The "Teams (new)" is absurd. Have we not learned not to name things this way by now? I say this as someone as guilty as anyone of having created an iterative series of files with "Final_1.txt", "Final_2.txt", "Final_1-new.txt" suffixes in times of mental sketch-padding. I would never release a product into the wild with any of those in the title, though.
Tbh, I prefer the Teams (new) and Teams (classic) naming. It's infinitely better than the naming they were doing before, which is they were named the exact same in the menu, but were entirely different versions.
The same goes for other office products too. For example, there is a business version of Outlook and a personal (?) version of it. They have the same name, the interface is similar enough to not be sure what you have, and the only reliable way to know is to check where you downloaded the installer from. Some business accounts apparently do not work with the personal version. Colleagues were just standing clueless as to why their company office accounts could not sync when they had to reinstall stuff on a computer.
I don't understand why they keep doing this. I guess because the names are recognisable enough that they want them advertised as such for both use-cases, but it is confusing.
In my cynical frame of mind I imagine those execs then golden-parachuted off to Google and were responsible for the Google Pay, GPay, and Google Wallet debacle.
Communicator -> Lync (after the computer system of a dystopian videogame?) -> Skype for Business (because everybody knew Skype, so let's make this completely unrelated thing) -> Teams.
IMO, the thing that went wrong with Lync->SFB transition was they bought Skype based on the idea that they could do something to merge the code with Lync, but over a year or two found out that that the only value was in the Skype branding, and the code and architecture of it was a dumpster fire. While the whole org was distracted by that, Teams came along and showed them what a rewrite from the ground up could do.
It fucking autoruns by default on my Linux machine and eventually the only way to prevent it from not auto-running is to remove it. I avoid teams now whenever possible and use a browser session if forced to use teams.
Rant on: I use it in-browser on Linux also: Microsoft's security system is horrendous. I have to log into Teams-based client meetings using incognito browser windows because Teams keeps getting into mystery login loops with regular windows. It was working for a while, but I needed to log into Intel for Altera FPGA information. Well Intel uses Microsoft Azure for identity management (I had to log into Microsoft to log into Intel). After I did this, I couldn't attend client meetings anymore. I'm pretty sure the root of the issue is that I have multiple Microsoft identities, and their security model does not handle this case well, or at least it's incomprehensible to me and I don't want to waste any more time on it. Now Microsoft also knows me via github which is screwing it up further. It tries to tie your identity to your phone number, but it will not allow multiple account on a single number. It's a nightmare. Oh yeah, Microsoft also insists on having me install a phone app for identity management, but it doesn't solve any issues (I can't log in) other than wasting my time. This is the only thing I have to use Microsoft for, and the experience sucks. F* Microsoft.
Say what you will about Google, at least I never had these issues.
The state of louisiana has a similar issue with their domain servers - if you have an errant client somewhere, anywhere, that has the wrong password (or whatever their IDS thought was 'fishy',) you get locked out of your desktop in the office. for two years my wife had to call State I.T. every morning to get logged in. Her office locked so no need to log out until quittin time.
i was never able to track down what device it was, we reformatted a couple of laptops, wiped a couple phones.
For some bizarre reason, Microsoft Teams is the registered file association handler for *HTML* files on my (Linux) machine. I have no idea how on earth that happened, but I do not think I did it.
I have the same problem on my Mac since installing Teams. Now Microsoft Update Manager starts every time I boot, even though it's not listed in the boot items. And it always shows that I have an update available ... to Microsoft Update Manager. It's a software ouroboros.
from the command line and it was an ultra-fast search using the index that Spotlight search uses. It's great to find pesky files when trying to rid yourself of an app and can't figure out what's left.
I usually pipe it into a text editor (mdfind 1password | subl), use my editor to put rm or so rm at the beginning of each one, then paste it into terminal to run. That lets me audit the files first as opposed to xargs but I'm sure there's a million ways—the point is mdfind can be useful.
Regardless of the software vendor, it's best to avoid Mac software for end users if the installer requires administrator privileges to run.
If you can't drag and drop an end user application into the Applications folder and have it work, just find another option in the same software category.
The exception would be system utilities that modify the OS.
It's perfectly normal for those to require administrative permission to install.
Microsoft could easily avoid a lot of legal hassle and earn a lot of goodwill if they just offered a version of Windows with nothing but the most basic stuff pre-installed. Hell, just go the typical/custom install that a most other programs have during the initial start up, most people will just select the option that installs Office and the other crap anyway. The people that don't want it will never use it and current resent that you attempt to force them.
How does one decide what constitutes "basic"? Is a password-manager a "basic" feature? If so, then is "Passwords.app" bundled by Microsoft into Windows an unfair advantage because of distribution when compared to "1Password.app"? Ok, then, can Microsoft make a button called "Passwords" in their "Settings.app" and that qualifies as a non-competitive "basic" "Settings" feature?
Everything that came installed on vanilla Windows XP would pretty much work.
By that standard I'm also including Internet Explore 8 since that should be just sufficient enough to download a modern browser of the users choice. /s (but also a little bit serious)
Unfortunately, this doesn't feel true anymore, I have an enterprise version and it's still pushy with its news feed, bing, and other pre-installed stuff.
Installed plenty of Windows 10/11 Pro recently, comes with a whole bunch of stuff that in no way benefits business clients and in many ways will hamper them.
Why should they care about goodwill? Treating customers as they have has made them one of the most profitable companies in the world. People whine and complain about them all the time, but continue to throw barrels of money at them. Goodwill isn't going to improve their profitability.
Teams is a dumpster fire that no one would pay for. But, now that's it's been free and rolled out everywhere, it's a little late for the government to step in.
> Internet Explorer is a dumpster fire that no one would pay for. But, [because] it's free and rolled out everywhere, it's a little late for the government to step in.
I administer a Windows domain at my job that I do 40 hours a week so your assessment of me is just wrong and also offensive.
I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task manager and Teams is still disabled after the restart. It hasn't appeared in the task manager either. This is Windows 10 Pro, so the behavior might be different on different versions/editions of Windows. Also this behavior might be affected by updates. These machines automatically install updates every Saturday, so they're running the latest Windows 10. Even if the setting is reset on a future update, I can create a GPO to disable it or even a scheduled task if I'm not allowed to manage this computer at the domain level.
This is the thing: Windows admins praise Windows when they are running a completely different edition of Windows with different configurable behaviors. It looks a lot different for home users who almost certainly do not even know what a GPO is. And this also raises the suspicion of which exact Windows edition those admins are running on their home computer(s) and how they obtained the license for that...
You haven't re-created the described problem - Teams sets itself to auto-start again after you start it yourself. After all, it's very reasonable that you might want to join the occasional Teams meeting but not want it running after every boot.
I'm not sure if it's a particular version or environment that does this, but at the very least I can't replicate it on my home PC with Teams (personal). If I disable it in the task manager's autostart, it remains disabled if I start Teams. It won't even let me enable "Auto-start" in the Teams settings if it's disabled in the task manager.
not to mention that gp editor is disabled on non pro windows. i think there is some kind of a funky command line or registry hack to enable it. So yeah, I moved on from windows largely because of this force fed software.
Windows licensing is the hardest part of my job. Like if I want to have thin clients running Windows 11 VMs hosted on Windows Server 2022, how do I pay Microsoft so they will let me use the software in this way? I have no idea. I think you need to contact some kind of client services representative at Microsoft in order to figure out the whole licensing thing. By the way if it wasn't clear, I hate all of this. The only good thing about it is that I can make a living by dealing with it so other people don't have to.
Task Scheduler is available on Windows 10 Home. I think of it as "cron for Windows" even though despite being able to schedule the execution of specific tasks, it is really nothing like cron aside from that.
Not sure about other people here but I really liked how autostart used to work in 7 and before - just drop a shortcut in the Start menu folder and you're done. In 10 at some point, in order to have 3rd party software launched at login I had to use task scheduler.
I tried that path back then but it still didn't work for me - no program I tried to put there incl Windows ones was able to launch at the login. I had just entries in the task manager's startup page. Maybe something changed in 11 - dunno
I can guarantee you that the startup folder still works fine, but in some cases you must create the folder.
Microsoft does not screw around with backwards compatibility. There are multiple ways to start applications on launch now, including the user or public user startup folder, registry entries, and via scheduled tasks.
Why do Windows users try so hard to keep defending their OS's shitty behaviors? It's always "you can disable it" (but it might come back automatically after an update), and when you can't disable it (one drive), it's "just don't use it".
I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my default browser either.
I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. They really need a strong hand to rein in all these departments with their own metrics and agendas.
I think the general principle people are operating out of is that: The USER should be the one deciding 1. what gets installed onto their computer, 2. what gets run on the computer and when, and 3. the configuration of their own system. The OS vendor should not be deciding these things, nor the manufacturer of the computer.
It's not enough that we can just ignore or correct these things that are just happening on our own computers without our consent. These things should not be happening to begin with.
Indeed, they've been playing shenanigans with OneDrive, but you can
actually uninstall it now easily. That didn't used to be the case. Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.
I'm pretty sure I solved definitively the Teams autostart problem long ago,
easily enough I can't recall what I did. It's not a problem for me, even on 'Home'
machines.
> Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.
Long, long ago we had names for software that auto-installs and auto enables even after you have removed it: malware, or spyware if it's not very destructive.
> people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
This, is it exactly.
Microsoft makes some very bad decisions, do not get me wrong. I agree with you and I think this is the core of why people complain so vehemently about Microsoft.
> I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
This goes to explain a lot of reactions that Very Online people tend to have to things. There must be a villain and that villain must be irredeemable. Even when, as the Brits would say, "cock-up" is a more likely explanation than "conspiracy."
Why are you so upset that people derive a lot of value from Windows? Enough that they want to keep using it, and defend it because they don't agree with the "everything is broken" meme.
Because like industrial waste, Windows exports problems to other systems.
1. Windows has an absurdly short maximum path length of 260 characters.
2. On Windows, moving files to a temporary directory can fail, if the temporary directory has a longer prefix than the original path.
3. When uninstalling, the python utility "pip" first collects files into a temporary directory, then deletes that temporary directory.
4. To avoid running into MAX_PATH limits, pip doesn't use a normal temp directory. Instead, it makes a temporary directory adjacent to the directory it is removing. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/6029)
5. If pip is interrupted while uninstalling, the adjacent temp directory is never deleted.
So, in order to work around a Windows-only problem, pip stopped using standard file locations, creating a new problem that only existed due to the workaround. And then I'm left trying to figure out why I'm running out of disk space.
The MAX_PATH limit is annoying legacy backwards compatible stuff, but can be avoided by prefixing paths with \\?\ before passing them into the Windows API.
This is something that languages/runtimes with more effort put into portability already handle for you:
Because even if you don't touch Windows (or whatever mediocre malware Microsoft presently peddles) those folks come to you and say stuff like "skype won't start" and lo! it does not start, though after much clicking around and rebooting and trying the obvious things you discover that if you right-click and try "open with skype" on the skype icon then skype will start. That problem at some point disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. Eh, who knows, it's Windows, and there's more science to reading tea leaves or goose entrails.
Then after za'o decades of stories like the above (it is merely the most recent of many) one might wonder how does Microsoft with so many programmers and so much money produce such kusogeware? That continues to waste my time?
You can have your own view. Nobody is taking it away or forcing you to believe otherwise. My point is why are people so upset when someone has a different view or doesn't agree with your personal view on Microsoft?
What? You shouldn't defend bad behaviour regardless of if you derive a lot of value from the same source. A good organization wants to be called out on shitty practices so they improve.
You can make an argument to convince people of your personal point of view, but there is no reason to be all upset if someone has a different viewpoint. Thankfully we are all at liberty to have our own view on this topic.
Apart from the fact that most people don't have a clue, and it shouldn't even have started to begin with... how then? I can see e.g. Widgets in the task manager. How do I disable the service permanently from the task manager?
When I look at the task manager, I literally have a tab called startup. It has an entry for Microsoft Teams. I set it to disabled. Teams doesn't start at startup for me.
