Microsoft Teams is a red flag

The author argues that widespread reliance on Microsoft Teams and Outlook signals a managerial decision made by people who rarely use the tools and prioritized per-seat licensing spreadsheets over actual user productivity. Teams became the default because it ships with Microsoft 365, letting IT avoid separate procurement for alternatives like Slack or Mattermost. That apparent savings is trivial compared with employee time - the piece quantifies it as the equivalent of about ten minutes of a senior engineer’s salary per month - and Microsoft has priced Teams to "look free" (since the 2025 EU settlement Teams carries a €1-€8 monthly price per user depending on suite).

The writeup catalogs the practical frictions that reveal this mismatch: tenant switching forces full reloads, file sharing routes through SharePoint for unclear reasons, and search is poor. Companies often veil the choice as compliance or fleet management, but the real driver is convenience for procurement. Using Teams thus signals a company that optimizes license cost per seat while ignoring the far greater cost of wasted employee time, and suggests the same spreadsheet-driven logic governs other choices like laptops and VPNs.