Microsoft Teams alternative is “absolute s**t,” European Commission officials complain
One official described Element Pro as “absolute shit,” while a third official said the US would “instantly win the war” if it decides to disable its technologies.
https://cybernews.com/tech/european-commission-teams/Open linkView original on lemmy.zip
25 replies
The journalism here (or lack thereof) is kind of shit, if I may say so. Title says „European Commission officials“ (plural) when it was literally a single person complaining like that. Article cites Politico, a news site owned by a far right billionaire.
Meanwhile we can all agree everything Microsoft is absolute shit.
Yes, it's based on a "report" by the very same "news" company who recently gave an award to Peter Thiel. No wonder their "journalism" sucks.
Also the son of the owner, Moritz Döpfner, was Thiels Chief of Staff
The truth is every single work chat sucks at scale.
Teams sucks, slack sucks, discord sucks, Amazon's homebrew chime sucked.
The problem is humans aren't good at talking to that many people, and giant orgs suck regardless of the tech.
If the EU client didn't suck, it would mean no one was using it.
yeah MS is shit but teams is a very non trivial app and element is definitely functionally shit in comparison. also element is also technically not the best either.
there is no direct replacement for teams
Having used both (and I agree that Element is pretty shit), I think the advantage of teams mostly boils down to the integration with Office365, which is hard to replicate for Element even if it wasn't shit otherwise.
Sounds like an equivalent product has been made.
So work on making it better. Teams isn't amazing by any stretch of the word and it didn't get to this level of medi
aocracity over night.*Mediocrity, mediocre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediacracy
That would require politicians have common sense. I guess most of them have proven the lack there of. They are in there because theyre good at talking out of their ass and play golf with the right people.
Someone posted an article yesterday published by Politico with the same headline. These reports refers to anonymous sources and don't provide even a single details why it is s--t. The only s--t here is this article, but the headline serves again a bad faith poster.
As a user of both, even if Element lacks features it is so much nicer than Teams
This is a bad take. Element is end-to-end encrypted and decentralized, and it does a lot of fancy crypto and federation magic to make this happen.
I work with Matrix and know both the people at Element and the people in the EC who decided to introduce it there.
Element/Matrix is a solid modern messenger, but as used in the EC it was never intended as a feature-complete alternative to MS Teams. The EC introduced it as a backup that will still work and be secure when half the continent is a smoking ruin.
I think much of the critique is never the less justified, but out of interest, how much do you think it has to do with the integration on Teams with Office365, or put differently, if the EC would stop using Office365, would the percieved advantage of Teams disappear?
In my opinion yes, that is a big part of it. Element has chat, file sharing, spaces, accounts, E2EE video and audio calls, solid mobile and desktop experience, and more. But an Office365-style native file storage, calendar integration, document cloud, enterprise identity and access management, etc. is neither part of the Element product nor the Matrix standard. There are decent integrations with other tools, but assembling a complete office suit is ultimately something you need to do yourself. openDesk provides a decent set of pre-integated European open source office tooling though , of which Element is also a part I think.
Edit: https://www.opendesk.eu/de/produkt
It's taken 10 yeas for Teams to still be this bad, EU should give theirs more time and not give M$ any more money.
How is this a credible and justified critique and why is it worthy of a Politico article?
The first two should never have gone to print, these are unqualified personal options. The third one somehow makes the claim that, because Element does not functionally behave like teams, the US would somehow be able to switch it off more easily in a war scenario....? That isn't even coherent logic on the surface. And none of the three statements make sense when you consider that the tool is supposed to improve data security and operational resilience.
They should not have quoted random user feedback. The critique in this article, which has somehow made it into the headline, has about the same substance as a random angry Google or Yelp review.
Politico is owned by the far-right and MAGA-supporting pile of shit that is Axel Springer SE, who also just a few days ago gave an award to Peter Thiel for his "entrepreneurial spirit, innovative energy, and societal impact".
Does that answer your question why they publish this crap to push their antidemocratic pro-US and Big Tech agenda?
Yeah trust this as much as a YouTube Influencer making a video titled "I tried Linux and is the most shitty OS I ever used", while we all know Linux is the best thing ever happened to humanity (not to be dramatic)
Have you guys tried Cisco's Webex?
And Teams is a old piece of dry dog poop on the side on the road with a rock in it so same-same i guess
How hard can it be to build a chat program?
It's not that hard, but Matrix is driven by bad ideas (decentralized rooms that function similar to a blockchain, basically mandatory e2ee compatible with large public chats where it makes no sense, etc) and those actively harm it being used as a chat program and bind developer resources.
This message could not be decrypted