We desperately need to teach people when a 3rd party dependency is necessary and not just optional to save writing a single function (cough left pad cough).

Also when the dependency is really good but other considerations override it being a viable option like security or code ownership.

How we all didn’t collectively learn our lesson from left pad baffles me.

Might end up with more humanity in business decisions by replacing the empathy-devoid CEOs currently running things with something trained on a larger sample of people.

Windows is mostly so entrenched because Microsoft applied monopolistic practices in the 90’s to ensure it was the most used operating system thereby cementing their place for decades to come.

Then, they applied monopolistic practices in the cloud industry to ensure vendor lock-in at the OS level with their most popular services (like Office).

You are right that most people just don’t care though. I don’t blame them, there is enough stress in the world.

For the first point, I’m just going to throw out that sending the content can be preferable given how likely the link is to go dead eventually. There are a number of things I can no longer find because of this although it is admittedly an edge case.

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.

Yep 100%

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.

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:

• It’s slow. I don’t care what MS says, Teams is really slow. It is slow to start, it’s slow to load content, and it’s slow to upload content to, and it’s slow to navigate around in. This doesn’t mean it’s painfully slow, but it’s slow enough that I think about it and that means it’s too slow. There is no excuse for performance like this in 2025 unless the excuse is you’re packing as much telemetry and data collection garbage as possible into the application.
• The integrations are really clunky (and also perform poorly). For example, if I upload a 30 second mp4 file it will go into Sharepoint and be served in MS Teams through MS Stream. Think about that for a second. A video file needed to be uploaded to Teams, shipped to Sharepoint for network storage, then read by MS Streams to feed back to Teams. Just render the fucking file in Teams. This isn’t hard. With the way they have it setup, the performance is terrible, the user experience is terrible, and it’s insulting that we’re being fed this bloated garbage. For context, I’m on a fiber connection and I still see buffering issues and slow video load times only in Teams so it clearly isn’t just something on my end.
• It randomly loses the ability to connect. Everything else works including other MS products but Teams won’t connect. Within the last 2 years, there have been at least half a dozen times where I turned on my computer in the morning and everything works except Teams. After a lot of searching for a solution, the fix was to delete two registry keys. Seriously, I have to go into the registry occasionally to delete two keys that are in no way tied to Teams based on their location in the registry before Teams will connect again when this happens. What the fuck is happening that Teams relies on two obscure registry keys that aren’t even located under any MS Teams nodes. Fucking awful.
• Did I mention performance? It is worth mentioning again because of how terrible it is. It is usable and gets the job done but people have no idea how much faster this could be if the bloat was removed. Slack isn’t exactly great from a performance perspective either but (at least in my experience) it’s much better than Teams.
• I keep getting prompts about copilot in Teams which is infuriating considering I’ve declined every time and it’s still enabled and still prompts me. I don’t need AI to summarize a one-sentence chat message FFS and I certainly don’t need help writing that sentence. Stop interrupting my flow to popup messages about features I’ve already told you I don’t want to use.

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.

Can anyone see the token person of color or did they not even bother this time?

Yeah and unfortunately it’s going to get worse when AI agents are also always running in the background (which is inevitable, let’s be honest).

I get what you are saying and this is definitely a factor but I think the bigger influencer was mobile adoption. As soon as smartphones took off it was inevitable that we would see a surge in cross platform frameworks/libraries.

The fact we tackled this problem by shifting everything to web apps was also inevitable given the more simplistic deployment requirements and maintenance costs of a website vs native application.

I feel like I am shouting to the void when I talk about performance of modern software being unbelievably bad.

One could say they are streets behind.

Honest answer? It makes it easy to release an application cross platform.

Personal / hot-take answer? Because we are human and our drive for mediocrity is astounding…especially when it can save a few bucks. Why make something good when you can make something less good faster and cheaper? That should be Electron’s slogan.

This is the proper answer.

“Would I lie??”

Not the OP but just wanted to say thanks for typing that out. I think it perfectly answers the question, gives several examples/explanations, and provides further research resources. It’s always genuinely great to come across posts like this.

Yeah we aren’t anywhere close to the point of states breaking out of the union. Some people will call for it, maybe even a lot. But as soon as they realize what is required that shit will stop immediately. California would quite literally need to go to war with the union to gain that independence regardless of what they voted. So not only would they need to actually vote for it but then they’d have to be willing to go to war and kill and die for that separation and their independence.

As strong as people feel, we aren’t even close to that point. Not to mention it would fail; none of the states currently have any hope of competing against the US military machine. Give us a couple hundred more years to really really deteriorate and siphon all value from the people and land and we may be there.

It’s hard to truly internalize this but no matter what you think about something and/or how wrong you think someone else is, we are walking through life with imperfect imaginings of what other people think and feel. Trying to make sense of people is even harder than making sense of a person. And we are quite literally incapable of truly knowing what goes on in someone else’s head.

Definitely ask these questions but don’t drive yourself crazy if people don’t make sense. The behaviors and actions we witness in others are only the emergent characteristics of a lot of brain activity that we aren’t privy to.

This post is a journey, not a destination.

That people are inherently good. This not being the case is reinforced near daily by people’s behaviors.

People in this thread are throwing around the term “smarter” a lot and I think we should avoid that. How quick you pick things up might be an indicator for being smart but it is only one aspect. The following are generalizations and there are always exceptions so keep that in mind.

What you will find in life is a lot of the people like you describe have generally shallow knowledge of a subject but are capable of ramping up quickly and filling out that deeper knowledge as needed. Meanwhile, the folks who tend to take longer and study more retain more of the knowledge and are more capable at using it without supplemental data or analysis.

It is the difference between knowing an answer and knowing enough to quickly find or intuit the answer.