Nice. Now can we please add Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta to that list? And while we're on it, how about breaking up all the oligopolies that sprouted up over the last 40 years or so?
It's high times.
Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
21–30 of 313 posts
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Apple is the worst of the bunch imo. Not if you look at their respective market share.
Apple owns the majority mobile US market share. It's basically a monopoly.
It's part of an oligopoly. Let's treat oligopolies the same as monopolies, because they behave almost the same.
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#23Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Apple is the worst of the bunch imo. Not if you look at their respective market share.
Apple owns the majority mobile US market share. It's basically a monopoly.
But that's not the case in the EU. They are more likely to come after Google.
And the US government has issues coming after monopolies that are US based and bring a lot of money in (for obvious reasons).
If the US starts regulating these companies more it would harm the US GDP. At least in the short term. There is an argument to be had that it could make the markets more competitive in the long term but without a lot of credible threats from outside of the US why take the hit and the risk?
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also don't understand what they expect. That Microsoft bundles google meet? amazon chime? Slack?
What if they didn't bundle anything? I installed Windows 11 this week and had to uninstall Teams, Spotify and others. Why are these even being bundled with the OS?
Much easier for people struggling to install programs in general. Not that that is the real reason, of course.
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also don't understand what they expect. That Microsoft bundles google meet? amazon chime? Slack?
> Slack filed a complaint with the EU in 2020, claiming that Microsoft was "force installing [Teams] for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers." I'm pretty sure force installing even more software and blocking removal isn't what they are going for.
Are you forced to use it? I certainly don't use it. I was able to remove it from Windows without any problems.
You don't like it? you can use Linux or buy a Mac. There are very credible alternatives today.
Edge is bundled with Windows and Chrome still has 80% of the market or more. I still don't see the problem.
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also don't understand what they expect. That Microsoft bundles google meet? amazon chime? Slack?
For MS to stop using it's overwhelmingly dominant position on desktops (Office) to take out it's competitors in online communications (Slack, Zoom, etc).
Are you forced to use it? I certainly don't use it. I was able to remove it from Windows without any problems.
You don't like it? you can use Linux or buy a Mac. There are very credible alternatives today.
Edge is bundled with Windows and Chrome still has 80% of the market or more. I still don't see the problem.
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#28My employer is a prime example for this case: We use Microsoft 365 because we need Microsoft Office and use their email hosting.
And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple is the worst of the bunch imo. My personal ranking for worst antitrust offenders would be: 1) Apple 2) Amazon 3) Google 4) Microsoft Internationally that may be slightly different though. I’d also maybe include meta for their oculus purchase but I think they’ve tied it into their core, “social” business well enough that I’m not very concerned at the moment when there are bigger fish to fry.
Nope. Google. They are on their way to corner the browser market. They've already killed Operas Presto and about every other engine except research engines and Firefox. Chrome and the way they pushed it with ads on the front page of Google [1]. The way Calendar and YouTube again and again has issues with Firefox. Or how some things just doesn't work in anything except Chrome - but hey, if you change how the browser i…
The get out jail free card is that the engine is open source chromium, not actually held by Google. Others are free to use it.
Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
#30> Microsoft was already contemplating separating the two products, possibly as a pre-emptive measure to prevent antitrust investigations. More like a pre-emptive measure to charge customers more for access to Teams
Through 3 employers over 5 years, all have switched from Slack to Teams partially or entirely because someone in upper management thought they were equivalent enough to cut the extra expense of Slack. It doesn't even make Microsoft any money (yet), it's just there to kill competitors.