Reason why i am asking this :
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/30/inside-taganro...
(this is not sarcasm, im just taking your nearsighted worldview as a joke.)
If you think im exaggerating than educate yourself on matter more then 2 minutes of googling.
Situation is simple. Question: does russian establishemnt attacks European and USA infrastructure?
Answer: Yes.
If you genuinely asking about delusions of grandeur then your answer to that question is no. So who does have delusions? Pure logic.
Slack addons or plugins used to be a good example before it was acquired by Salesforce.
Which is very limiting considering that the Apple ecosystem, other than for phones, is the smallest one. A lot of software companies don't even target Apple at all because it's not worth it.
So while the platform has less reach the lower competition and higher RPUs make them great. If I were still making games I’d be looking at Steam before iOS, for instance.
Congrats!
Good product, but I'm concerned about relying on something developed essentially by a single person due to the bus factor... If it's open-source, that's fine — we can fork it if needed. But if it's a SaaS product, what happens if something happens to the developer? Will all my data be lost? Then again, one of the tools we used before was discontinued despite being developed by a fairly large team...
Some sort of data and data structure export/external backup would be a good feature though if it doesn’t already exist
"...we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
My duty is to warn ordinary citizens, this is it, you were warned.
answer to your question follows:
because product is Russian, programmers are Russian, so your data will be under influence of Russian government directly or indirectly - his family is in Russia.
so HN bots want to be edgy but failed to comprehend that Russian regime IS directly involved in making life for US citizens difficult, even tho Russian regime had 20 years worth of chances to not do that, not be bad actor, but they did not want that. they want to be bad actor and they act as bad actor. im not saying anything about Colonial Pipeline attack of course that would be silly.
Russian people are not outsiders, they are complicit in Russians regime activities. but it is so hard to explain this to people because even XTwitter is allowing Russian propaganda / soft power activities of Russia unimpeded.
Also a lot of Israeli people have family, ancestors in Russia so they project their feelings for them, towards Russia uncritically.
Russia is not democracy, Russia is not USA. Russia IS Russian people. Russia IS acting as a bad actor so call it as it act as.
> I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot.
> Many of our clients came to us after trying the Microsoft built-in Wiki. It was clunky, inconvenient, and didn’t do the job well. We focused on simplicity: the essential features only, nothing extra — and everything should function inside Microsoft Teams.
So I know it wasn't a coincidence, and rarely are such software built without understanding the needs first.
I just wanted to point out that in this case, the business relies on Microsoft not doing a proper job. Otherwise they would be at a serious risk of being Sherlocked by the provider.
Plus once they realize how much data is in these wikis, they will want to ingest them for AI (if not already done), so there is an incentive for them to have more users on their solution instead.
Edit: And even if the OP is not relying only on MS for sales, they still depend heavily on them and their App Store. They are not competing with Confluence or other systems, they are competing with Teams itself.
I’ve been down that rabbit-hole and Je-sus what a horrific experience. Never again.
Their SDK is built into 2 view render portions. 1 for in-message rendering using their own markup syntax for structuring views, and another that's just a web browser. So if you want to share components between 1 for messages and another for your pane, you can't.
Ingesting events is not very well defined. Everything gets sent to 2 endpoints you define and it's up to you to determine how to handle it.
Just some of the issues I came across in my short time at the company.
So there’s videos, articles, VSC extensions, all to help you navigate this Byzantine structure. But they’re all just wrong.
Look I’m not a pro dev so YMMV. Kick the tyres for a few days and see if you can get it to do anything. I never could, and the experience was just no fun at all.
At least with web dev, that I’m also no good at, it can be fun. Teams was like pulling my own nails out.
Everything you could imagine being wrong with an enterprise JavaScript package and much more is in that hellish rabbit hole.
The way he did product research to find out what customers really needed, after testing the waters with a translator, was really good.
Definition of make something people want. Classic way business has always been created, by keen observation of the market. Well done!
However, this is one of my frustrations about Teams - it absolutely sucks, and what few integrations it has from Microsoft absolutely sucks. You are already paying too much to MS for it to not be working properly.
God knows how much my company is giving to Microsoft for us to have crappy and expensive (read: time wasting) experiences with Teams, Windows 11 onboarding, Azure DevOps (better than what wr had, at least), Visual Studio 2022, etc.
Now in reality, I think the true cost is hidden by the frustration it causes (some?) users, but it's very hard to quantify that in a dollar amount. Which is why companies stick with Teams.
But you're still paying for it. The costs to build and fund the product still exist, and are still coming out of customer payments. Manipulating their pricing to manipulate their customers doesn't change that.
> Every time I check out competitors' sites — those who also build knowledge base or customer support platforms — I notice something odd. Almost all of them use third-party tools like Intercom or Zendesk to support their own customers. That surprises me. If your product is so great — why don’t you use it yourself? For me, that’s a golden rule: your product should be so good you want to use it yourself. If not, that means something’s wrong.
Is this not just because Intercom and Zendesk have their own ticketing systems tightly integrated to the docs? Integrating the two allows e.g. customer query auto-reply based on RAG with the documentation, or auto-replying with the 3 support articles most likely to solve the problem. I assume Perfect Wiki has no equivalent ticket integration?
It would have been 20 people if investors were brought in. Missed opportunity!
Edit: forgot to mention that it would have had the same revenue and been a failure :)
This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.
By comparison, I unpublished everything there and asked to delete my account in Feb, 2022, just after the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started.
Similar things could be said about the US, excluding 90% of websites.
Habr Blockchain Publishing Ltd. Diagorou 4 Kermia Building, 6th floor flat/office 601 1097 Nicosia Cyprus
You as a Western customer currently have no way to pay to a Russian legal entity, meaning that VAT and corporate income taxes from your payments are paid in EU and probably supporting Ukraine. I highly doubt that owners repatriate the profits to Russia or they cover operational costs in Russia from foreign income. It is also possible that part of that income goes into salaries of the staff which emigrated after 24.02.2022 and works for Habr remotely, as it happened with many Russian IT companies.
So question is, do you have any specific evidence that your money would fund the war or it is just application of collective responsibility?
Source: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/11/14/d...
Is there any specific evidence that Habr supports the war? This is not a rhetoric question, I expect the answer and I'm fine if the answer is yes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment
Just like with BDS in case of Israel, this principle is incompatible with Western values. If you apply collective punishment to Russia, how are you different from them?
Here, the point that's raised is: isn't there any collective responsibility for a group of people that support and re-elect a political leader with 87% of votes, who was, and promised to continue engaging in a war of genocide?
Notice that I'm being cynical here, referencing the 87% vote count. While it might be a theatrical display, the regime likes to preach about the legitimacy of Democracy (especially how Ukraine is conducting its democracy), and Russians accepted these results - so even if it's not actually 87%, it's still high.
Also, let's not forget that a lot of the invading force is composed of individuals with entrepreneurial ambitions; they're contractors, not conscripts, meaning people who sign up to get well paid to go to Ukraine and kill as many Ukrainians as possible, just because they're Ukrainians. The latest estimates of +950.000 Russian casualties point that it's not just a few people willing to do this, but a lot.
So the question that I want to ask you is, at what point does collective responsibility apply?
Two points to clarify:
- This is an honest question, because I don't know the answer to it, but I just don't think that "there should never be collective responsibility" is a good answer.
- Collective responsibility =/= perpetual collective responsibility =/= collective punishment;
There’s no such point. This is the main reason why Russia is still not under full trade embargo and Russian citizens can still get visas. Justice is a fundamental human right, so sanctions always target individuals after some due process and may be repealed in court.
Well, I disagree; the people of a nation contributing to and supporting genocide are responsible in part.
> This is the main reason why Russia is still not under full trade embargo and Russian citizens can still get visas.
I don't think those are the main reasons:
- Embargo would have a global economic impact and would have to be militarily enforced; Also, it wouldn't be enforced everywhere as Russia has borders with countries that aren't sanctioning them.
- As far as I know, Russian citizens can't get Visas everywhere; several European countries have banned all sorts of visas for Russian citizens.
In fact, there's a case to be made that Russians are being collectively held accountable, for example:
- Sanctions;
- Seizing of Russian State assets (they don't belong to Putin or the regime, these assets actually belong to Russians);
- Visa bans;
Why exactly do you think human right for justice doesn’t apply here? Do you include in this group everyone, even those who were not able to or actively tried to stop it? What is their responsibility exactly? If not, how do you make the distinction?
Then what country are you talking about? Russia is not committing genocide in Ukraine, so it must be Israel and Gaza? But even in that case, with dramatically higher number of civilian casualties and people having more agency in state matters how exactly do you want to hold every Israeli citizen responsible?
>In fact, there's a case to be made that Russians are being collectively held accountable, for example: - Sanctions;
I don’t understand this part. “To make a case” means to present arguments. You don’t present arguments for sanctions with saying “sanctions”.
Unfortunately, there's no way to separate accomplices from those who don't support it, but what do you expect to be done? Pretend that nothing is happening and that there's no support at all for the war and only one man, Putin, is to blame?
> Then what country are you talking about? Russia is not committing genocide in Ukraine
Well by the definition of genocide and the actions Russia is taking, it is genocide:
- Denial of Ukraine's existence as a sovereign country and as a people (a very clear admission of genocide by Putin in his speech denying the existence of Ukraine - he just happened to fail to achieve it in full).
- The destruction and stealing of cultural artifacts;
- Forcibly transferring and filtering children of Ukraine to Russia;
- Destruction of maternity hospitals, medical facilities, power grid, all with the goal to bring suffering and inflict on Ukrainians conditions of life;
These are elements of the crime of genocide[0]. You might not like that reality, but that's what's happening. It's not about the number of civilian casualties - the Nazi Germany was committing genocide before the Final Solution. I'm not even addressing war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Just speaking of Genocide.
What baffles me is that it's like you don't grasp the scale of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, where 700.000+ children were kidnapped by Russians, there are more than 10.000.000 refugees, and God only knows how many were filtered in Russia.
> I don’t understand this part. “To make a case” means to present arguments. You don’t present arguments for sanctions with saying “sanctions”.
The point I was making is that Sanctions are already an example of collective responsibility. I wasn't making a case for Sanctions, that's self evident by many laws, such as International Law, UN Charter, etc.
First of all, there is a way. See EU sanctions. They are targeted because there was an effort put in identifying the accomplices and finding the appropriate way to sanction them precisely. Second, by even contemplating the idea of punishing the innocent by applying the principle of collective responsibility you put yourself on the same level as Russian supporters of war. They do exactly the same to justify the war.
> Denial of Ukraine's existence as a sovereign country and as a people.
This is factually not correct. Russia recognizes Ukrainian ethnicity and Ukrainian language (see e.g. the annexation paperwork) and currently accepts existence of Ukraine as a sovereign non-aligned state. That’s literally their proposal for peace.
> The destruction and stealing of cultural artifacts;
Probably war crime, but not genocide. Ukraine wasn’t particularly careful about cultural artifacts in Russia too.
> Forcibly transferring and filtering children of Ukraine to Russia;
That’s complicated. They did move Ukrainian children from the war zone into Russia. It doesn’t constitute genocide obviously (they received proper care), but may constitute crime in some cases.
> Destruction of maternity hospitals, medical facilities, power grid
War crime. Not genocide.
>These are elements of the crime of genocide[0].
You missed the most important part. The definition actually starts with intent: following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such
Russia does not have an intent to destroy Ukrainians as a nation or ethnicity. Without intent every war would be a genocide. E.g. Americans did bomb a hospital in Afghanistan and did kill civilians.
I am aware of the scale of what’s going on there. More than you think.
>700.000+ children were kidnapped by Russians
This number is off by orders of magnitude.
>The point I was making is that Sanctions are already an example of collective responsibility.
Not exactly. They target state and certain actors. Yes, that may make life of ordinary people less comfortable, but this is not the same as when they are applied to a specific person or entity without due process.
I'm not talking about sanctioning individuals, I'm talking about sanctioning Russia - visa bans, economic sanctions, seizing assets of the Russian state. That affects people, not a select group of individuals. There were additional sanctions for particular individuals, as you stated.
> This is factually not correct. Russia recognizes Ukrainian ethnicity and Ukrainian language
I can't believe I'm still arguing this in 2025, but here we are, from the dictator himself:
> Vladimir Putin reportedly claimed that “Ukraine is not even a state! What is Ukraine? A part of its territory is [in] Eastern Europe, but a[nother] part, a considerable one, was a gift from us!” In his March 18, 2014 speech marking the annexation of Crimea, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities. Ancient Rus’ is our common source and we cannot live without each other.”[0]
> That’s complicated. They did move Ukrainian children from the war zone into Russia.
It's not complicated at all, they kidnapped children from Ukraine, their state. They could have allowed for humanitarian corridors, they could have requested the UN, or other organizations to take the children back to their parents and guardian, they could have ALREADY RETURNED THE CHILDREN - SINCE 2022.
I'm sorry, but it's absurd that you're trying to wash one of the most despicable crimes of genocide.
> War crime. Not genocide.
According to the definition: > Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;[1]
Russia didn't destroy and brag about destroying Ukraine's power grid in the winter to bring them good health. You don't destroy medical facilities, including children's hospitals and maternity wards to help them thrive.
> You missed the most important part. The definition actually starts with intent: following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such
No, it's YOU WHO MISSED THE IMPORTANT part by disregarding Putin's speech with the intent to wipe out Ukraine:
" In a televised address to the nation, Putin explicitly denied that Ukraine had ever had “real statehood,” and said the country was an integral part of Russia’s “own history, culture, spiritual space.”"[2]
There's the intent, Putin own admission of genocide is more than enough, the problem is that it was when he thought Russia could take Kyiv in a few days.
[0] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine...
[1] https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
[2] https://time.com/6150046/ukraine-statehood-russia-history-pu...
Politicians often say a lot of provocative things in interviews. What matters is what they actually do and whether they do it consistently. You pick one quote from an the interview and think it is more important than all the legislative framework and all the peace proposals that were written on paper. I disagree and will not continue, since you are apparently arguing based on beliefs not based on knowledge of the facts.
>It's not complicated at all, they kidnapped children from Ukraine, their state.
As I said, your number of 700k children is wrong by order of magnitude. That number comes from a Russian source, Ukraine has a database of 20k confirmed cases (could be higher by now). Russia annexed Ukrainian territories and offered citizenship to inhabitants. Russia also hosted a number of pro-Russian Ukrainian refugees, some of them children who left the war zone with their parents and preferred to stay in Russia (yes, those people do exist and there's a lot of them). I do not deny abductions, I just say that that number includes very different cases and taking them into account will paint very different picture from "genocide".
>There's the intent, Putin own admission of genocide is more than enough
You are making up things. He did not admit genocide. I did watch that televised address, you just make conclusions from news reports.
Well, it was in the national address when the second invasion kicked off in 2022. So we have the denial of the Ukrainian state and people, while launching an invasion, trying to capture the capital to topple and kill the government - how aren't these actions following the words?
What is more important are the actions - 3 years of bringing death and misery to Ukrainians, all while preaching they're either Russians or they're nothing. There was no peace proposal from Russia that was ever taken seriously by Russia itself.
These are facts.
> As I said, your number of 700k children is wrong by order of magnitude.
The number is between 25.000 and 700.000 - but what's absurd is that you're arguing about thousands of Children. Doesn't matter if it's 100, 1000 or 10.000, it's the genocidal intent behind it to transfer and filter Children from one country to another.
Russia threatened Ukrainians to accept passports or to be ejected from their homes, it's yet another instance of genocide/crimes against humanity[0]
Why were these people, children, women, and the elderly displaced across Russia and not given a safe passage back to their homeland? It's just like when Russia allied with the Nazis to help with the genocide of Poland, by removing people from their land and displacing them far away.
> Russia also hosted a number of pro-Russian Ukrainian refugees
Who are you to say if refugees that have no way to go but to the land of the aggressor are pro-Russian Ukrainians?! What kind of fcked up mentality is that?
You keep trying to wash genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by arguing about numbers, and hypothetical political, and by trying to change the definitions of the UN - of which Russia is part of. In reality, what defines these horrific crimes is their actions and intent.
> He did not admit genocide. I did watch that televised address,
Well, you need to watch it again.
We're done here.
I, as an individual, can refuse to do business with any company I please, on the basis of my beliefs and moral convictions (and on the basis of the likelihood of them being complicit in something I oppose to).
If you prefer one brand of ice cream over the other, is this a collective punishment of the other company (looking at you, Ben & Jerry)?
US economy contributes to endless wars in Middle East, crippling economies in South American countries. Commenting in HackerNews is bad taste at best.
Russia is highly centralized, so whoever operates in Russia has to not only abide by its laws, but actively collaborate with the regime.
There is still a fair amount of dissent and chaos in US business circles.
But business leaders are shamefully silent in US indeed. I'd hope bg and pg and zuck and besos to take clear positions on tariffs, for instance.
You are saying this based on what? Do you have any relationship to Russia, have you visited it after the war started or you just read the newspapers?
Yes, there are some businesses receiving the direct calls from the government and I'm aware of several examples where they just tell "f. off" to a very senior official. Among the rest the level of cooperation or resistance varies from unstoppable patriotic propaganda and fundraising to CEO tipping employees about military recruiters during the mobilization campaign and relocating staff abroad. Russia is certainly not as centralized as you might think.
Not sure why there are so many salty comments. Russian invasion of Ukraine represents a regression to colonialism.
As OP points out you can boycott Hacker News too if you want to take a principled stance on any group tangenially linked to colonialism.
Reads to me like the people have no problem with the idea of boycotting countries or products one doesn't align with as much as OP's apparent hypocrisy and selective application of his reasons.
But I say "apparent" because he doesn't flat out condemn invasions. He says he had no problem with the smaller scale invasion going back to 2014, or the many other invasions around the world, they were fine. Only the "full-fledged invasion of Ukraine" in 2022 crossed the boycott threshold for him.
This could leave a bad taste at best for some fellow HNers.
> This is the biggest Russian IT resource that contributes to the Russian economy and thus to the war effort.
> I unpublished everything there and asked to delete my account in Feb, 2022, just after the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started
Habr contributes money to Russia and their war effort. OP (@sam_lowry_) was fine with this and implicitly Russia's lower scale invasion until 2022 when the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine started.
Otherwise half of threads will be about Nazis by Godwin's law [0]
Like this one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the money quote for me.
Kind of iffy claim when you're on GCP, especially since the current president wrecked the data protection agency that gave US corporations a veneer of legality.
No need to bother with greedy investors. Just working directly with customers and solving a problem (created by incompetence at MS).
Only downside here is that MS at any time _could_ decide to improve their shitty built in wiki. Might take years and you won’t feel it until your revenue starts to drop.
Or MS goes completely anti-competitive/anti-trust and buys out the competition. Entrepreneur here gets paid out but customers left scrambling to migrate data out or shift over.
Depression and dread is coming through me. All the repressed memories are flowing back up.
Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.
And to be fair, you can just tell Teams to open in the desktop office apps by default (settings > Files and Links), and Outlook has a little radio button to turn off whether meetings are also Teams meetings. All the enterprise productivity apps seem to accumulate complexity and resultant scar tissue, usually in the form of busy settings or painfully opinionated defaults - painful when the defaults don't optimize for your use case.
A lot of open source projects insist on using Telegram or Matrix instead of an issue tracker or forum and have the same problem. If you want to spend 90% of your time answering the same questions again and again, be my guest, but as a user I won't do more than a cursory search of chat history, and won't try to follow intermingled replies anymore. I will simply ask again and explicitly say "the chat history on this can't be followed and there's no forum, so...".
Professionally I also won't try to keep up with most chats. Someone mentions me on something and if I can't read their one message to get the context needed, I just reply with "I'm not readinf everything said in the last X days. What's the context?" and make them re-explain it.
My company even recently added AI assist tools for our chats, and I occasionally will use it to summarize everything I haven't read just to see if there's any topics I should know about. But I won't use it to try and get context for a question I've been asked.
The chat systems are basically like being in a physical room with everyone coming and going and having their own verbal conversations around you. I'll pay equally as much attention and effort ignoring it to get work done, and ask people to repeat things if they suddenly pull me into a conversation. I'll also drift out of conversations the same, but now they can't see me going back to work to take the hint its time to wrap it up.
Once you do, you will realize the DB grows REALLY fast
Features it had 6 years ago that I desperately missed when we had to start using Teams are pretty much all gone now. Its such a slap in the face of how Enshittified it's become.
Could you point out what has changed? I guess calls are called "huddles" now for some reason, that's a bit weird but doesn't really bother me.
I now have to constantly manually check in a special tab to see if someone ACKed my message.
They're fixing that by replacing Outlook with "New Outlook" which is a terrible half-clone of its predecessor.
For me, it's basically exactly the same except the sidebar is now wider because of the multi-slack thing, and the home/DMs/activity nonsense bar, which I could do without.
Otherwise it's just channels with messages in them. Which has improved since I started using it, when there were no threads or reactjis.
The bad thing: it all moves to private messages
What was the reasonable thing that they should have done?
The there's the whole mess when using multiple a mobile and desktop app. It often happens that I get slack message notifications from my phone in my pocket while the open desktop app sometimes takes another minute to get the same message. The same happens with huddles, why does my phone ring abut not my desktop app? And one of my colleagues even has the problem that when he picks up a call on the desktop it opens up on his phone.
I agree that teams is a mess, but IMO mainly because of the mess that is calendering... around it. The calls and messaging parts are OK. In contrast slack can't even get it's core competency right.
A business owner might conclude 'ah, less time jawing, more time working', but hardly the case. In fact, I think that was a big factor in what ultimately killed the company off a couple years later - through both people literally quitting over it, and a complete breakdown in communication.
The other competitor to Slack is Discord, and if you remove the playful "gamer" elements I think it'd be a lot less jarring to people used to Slack, because they follow a lot of similar UX and design patterns.
At one point Discord tried to rebrand into something a bit more serious but it didn't work, but I think they should try again; create a Discord Pro or something like that, get the certifications, add SSO support, etc.
These moves are always penny wise and pound foolish if you ask me.
Disrupting the space now doesn't seem any less hard now than it was 10 years ago when slack and zoom did it.
But yes, if your point is that it's hard, then indeed. It is hard. Should that stop someone? No!
And something being harder stopping your from doing it is ubiquitous in life. It's a good skill to know how much effort something will take and weighing the risks and rewards.
What is it about enterprise IT that is preventing us from building a better alternative?
How can we get around those hurdles?
The hurdle is producing a full suite covering everything Microsoft sells in one package, which seems impractical without their funding to start with.
Enterprise chat might not be a commodity quite yet - SSO, DLP/data classification, auditing, retention, compliance checkboxes - but these seem insurmountable at first glance to get a FOSS solution to reach a viable enterprise feature matrix.
Killer features as a moat might help, but while almost everyone uses chat, everyone probably uses chat differently, so that means discovering killer features for a niche and trying to own that segment before expanding. Unfortunately this is the "Draw the rest of the owl" part, because while I have quibbles with chat apps, I struggle to envision a chat app that does something radically different than any other chat app.
Your comment is just fake empathy noise.
There are already open source alternatives built for both Teams and Zoom. The issue is that open source projects don’t have salespeople that will promise compliance and integration (whether or not they can actually deliver).
Hard disagree on the "only" modifier. Surely integration helped, but I've used Zoom, and I hate it every time I have to use it. Teams is comparatively a godsend.
It basically works the same as every competitor, I'm not really sure why you'd need to do things 'any other way'.
Granted plenty of office drones can't imagine / use much else at this point.
Teams is not popular because it does something that no other app does. It is popular (IMO) because it does everything (calendar, chat, videoconference, and wiki - all of it badly) and, if you're a Windows user, you're paying for it one way or another.
All that Microsoft had to do during the pandemic (which is when they unleashed Teams) was to approach a higher-up and pitch "why would you pay for Slack and Zoom when our product does the same? And since it's already included in your Office license you're already paying for it, so really, you're throwing money away". I know me and my friends complained about it, but so what? The company saved on licensing costs and IT people are always complaining anyway. And while the bundling of Teams got Microsoft in trouble in the EU [1] they still haven't paid any fines for it (I think) so it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have done that.
</rant>
[1] https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-union...
Oracle have a dark team working on what will become "Oracle Team Fusion".
I'm looking forward to the competition.
In what?
- operating systems? The Mac has over a 20% market share in the US. I haven’t used a Windows PC for work since 2017. I’ve used Macs across 4 companies
- Office Suites? GSuite has a higher market share and the company I work for now uses it.
- Chat? Slack has 25%.
Absolutely no one in the industry is afraid of Microsoft anymore
Just a quick internet search shows that PowerBI has around a 25% market share.
Doesn't mean it won't sell, congrats to OP, but god I hate everything about Teams.
Right now it's showing me calendar items with times that are wrong, they'll switch to the right time in a few minutes... probably. I didn't change time zones, I didn't do anything, it's just something wonky about their new calendar setup. If the time updates I'll click to open the calendar item, and it won't show me the join link to join the meeting ... well eventually it will pop in there, maybe.
It's not just annoyingly designed and slow, it's constantly buggy with new and exciting bugs every few months.
Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?
I can't share photos in a channel w/ a customer. Why? No idea. There's no feedback at all. Drag and drop simply fails. Uploads won't go. I went through support and there's 5 different places in the admin to check. All of them seem fine.
It's amazing as outlook used to be consistent, but now that its calendar is tied to teams too... it has inherited the suck.
Video conferencing for me Teams isn't the issue as much as it is a compromise when it comes to everything else.
Do you have a laundry list?
I think that causes some of the issues you are mentioning.
Now I don’t personally see any communication app like slack that is any better than it. They all sort of suck but I feel like I had a better time with IRC apps back in the day than I do with modern communication apps.
These are...identical apps. That's the point of packaging with electron.
And then there’s the “helpful” way teams resets the calendar view: let’s say I’m going back through calls from last week to see how long they took. In Teams, I go back a week, click the calendar item, record the time in my app, then go back to the calendar view and…I’m on this week. Neat. Intuitive.
Are they on a VPN to another time zone?
And we're not talking edge cases, just "It's been solved since the 60s" meat and potato use cases.
it's because they hired "frontend" developers to develop these features, likely someone with little actual compsci experience, and have little to no room to make the feature and under a tight deadline.
Tell me more about "frontend" developers please.
I contacted support two weeks ago. So far they have asked me to check the Teams admin recycle bin (3 days) and then the SharePoint recycle bin (7 day). I had shared screenshots of both of these in the initial support request, both are empty.
Only 3 people have admin rights in the company, one of us deleted the channels, and even if we did there's supposed to be a 93 day recovery window. But they're just....gone.
I asked for them to escalate 3 days ago. No reply.
Teams is a different beast
Source: I run a SAAS where we have to unfortunately support integrating with MS Teams (for training etc).
Jira on ghe other hand.....
Features that worked in mIRC in the 1990s are broken, like sending messages. Right this second if I click to reply to someone's message, I can't add a message in Japanese unless I copy-paste it in. This happens every few months. I can't tag people who have non-English names reliably.
It crashes my browser. There are weird security settings, and when you have multiple environments, it is completely unusable without having multiple browsers. Sometimes you can't log in without clearing your cache completely.
It is sheerly anti-organic, adding features no one wants.
I'm literally taking time out of my vacation to complain about it, fml.
I would also not that I've never been a huge power user or rely heavily on it for anything really outside of calendar or channel conversations so for me, on a basic level it works.
You can truly create some workflow nightmares and there's nothing in the app to discourage it apart from org culture.
That can be said about any tool/platform that gives near complete control to the user.
As far as a tool, it's perfectly fine. A lot of my bad feelings came as a result of wanting it to be simple ("What should I work on next") but it being twisted into a series of incantations and rituals by those looking to bend it for the purposes of more and more intricate views into how we spend every moment of our day.
The whole channel experience is horrible and really degrades any attempt at having open communications in a company.
However, if you are a "flat" company that does everything in the open, Teams is going to work against you; this is one of the qualities that makes Slack great. Its whole approach pushes more things out into the open for more collaboration.
I worked for a client once that refused to let us build and manage databases for things that needed it. The one option in the end that we could get approved was using Microsoft SharePoint lists and CRUD'ing to them through the Javascript API.
A lot of problems have lame constraints, but having an option at all to solve them is pretty nice.
None of that mentions the terrible UX(why do emojis take 10s to load?). When your company is remote first, it's a complete disaster.
I only have to use teams as a contractor thankfully for a single client. Not a single meeting I’ve had in two years of using it has been free of someone having some kind of issue specific to teams itself, including me.
Who the heck is Microsoft Loop for anyways?
Me: can dynamic content such as inventory feeds be included in wiki pages?
*AI Assistant is typing*
AI: Hmm, I couldn't find an answer to that. Can you rephrase your question or give me a bit more detail?
And $790+ annually and still can't remove the "powered by Perfect wiki" logo! It takes $2390 before you're unsticking that sucker!
I hope this becomes more common -- laid off engineers starting their own digital products.
From my perspective, this is excellent product.
As the files are all stored in Google Drive, so there's no vendor lock-in.
The documentation site is also made with their product: https://docs.youneedawiki.com/
Except for Google Drive
And because Google does not participate in standardization efforts for document formats, the exported Docs/Sheets/Slides files you get from GDrive won't have any of Google's admittedly cool features, they're simply discarded when exporting.
The common denominator in the room is probably so high for a lot of tech people that it's easy to be dismissive, but this looks like giving people what they think they want - the oracle. It's impressive looking for a lot of users, and impressive for certain people to brag about connecting and setting up for a team.
I think there's a mid to bottom market desire for this stuff, even if it doesn't survive a possible future bubble pop. Call it selling shovels in a gold rush.
"Avoid investors! Avoid investors. Avoid investors for as long as humanly possible."
As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia
That being said, I find it a bit discouraging that small-team passion projects with even the best product-market fit and minimal marketing spend only reach this level of profitability after 5 years.
Like, I can work at a FAANG, coast, make no real contribution to society and collect a 400K/yr check. Or I could go all in on a cool idea and risk getting no customers. Option 2 sounds more fun, but it's still so much stress and uncertainty for little payoff.
Do others feel the same?
99% of the world is not able to just go work at a FAANG. That 99% also earn way less than 250K a year.
In effect you've earned a $250k income _and_ ~$1 million dollar asset you can sell later (one which will also likely keep growing in value well above most other assets return rates).
The reality is a bit more complicated, but there is definitely significant value in 100% equity in a successful business that will often be larger than your paycheck.
And that's before you get into the flexibility and other upsides of being your own boss, the long-term CV & reputation benefits of this for whatever else you want to do next, etc etc.
> That’s when I decided to dive deeper into analyzing what other problems Microsoft Teams users were facing and what kind of service I could offer them. I was confident I’d find a niche because the traffic and activity on the marketplace were high — a ready-made customer base was just in front of me. I just needed to find a product idea that would solve a real problem.
> I started reading forums, comments, and online discussions. It turned out the built-in Wiki in Microsoft Teams annoyed users really a lot. It was slow and inconvenient.
OP has done actual research and found a real problem to solve. Amy Hoy has been popularizing this exact approach under "Sales Safari", but it boils down to "find your user's watering holes and listen to what they complain about to each other."
What do these people do?? Like what is a job that requires you to spend most of your time in an internal chat app? Every job I can think of either has its own "main" software, involves doing things IRL or, even if it is manily a communication job, that communication happens with a wide variety of outside people, meaning you probably use email a lot more than Teams.
If you're in-office you might do some of these less often. If you're fully remote and your org uses Teams, this is what goes on.
gadders•7mo ago
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
freetonik•7mo ago
gadders•7mo ago
dmos62•7mo ago
catlikesshrimp•7mo ago
-__---____-ZXyw•7mo ago
The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
It's heady times, anyway, that's for sure.
-__---____-ZXyw•7mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/active
to see flagged stuff too is great. Not sure if you see everything, but I definitely am more interested in a less curated frontpage. I don't find ignoring headlines I'm not interested in to be such a major affront to my sensibilities.
bigstrat2003•7mo ago
Speaking personally, I flag the political posts and not the AI posts because the political posts always turn into flame wars. AI posts do not, so I leave them be (even though I don't personally like them).
-__---____-ZXyw•7mo ago
No judgment, just curious. I presume you've reflected on the idea that one person's flame war is another person's gentle exchange of opinion.
I can see what you're saying though, and I have seen discussions where I've thought "oook, don't really understand what these people think they're achieving", but I wouldn't say I've seen anything horrendous. I mean, individual horrific comments get quickly flagged to death. Why bother flagging the whole topic? Why not simply not investigate those threads?
satvikpendem•7mo ago
stevage•7mo ago
There was a great post by someone who did some analysis on HN content, just yesterday. Can't remember keywords to find it though.
sochix•7mo ago
gadders•7mo ago
YetAnotherNick•7mo ago
sochix•7mo ago
sirfz•7mo ago
YetAnotherNick•7mo ago
bboygravity•7mo ago
Or. If you like the idea of having no boss, no standup meetings, no Jira, no commutes, no open office plan, etc.
0_____0•7mo ago
naughtyfinch•7mo ago
sochix•7mo ago
jll29•7mo ago
RandomWorker•7mo ago
whiplash451•7mo ago
sochix•7mo ago
pac0•7mo ago
dustincoates•7mo ago
> All of this — without investors, [without] a 20-person team, or [without] a “Series A” round.
Later on, the author says:
> Currently, the team behind Perfect Wiki is just two people.
jen729w•7mo ago
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
motorest•7mo ago
I think you might be projecting to try not to feel bad for your life choices. A telltale sign is the way you try to claim every single engineer employed by half a dozen companies is unhappy. This is obviously unrealistic. I personally know quite a few of them and they are having the time of their life. Keep in mind that you hear far more reports from those who quit/were fired than from those who are happily chugging along in their role.
cactusplant7374•7mo ago
motorest•7mo ago
Is it though?
The FANG engineers I know have been leveraging internal transfers to relocate abroad to places like Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, etc. Not to mention business trips abroad for all kind of things like hiring events.
> Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
This is not a generational thing. This is about objectively comparing jobs. Accusing each and every single FANG engineer of being miserable whereas a random low-paying role is the envy of the world screams the fox and the grapes.
cactusplant7374•7mo ago
close04•7mo ago
Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than the more realistic one that those people might be in a "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is impressively accurate.
motorest•7mo ago
Not really. I've worked at a FANG for quite a few years and I can tell you from my own personal experience that in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The misery imagined by OP has no bearing in reality, and screams projection. I see it a lot, sadly. People are desperate to get in and when they don't then they resort to shit-talking things to try to make themselves feel better.
jen729w•7mo ago
deadbabe•7mo ago
In contrast I know plenty of people who quit jobs and are now working way harder to earn less at the expense of those around them, resulting in broken homes, divorces, and all around miserable lives, all pinned on the hope they will get their big break and it will all be worth it. They are very pathetic but can’t see it because they are so wrapped up in some foolish idea that isn’t going anywhere.
cactusplant7374•7mo ago
deadbabe•7mo ago
And traveling the world is a bit overrated. It’s cool to change scenery, but at the end of the day, you’re just doing the same work you always do, just in a different country. You’re just running away from the fact you have nothing worth settling down a bit for, no where to truly call home and invest in a local community, just a drifter chasing their next hit of stimulus. Eventually, you run out of truly novel places to go. You’re not giving back to a community and making your mark, you’re just leeching off the lifestyles built by people who chose to settle in one place. If everyone was a traveler, there wouldn’t be anything worth traveling to.
cactusplant7374•7mo ago
Do office workers do anything to help other countries develop? Or does all their effort go towards making their rich friends richer?
darkwater•7mo ago
gadders•7mo ago
And $250k is the current point on the graph - it could be $1m this time next year.
sochix•7mo ago
cpach•7mo ago
apercu•7mo ago
maaaaattttt•7mo ago
He chances on a Mastiff as powerful as handsome Fat, sleek, who had strayed by chance.
To attack him, quarter him Lord Wolf would gladly do;
But he would have to join battle,
And the Mastiff was of such stature As to defend himself with ease.
So the Wolf approaches him humbly, Enters into conversation, compliments him On his girth, which he admires.
"You fine sir could be as fat as me" Replied the Dog.
"Leave the woods, you would do well: Your like are miserable there,
Dunces, hairshirts and poor devils, Their estate is to die of hunger.
Every bite of food is hard won By dint of fang and claw. For what?
Follow me: you would have a fate much better." The Wolf replied, "What must I do?"
"Almost nothing," replied the Dog, "Chase beggars And people carrying sticks;
To flatter those at home, to please one's Master: In exchange your salary would be
A great many scraps of all kinds: Bones of chickens, bones of pigeons,
Without mentioning many caresses." The Wolf already imagines a happiness
Which makes him teary from fondness. Walking along, he saw the bald neck of the Dog.
"What is it there?" he said. - Nothing. - What? Nothing? - Nothing much.
But still? - The collar by which I am tethered Is perhaps the cause of what you see.
"Tethered?" said the Wolf: So you do not run Wherever you want? - Not always; but what matters it?
It matters so much that all your meals I would not want in any wise or manner,
And would not desire even a treasure at such price." This said, master Wolf runs off, and he runneth still.
— Jean de La Fontain, 1668 ( translated by Tad Boniecki)
Y_Y•7mo ago
tomhow•7mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cornholio•7mo ago
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
pjc50•7mo ago
Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.
detourdog•7mo ago
My guess is this will always be a moving target. The consumer will choose models based on their value proposition.
We all have to start our sandcastle somewhere.
Perz1val•7mo ago
kryogen1c•7mo ago
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
vintagedave•7mo ago
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
[0]: https://daveon.design/what-are-you-optimising-for.html and https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
[1]: https://daveon.design/adventures-making-vegemite.html
showerst•7mo ago
bigbuppo•7mo ago
catlikesshrimp•7mo ago
If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!
kaonwarb•7mo ago
mbreese•7mo ago
If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of interaction. Please think about doing it. I’d love to hear the story!
gus_massa•7mo ago
Do you have a blog or Instagram or something with your work? Non computer projects sometimes get traction here if they are unusual or interesting or are made by a regular or whatever criteria the hivemind uses to choose the upvotes.
I'd like to take a look, in case there is one where my spider sense feels that can farm some karma. (Obliviously, my spider sense can fail!)
Take a look at https://hn.algolia.com/?q=woodworking
deadbabe•7mo ago
bredren•7mo ago
Things that previously could be taken for granted now require applied thought and physical capability.
For example, people regularly ask how to find reasonably priced housing in /r/askPortland. The OP usually mentions constant looking at Zillow and other sites / apps.
Very, very few good deals will be found there because the marketplace is too fluid and too accessible. You gotta hustle on the ground in the neighborhood you want to be in to find the best housing compromises.
Used to be you could wing it on craigslist.
From concert tickets to new Nike shoes, you want a good seat / common size? How about a nice family campsite?
Well you better have set up automation. It’s to the point where public swim lessons can’t be got without a bot. Unless, you go to the pool and ask about lessons not scheduled on the internet.
It is an absolute hustle, across the minor daily desires of good things and experiences.
Those products rejected by the most motivated get binned into some consultant optimized vertically integrated reseller.
The services get marketed heavily with dark patterns just to cancel their membership.
It is tough out there.
deadbabe•7mo ago
devsda•7mo ago
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
bredren•7mo ago
The genre of content is regularly abused by hypesters. There is a forum / podcast dedicated to this kind of success story and it is just massive cheerleading and success bias.
If you go look for it, you’ll find it.
HN readers achieving this success either don’t need or don’t want the attention that might come with this kind of content marketing.
It’s much more interesting to learn about detailed technical solutions engineering and the SOTA.
camdenreslink•7mo ago
heromal•7mo ago
stevoski•7mo ago
People will reproduce what you made - to the pixel.
It is really, really frustrating. Founders who have experienced this learn to avoid sharing the stories on HN, etc.