I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors

My personal favorite UX-failure-of-the-moment in Teams: If I open the teams tab > Browse, it shows a big list of company-wide channels that I could join. There's a search box, but unlike any normal search box, it only does a prefix search, so if your channel is named "some test channel", and you search for "test", it doesn't find it! Several times I've given up at guessing the right channel name and had to ask coworkers to tell me the exact name in order to join.

Ah, that's probably related to the bug I'm seeing where I've got my Teams calendar synced to my phone, but about half of the events show up an hour later or earlier.

Isn't getting this right, like, _the_ purpose of a calendar?

I was once 5 hours late to a fairly important meeting because the Teams calendar was showing the time in UTC instead of my zone. Never determined why.

For thirty years now, the world knows that the last company to trust calendars and mail is Microsoft and yet they are all over the place. I have lost all hope for humanity‘s future.

Last week there were so many apps added to my teams that I couldn't see the chats anymore.

This seems to be a very common response. I definitely believe it but Teams seems ok to me - can make video calls and do text chats. That is all I need it to do, really. Maybe I just haven't used Zoom enough to know what I am missing.

We're all-in on Teams PLUS have management pushing for "service level objectives" on response time. It's impossible to stay on top of the stream of consciousness posts, impossible to find anything you previously answered or value you know is in there somewhere, impossible to measure response time or take ownership of... (what? a chat?). MS keeps cramming poorly thought out "AI-first" features without addressing things like cameras and mics that randomly stop working, blue screens in the middle of meetings. It's such a garbage piece of software that's now THE foundational infrastructure for so many companies. You'll save $600K on the financials and lose $6M across all the things that won't directly show: poor customer service, churn, slower everything, individual and team frustration... but your VP of IT doesn't pay for that.

I worked at a company that went through this. Honestly, it changed the entire mood of the company and working there. We went from thousands of messages per day to something like 10 (of those channels I was part of, at least). People just hated it, and only used it if they really, really needed to. No more bouncing of ideas around, no more ribbing, just the desperate 'who do I talk to about accomplishing X, anyone know?'

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 good thing: When you switch from slack to teams, all channel communications go to 0, because the experience is so dreadful, so you don't get 100 channels to read.

The bad thing: it all moves to private messages

I worry about this too. Diversity is a good thing. And when we do email, DNS, Web, calendars, chat, meetings, storage, etc. all on the same platform, how will we operate/communicate when it fails?

Heterogeneous computing environments provide diversity to isolate and contain failures. So when email goes down, we can still chat and meet.

As if slack was any better. I never understand how people accepted this piece of crappy software for regular communication. I mean it has the populate when scrolling behaviour that everyone hates in website design, but somehow it's acceptable for a chat app where looking at past messages is crucial?! I mean you just displayed those messages to me yesterday, why do you need to reload them from the server today. The amount of space saving compared to the bloated mess that your electron app is can't be worth it?! That would be not so infuriating if the search wasn't so crappy that it's often easier to find things by scrolling.

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.

It's gonna be terrible. There are so many teams integrations with github, jira, our deployments etc that took busywork off my plate when I was at a slack company and has slowed down me down a ton when I went to a teams org. Sorry man.

I just had to use Slack again after 6 years, and it's incredible how much worse its gotten. Honestly I don't know how they managed to make an industry leading tool actively worse by so much that its now _worse_ than Teams.

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.

Sorry if I'm ignorant, but how can slack cost 600k/year? I doubt they wouldn't give some form of deal for bigger companies. I know integrations can sometimes suck up money, but 600k is insane

That is exactly the thing. It never just works. There are new bugs plaguing our company on a daily basis. And they change daily. Can't share screen today. can't unmute. unread messages will never become read. Can't call anyone. Meeting invites only updated for one attendee. meeting alerts don't pop up. trying to open basic windows takes upwards of a full minute(workflows panel for example). these are just some of the things from the last couple weeks. The problem is that it's never a consistent experience. It becomes a time sink of eternal FOMO because it cannot be trusted.

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.

> but it does just quietly get the job done.

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.

I've worked at companies that use both Slack and Teams, and the chat culture that Slack creates is hugely different than Teams. Have you experienced both? Teams chat rooms are ghost towns compared to Slack. The UX of teams discourages chat, syncing is a mess so ordering is all funky, and good luck finding anything written in the past. Slack is so good at search that we have channels with just feeds of auto-generated information, and there's a good chance anything you need to know is in one of those channels. (company is 800+ people doing 300m ARR)

I think on HN, it might be because smaller teams are using it and aren't actually managing it properly. I get the impression they are just rolling it out as a free for all and not restricting who can add apps and channels etc. Of course it will turn into a mess if you allow that.

Do you use it for anything other than team meetings?

it is like Jira, everyone loves to shit on it :)

You must not use it that much.

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 don't understand all the hate for Jira to be honest. I've used it at various companies and I think it's fine. You can absolutely customize Jira into a monstrosity that sucks to use, but that's true of many ticket systems. I think that the out of the box experience is reasonable though.

If you're in a company with a very top-down model/mentality, Teams is fine. Your comms are mostly in small groups or DMs, which Teams seems to really push users towards.

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.

jira and confluence are annoying but they do their job, somewhat. You don't like them but you don't hate them

Teams is a different beast

Depends on what you compare to. Jira and Confluence at least work even if chubby and get only a bit of your attention.

Are you talking about Indie Hackers? Why speak in riddles, it isn't a secret.

I wouldn't mind if it was "Here is how I got to $250k ARR with my self-funded AI startup" :-)

I prefer AI both raw material and recycled garbage than the cryptocoin epidemy from recent years.

To be fair, more than 1/3 of my technical thoughts involve ai these days.

Yeah, it's a Trump-related political outrage, or it's an AI thing. I feel anecdotally like the AI-related things are even more prevalent, but would love to see some data on it.

The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.

It's heady times, anyway, that's for sure.

You might be surprised what you could contribute.

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

I would upvote interesting Show HNs about, say, raising pigs! I like learning from folks with firsthand knowledge.

> from pigs I raised.

If you rose them at home, contrary to a dedicated farm, I want to hear about it!

I’d take a 100 random IT folks with gardens over a single growth hacker, crypto bro, or “I created an ai bot to do (X)” ChatGPT wrapper site shill.

[sorry for the late reply]

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

I was not expecting this comment here but it tracks with my observations.

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.

Yes, but maybe this rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like every week we would have a story like yours, an essay from Patio11 on how much money Bingo Cards are making, Nathan Barry talking about how a book launch earnt him $50k in a weekend, Brennan Dunn launching a course for 5 figures etc.

> AI looks to many as a wall buster

Hmm. I see a lot of people trying to build products on top of models trained by other people, which seems very vulnerable.

You're welcome - it's inspiring :) Thanks for the write up!

what else is there then? google, microsoft, apple, some chinese companies. can't think of anything else with a large market for apps.

The hidden cost is also the removal of competition. Google get more heat for browser "monopoly" when they even provide a free browser base for others to customise, and Microsoft gets almost none for incredibly overwhelmingly anti-competitive behaviour around lock-in to Office, Teams, Sharepoint, Azure.

Yup. That's because they had actual competition in the space. Throwing a (bad) Slack clone for free was a way of preserving and extending their monopoly.

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.

Jetbrains rider blows Visual Studio out of the water, but it's not Microsoft, so our company doesn't use it.

as someone who works in visual studio on c# every day of my life, I have the opposite opinion. it's awful

There is nothing in google drive that has a lockin. You can move files anywhere anytime - local disk, dropbox, S3 etc.

Sure, but the product is targeted at people who already use Google Drive.

Surely they meant indirectly. I suppose any Russian company that pays taxes could be said to do so.

By my count they mention AI seventeen times on their homepage.

https://perfectwikiforteams.com/

Judging from their web site, so called AI is at the center of their offering.

https://perfectwikiforteams.com/