Idk, it feels like the UX team has been hitting the whiskey, and the UI team slapped something together to squeeze out a pay rise.
And then the ads team garnishes that with terribleness.
It still a little mindblowing to me that teams steals focus like it does at startup. Windows boots relatively slowly that I could be in an Outlook window or typing in a URL or whatever after a fresh reboot and then teams just steals my mouse and keyboard. I've trained myself to not do anything until teams starts (and being an electron app, it certainly takes its time) because I'm so annoyed by focus stealing.
On my home computer the xbox application does the same but at least it loads super fast. I am just bewildered that in 2021 that focus stealing like this is so common and accepted by anyone let alone Microsoft. It just feels like scammy 2000s adware.
There’s a setting to open teams in the background/minimized. I’ve never seen that not work. If you want the window to open at startup as a window… then it’s working as expected, it’s not stealing focus, you told it to open at startup and above everything, zoom, steam, origin, VPN, did the same thing when I allowed them to open at startup maximized.
Not sure why you’re using the Xbox app, but I believe it also has the option to open in background.
I don't see that as working as expected nor do I appreciate having to hunt and peck through settings to find this setting. The default should be for it to a polite application like any other. Awful defaults is exactly the dark pattern I'm complaining about. Just because Microsoft generously allows me to not have this awful behavior if I manually find this setting is not the big counter to my argument that you seem to think it is.
And now, the teams team wants to make it worse.