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Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

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Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#31

Post by Jenk »

veave wrote: post #20
eitland wrote: post #10

This is really good, but needs to be done in parallel with the investigation of how Google destroyed a thriving browser market just as it was recovering from IE. (Massive ad campaigns, and products that had weird bugs in other browsers for no good reason.)

"massive ad campaigns" is hardly an antitrust matter. Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

I would argue it was better but has since degraded. The pivotal point, IMO, was ~6 years after Google's IPO.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#32

Post by kwanbix »

Hamuko wrote: post #17
kwanbix wrote: post #4

Earlier 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?

So Apple and Google can bundle the sh*t out of iOS and Android, which together have 99% of the cellphone market, but MS is expected to not do it?

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#33

Post by pgeorgi »

withinboredom wrote: post #2

Jeez man. Everyone keeps bashing on Microsoft for this shit. Have they seen Google, Amazon, etc?

These find a few unrelated cases, but the interesting bits tend to come first:

EU v. Google: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22Alph...

EU v. Amazon: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22Amaz...

EU v. Facebook: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22face...

EU v. Apple: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22appl...

...

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#35

Post by Dalewyn »

veave wrote: post #20
eitland wrote: post #10

This is really good, but needs to be done in parallel with the investigation of how Google destroyed a thriving browser market just as it was recovering from IE. (Massive ad campaigns, and products that had weird bugs in other browsers for no good reason.)

"massive ad campaigns" is hardly an antitrust matter. Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

Chrome when it released was faster than Firefox, but it wasn't "better".

It ate far more RAM than either Firefox or IE did (and still does), back when RAM capacities were still practically limited, and Chrome was (and is) rendering the internet in Chrome ways much like IE did in Trident ways and Firefox has in Gecko ways. Chrome also had and still has its own UI paradigms, including no title bar, menu bar, nor status bar, and an omnibar instead of an address bar.

What really made Chrome the victor was they kept improving things common people care about, particularly in JavaScript and therefore JavaShit execution, while Mozilla got lazy on "winning" the war and Google dollars and IE was too late in getting back into the game.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#36

Post by _cenw »

skrause wrote: post #28

My 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…

Saw the same pattern with 3 employers over the past 5 years. One killed Slack and all institutional knowledge in its search engine within a month. One replaced all remaining Intel Macs (not an insignificant amount) because Teams would being them to a standstill. The last one is currently happening and I'm wondering what unexpected cost will come to haunt this decision this time.

Though one thing that always suffers in Teams is the ability to self-organize. Slack makes it very easy to let everyone write an automation or open a channel. Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations that I saw adopt Teams, at least until they did.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#38

Post by eitland »

veave wrote: post #20
eitland wrote: post #10

This is really good, but needs to be done in parallel with the investigation of how Google destroyed a thriving browser market just as it was recovering from IE. (Massive ad campaigns, and products that had weird bugs in other browsers for no good reason.)

"massive ad campaigns" is hardly an antitrust matter. Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

Who else has been allowed to advertise on the front page of Google?

None as far as I am aware of. Not even - again AFAIK - disaster relief after the biggest disasters we have seen after Google was founded.

I'd argue that is quite clearly the same league as Microsoft pre-installing Media Player and Internet Explorer: taking advantage of a niche that they completely dominates and abusing it to wedge their way into another ecosystem and then completely dominating that too.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#39

Post by skinkestek »

theonlybutlet wrote: post #29
eitland wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seeing that they already nerfed ad blocking possibilities in Chromium before completely killing Firefox, what do you think they will do once it is completely gone?

Those who use Chromium - either end users or browser creators who build on Chromium - are dependent on the whims of Google.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#40

Post by formerly_proven »

eitland wrote: post #38
veave wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"massive ad campaigns" is hardly an antitrust matter. Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

Who else has been allowed to advertise on the front page of Google? None as far as I am aware of. Not even - again AFAIK - disaster relief after the biggest disasters we have seen after Google was founded. I'd argue that is quite clearly the same league as Microsoft pre-installing Media Player and Internet Explorer: taking advantage of a niche that they completely dominates and abusing it to wedge their way into anot…

When you try to change the default browser on Windows (a setting ignored by some Microsoft apps, which will always use Edge btw.), you can't just change it, you get a pop-up going like:

You SURE you wanna do that? Edge is better you know. And more secure. And shit.

[ BIG BLUE CONTINUE WITH EDGE BUTTON ]

Arial, 6pt grey on white, "Use my choice" link

Edit: You also can't move or remove the Edge symbol from your desktop without admin privileges. So for a normal, unprivileged user there's just two things you can't remove from your desktop, recycle bin and Edge.

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