> It's really disappointing to see that Microsoft, of all companies, seems to have no interest in writing a native Win32 client for its own service
And another one for macOS, and another one for Linux distros. Teams would have never become as popular if it was Windows-only, and doing frontend code 3 times for some slight advantages in speed and resource utilisation is textbook waste of money.
slight advantages in speed and resource utilisation
I would not call the two orders of magnitude difference that you can get between true native and this new webcrapp stuff "slight". There are reports of Teams taking dozens of gigabytes of RAM --- that's just not something you would see with a native application with the equivalent functionality, unless it was written extremely horribly. Dozens of MB is a comfortable amount of memory for such an application to use, and the old MSN Messenger (native! with many third-party clients too!) was in that ballpark. Remember that Skype used to have a native Linux client too. Microsoft is a huge company. They can certainly afford it.
is textbook waste of money.
So it all comes back to corporate greed. Inflicting a dismal user experience on everyone, for what would be an essentially tiny savings on their end.
The fact we have a near-universal UI language (HTML/CSS) and a basic scripting language (JS) that we can't use as an intermediate language for compilation to native UI is a tragedy. And I'm not talking about every nook and corner of JS and HTML and CSS.
It's even more ridiculous that MS didn't use their HTML5 + JS framework they made for Windows 8/10. But the Office team is almost completely independent from Windows politically since they make so much money.
And another one for macOS, and another one for Linux distros. Teams would have never become as popular if it was Windows-only, and doing frontend code 3 times for some slight advantages in speed and resource utilisation is textbook waste of money.