Microsoft employee:
Hi, This is a high priority ticket and the FFmpeg version is currently used in a highly visible product in Microsoft. We have customers experience issues with Caption during Teams Live Event. Please help
Maintainer’s comment on twitter:
After politely requesting a support contract from Microsoft for long term maintenance, they offered a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars instead.
This is unacceptable.
And further:
The lesson from the xz fiasco is that investments in maintenance and sustainability are unsexy and probably won’t get a middle manager their promotion but pay off a thousandfold over many years.
But try selling that to a bean counter
There’s a reason Teams is/was shit.
The first teams was written in AngularJS (which is a slow to run resource hog, but fast to develop) wrapped in Electron. It was kind of a minimum viable product, just to build something quickly to get some feedback and stats on what people needed.
The plan was to build a new native version of teams and build it into the next windows while having an web fallback (built on react) for everyone else.
They stopped working on the original teams and started working on the new versions.
They got half-way through working on the native and react versions when suddenly, covid happened.
They couldn’t keep working on the new versions because they wouldn’t be ready for a while, so they had to go back and resume development on the old one, introducing patch after patch to quickly get more features in there (like more than 2 webcam streams per call).
Eventually covid subsided and they were able to resume development on the new teams versions.
Windows 11 launched with a native teams version (which has less features but runs super quick), and the new react based teams (which can now be downloaded in a webview2 wrapper) has been in open beta since late last year (if you’ve seen the “Try the new Teams” toggle, then you’ve seen this). The React+Webview2 teams will replace the AngularJS+Electron version as the default on July 7th.
“New Teams” has been so painful for me, but if I understand correctly that is because my work is still on Windows 10. The Windows 11 version works better than the React version?
The windows 11 teams runs better, but if you’re using a school or work account, you need to use the old AngularJS+Electron version, or the new React+Webview2 version.
So for the time being, the Windows 11 teams is more catered for personal use only. It’s kind of like a modern reboot of Microsoft’s old MSN Messenger. It was included in Windows 11 (rebranded as “Chat”) but it’s been unbundled from Windows 11 installs and I think rebranded again. But not having the school/work account support means not a lot of people use it.
The transition between the AngularJS+Electron version and the React+Webview2 versions is happening now. At some point soon, anyone who is running an OS too old to run the new teams will be forced to use the browser version.
So after their transition, we’ll have to wait and see if they add the school/work account support to the native version because everyone using teams right now only uses those accounts.