Microsoft Teams: the app we all love to hate

Every workday, I open Microsoft Teams with a small knot in my stomach. I know that sooner or later, something will go sideways. A meeting will freeze, my mic will vanish, the screen share will turn into a slideshow of frozen frames, and I will end up doing the thing I have done a hundred times before: drop the call, take a breath, and redial. On my Mac, this is almost a ritual. And yet, here we all are, still using it, because most of the working world has decided that Teams is where we live now.

So let me try to make sense of this love-hate relationship, with a bit of data and a bit of honesty.

A giant nobody can ignore

The numbers are genuinely staggering. By 2025, Microsoft Teams reached around 320 million daily active users and roughly 360 million monthly active users, according to Microsoft’s own reporting and aggregated industry statistics. More than a million organizations rely on it, including about 93% of the Fortune 100. The product pulls in over 8 billion dollars a year. Teams Premium alone surpassed 3 million seats, with a 400% year-over-year jump, and Teams Phone counts about 80 million users.

When a tool reaches that scale, opting out stops being a real choice. Your clients use it, your employer mandates it, and your calendar fills up with those purple invitations whether you like them or not. We have to live with it, so we might as well understand it.

From Skype’s magic to the all-in-one machine

It helps to remember where we came from. Skype genuinely changed the world. Back in the early 2000s, calling a friend on another continent for free felt like a small miracle, and at its peak, Skype had around 300 million users doing exactly that. Then Microsoft bought it, slowly let it drift, and in May 2025 shut it down for good, pushing everyone toward Teams. By the end, Skype had withered to about 36 million users.

Teams inherited that legacy and then kept piling things on top. Chat, video, calls, file storage, a calendar, task boards, wikis, apps, bots, and a small army of Microsoft 365 integrations all crammed into one window. Critics have a fair point when they call it bloated. As one technical breakdown put it, Teams is essentially a big web app that has to log you in, pull all your chats, calendars, and files, and connect to a dozen background services before you can even type “hi.” That ambition to be everything at once has a cost, and we feel it every time the app wheezes to life.

If you have read my take on the unnecessary Trenitalia redesign, you already know my feelings about products that become more cluttered while pretending to be more helpful. Teams fall into a similar trap.

The Mac problem nobody warned me about

Here is where it gets personal. On macOS, Teams and I have a complicated history. I am not imagining it, either. Mac users across Microsoft’s own forums report the New Teams app consuming 80 to 100% of CPU during meetings, with typing that lags by several seconds. Screen sharing is its own special torment, because Teams on Mac can throttle bandwidth and frame rate so aggressively that a connection drops from a gigabit to a few megabits, turning your demo into a slideshow.

Preview builds have failed to launch on Apple Silicon, updates have made the app crawl, and the most common fixes you will find online amount to clearing the cache, reinstalling, or quietly switching to the browser version, which then misbehaves in its own ways. None of this happens on a whim. It traces back to how Teams handles hardware acceleration and rendering outside the comfortable Windows ecosystem it was clearly built for. As someone who writes about iOS vs. Android platforms, I find it telling that a company this large still treats a large share of professional users as an afterthought.

The competition is circling

Teams is dominant, yet it is far from beloved, and the rivals know it. In video conferencing, Zoom still leads with roughly 28% market share, with Teams trailing at near 23% and Google Meet climbing toward 17%, based on 2025 figures. Slack, meanwhile, owns the hearts of teams who want focused chat without the heaviness, even though most of its users still jump to Zoom or Teams when it is time actually to meet.

The pattern is clear. People reach for Zoom when they want a call that works, Slack when they want a conversation that feels light, and Google Meet when they want something that opens in a browser tab without a fuss. Teams win on bundling and pricing, less so on delight.

Why do so many people still defend it

Now, to be balanced, Teams is not without genuine champions, and they are not wrong. On Gartner Peer Insights, reviewers consistently praise its tight integration with the rest of Microsoft 365. When your email, documents, spreadsheets, and chat all sit under one roof and talk to each other, the workflow can feel seamless. The learning curve is gentle for anyone already using Outlook and SharePoint, and for IT departments, getting all of this under an existing license is a real budget win. For many large organizations, that convenience genuinely outweighs the friction.

Why it matters more than ever

There is a bigger shift underneath all of this. Chat has quietly overtaken email as the default way we talk at work. Around 51% of workers now prefer real-time messaging over email, a figure that rises to 67% among millennials, according to reports on workplace communication. Teams that adopt these tools report up to a 30% productivity boost and save roughly 32 minutes a day. Email is not dead, since about 55% of us still use it, but the center of gravity has moved.

That shift is exactly why the friction stings. When a tool becomes the main artery of how we collaborate, every freeze and forced redial costs us real attention, and I have written before about how precious that has become in Attention please, if you will.

Living with it, eyes open

So where does that leave us? Teams is huge, indispensable, and a little broken, especially on a Mac. It is the product of a company trying to be everything to everyone, and that ambition both built its empire and weighed it down. I will keep using it, because the world has decided for me. But I will also keep my browser tab ready, my cache-clearing shortcut handy, and a healthy sense of humor about the next time I have to drop and redial.

MS Teams, a debated affair