I also have seen zero ads, which struck me as weird. But also, I bet they count free game codes to content creators, sponsored streams and the like,so maybe a lot of the money was spent targeting streamers, tick tok and YouTube—a bunch of the people I subscribe to have been hyping cod zombies. Granted many of them played warzone a lot so it didn’t seem that weird to me.
I haven’t used competing apps to know, but as a forced teams user it is very sluggish, seems to break other ms apps half the time and has some strange and persistent design choices that irk me. It also crashes on its own, when I’m not using it 2-3 times a day.
It has improved in terms of features lately, but still feels very bloated and WIP most of the time. It still won’t let me control where video windows are, and I’ll never understand this.
This is our replacement for Skype, which was obviously feature deficient and getting old, but does what it’s supposed to do and doesn’t cause problems.
Not sure if there’s a good competing app in terms of video and slack functionality, integration into outlook and onedrive (both of which also annoy me and seem to be performing worse-over-time, but are unavoidable and sometimes useful.)