corporate buzzwords one would like to use). It ostensibly enables 2 or more people to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously. For that purpose, it is tragically underwhelming. I say this as someone who has used numerous "chat clients" (or whatever you want to call them) in the span of my corporate career.
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I see. When I hear "chat client", I think of things like IRC. I guess I'm dating myself there. To be honest, when Teams first arrived I was very unimpressed and I didn't "get it", but like I said, the users gravitated towards it on their own and it made more sense once I saw how our employees were using it.
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> If a "chat client" is what you think Teams is, then I see why you are confused.
I think maybe this is like the old saying about emacs, "it's a great operating system, the only thing it lacks is a decent text editor"
Since all I want from MS Teams is a chat client, it's understandable why I'm disappointed. Sure it has lots of garbage I don't want, but the chat functionality sucks and that's the only thing I actually want it to do.
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> Since all I want from MS Teams is a chat client, it's understandable why I'm disappointed.
The last thing I want is any chat client.
We use Teams for video calls, one-to-one or conference. Better than just phoning, not as good as in-person, but has the big advantage of not traveling.
We use e-mail for most correspondence and that benefits from deliberate writing. (and we use it for sharing files outside the company, either attachments or links)
Chat is good for one paragraph quips, but is not a suitable re
I'm so glad for all y'all (Score:2)
I started doubting me skills and sanity lately and I thought "Am I really the only one who things this tool is utter crap?"
This comment section does me some good.
fun facts... (Score:2)
Fun fact: Teams bypasses 2FA in certain setups.
Until recently, I had to 2FA into my Outlook, both via VPN+Client or OWA. But Teams - I could always just fire up Teams, it has my password stored, and it would show me my calendar with no 2FA, authentication or anything. :-)
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My experience is that 2FA for Office requires you to 2FA once and it carries over into all Office365 apps on that machine. So if you log into Word, you're not required to 2FA into PowerPoint, OneDrive, etc. Since Teams is part of O365, it's included in that 1st 2FA auth. At the least the way we are configured. It's possible that's configurable. If you 2FA into a AzureAD-bound Windows device I believe that carries into Office as well. You can usually find this status in Settings->Accounts->Access work
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That will be purely configuration of your environment, it doesn't bypass anything. Also remembering that it utilises the same token so if you have MFA'ed into outlook etc it will use the same token.
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I've noticed that it sometimes pops up a login prompt, but then I can just hit the X in the corner and it gives me a couple seconds to view calendars or messages before prompting again. Definitely some fundamental security issues
how many of them are happy (Score:2)
and don't already work for Microsoft?
Linux version is left behind (Score:2)
Doesn't seem to be moving forward, seriously lacking in features and also buggy.
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> Doesn't seem to be moving forward, seriously lacking in features and also buggy.
My experience of it is that it is not buggy and is pretty rock-solid. Features? I don't know, because I've never used any version other than the Linux one.
It is sad that something so simple as video calling over the public Internet has spawned a regular elephant's graveyard of abandoned attempts - Skype, Hangouts, various open source clients - and left us with just two centralised (not to mention concealed-source) clients dominating the landscape.
Misplaced priorities (Score:2)
While it is OK as a video conferencing tool, it is still a shitty chat app and a resource hog. Most integrations are useless and UI is from hell. I am kind of amazed how Microsoft fucked this up. But who cares if you own all of the corporate users.
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Chat is fine until you try to do any kind of search (which Microsoft consistently can't seem to figure out) or copy the chat text (which can be impossible for whatever reason) or try to go back in time for a long chat (something Microsoft seemed to not even take into account). Very unprofessional professional software as usual.
They did say Active Users (Score:2)
They did say these are active users, so not just someone who happens to install the product and create an O365 account.
The organization I belong to just purchased several licenses at the lowest tier merely for Teams. It's cheaper than GoToMeeting or Zoom and I have controls to shut down file sharing as much as possible.
I buy that they have 270 million active users globally though. They have free accounts and I have created a few sock puppets just for fun. ;)
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You can bet over 90% of the 270 million work for a corporation that use Teams as their primary way for meetings, presentations, workgroups and calls. I am one of them, forced to use this POS software. If you are using Teams on your own free will there's something wrong with you. I use it on macOS and it's even worse. Can't bring up attachments, constantly have to click off the thread and back onto it to try and open it again. Our executives hate it, they blame us (IT) for all the problems. But the worst is
There's 2.2M users of the prison system in the US (Score:2)
All of them would rather be elsewhere. Just like Teams.
Teams is awful (Score:2)
I am forced to use teams, working remotely.
It's a pain. The chat looks ok, until you try to send a file over it - but no, you have to do that in a special area called chat. Hmm.
But worst is the horrible way it eats your computer, rendering it unusable whilst running a video chat. The mouse is weird, in fact everything goes a bit weird. What is it doing?
And just to add insult to injury, there's some weird bug (how do you even DO this?) so the text entry does quite work properly if you try to edit it. It's a
Best of a bad bunch (Score:2)
With Corona, I've used nearly every software out there. They all have their problems. Teams is no exception, not least because the versions for different OS's are out of sync. That said, it is overall as good as anything else out there.
I mean (Score:4)
It is pretty easy to push those numbers up when you installed it for anyone with Office or 11
Re:I mean (Score:4)
Yeah, it's pretty easy to improve your market share when you bundle your product and give it away for free.
Microsoft basically did with Teams against Slack what they did 15 years ago with Internet Explorer vs Netscape.
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It's even worse than bundling it or giving it away; employers force their employees to use it.
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Yep. Soon I will no longer be allowed a phone in my office. I am expected to have a set of headphones which is interesting as I am an electronics Tech who is out in the workshop and will no longer hear my phone "ring".
Oh well, I can check voice mail just before I go home I guess.
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Oh noes, forcing me to use an actually good product that is really well integrated with their entire product suite and moderately flexible and extensible, whatever will I do?
This ain't Skype for Business shit anymore
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Maybe all the Teams servers I've used have been setup improperly but 'actually good' and 'well integrated' are not words I would use to describe my experience.
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The first and only Microsoft product I have ever seen that works flawlessly out of the box on Linux. It just works. In fact, it has better user experience on Linux than on Windows - intuitive settings, every single knob functions as designed.
So a suggestion - do not use it on Windows (I have seen it there too and had to help the SWMBO with it). It was significantly worse.
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Teams works the same on Windows and Mac; and it's bad on both in the same ways. I suspect, as an Electron app, it works the same on Linux as well. I find it also works poorly on Android.
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For me, every project gets a Teams channel, and that provisions a project Sharepoint with automatic access provisioning, channel based Whiteboard/Project/Visio/etc, Jira/Smartsheet integration, team calls are automatically saved and posted with automatic transcription instead of manual meeting notes being necessary, blah blah blah. It's all about unified tools with easy access management and provisioning.
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What you describe sounds like a personal nightmare. We get a lot of that, and each individual component is slow, buggy, hard to fine, frustrating to use, and unreliable. I can't even count how many times I've heard "oh, I didn't even see that" or "god, teams sucks" on my team.
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When you're herding cats, having everything in one place is a godsend
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This ain't Skype for Business shit anymore
This is true. It's shit of an entirely new variety.
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> Yeah, it's pretty easy to improve your market share when you bundle your product and give it away for free.
And you also start it with Windows using the account they tricked you into creating.
The thing should be called "team" though, "Microsoft Team". Not plural.
IN the last year I've had several companies add me to their internal team using an account they created for me. The idea is to receive notifications, let them call me, etc.
Guess how well that's working out on Microsoft team?
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A, home user. Don't use Teams, uninstall it. For work users often the employer asked you to use it, and you use your work account. For home users, you can skip it and never create a Windows account and you never miss anything that way except the crap on the Windows Store.
Apple was similar, you needed an Apple account to get xcode for instance. No way around it except to copy an installation .dmg file from a coworker. It's not tied to your computer though.
and mandatory to be connected (Score:2)
so they can spam you with bullshit analytics emails...
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That does not get you active users. If this was installations you would have a point, but since it is active users, you do not.
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It depends on how MS defines "active". Does that mean "logged in" which happens automatically when the user logs into their Windows account? Or does that mean the user sent a message? I have Teams on my work computer by default and I cannot remember the last time I sent a message. Am I an active user?
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> It depends on how MS defines "active". Does that mean "logged in" which happens automatically when the user logs into their Windows account? Or does that mean the user sent a message? I have Teams on my work computer by default and I cannot remember the last time I sent a message. Am I an active user?
The article talked about monthly active users and daily active users having quite different numbers. That strongly suggests that you're not an active user.
(Alternative explanation: maybe you are an active user, and the reason why MAU and DAU are different is because lots of people don't even log into their windows accounts most days. I don't believe this, since I expect most people will be signing in to use their computer for at least something on most workdays.)
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> Alternative explanation: maybe you are an active user, and the reason why MAU and DAU are different is because lots of people don't even log into their windows accounts most days. I don't believe this, since I expect most people will be signing in to use their computer for at least something on most workdays.
That would assume that no one changes jobs (thus a new account) or takes any days off. Also that assumes only computer. If I log into a server using my Windows account, does that count twice?
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so its possible that at some point they will auto-enroll everyone with a microsoft account (required just to log into windows) if they need another boost in numbers? Sort of the way google auto enrolled everyone in G+
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Active Users are people actually using it, not people with it installed.
Re: I mean (Score:2)
You guys think it's individuals using it, really? This is ~270 million corporate users with a very small need of individuals using it. The decision to use teams was made at the company level. It was not forced by MS it was a company decision.