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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

#91

Post by CSMastermind »

jp_nc wrote: post #84
Shrezzing wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Slack really dropped the ball in 2020, and that's ultimately why the inferior Teams and Zoom platforms have been able to solidify their market shares, and Discord was able to bastardise some of Slack's old market share. It took Slack nearly 2 years after the pandemic started to introduce features like Huddles - by which point, everyone who needed video conferencing software (which was basically every white-co…

Slack dropped the ball earlier than that on audio/video. They acquired Screenhero in 2015 and did nothing of substance with it. Also, the lack of any real meeting features means that Zoom or Teams always has to be in the picture.

This still makes me mad.

Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day.

If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing.

Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?

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

#92

Post by ThatPlayer »

withinboredom wrote: post #89
gls2ro wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the market share for MacOS in EU or in US? I bet it is single digit right?

You can’t get mad at someone if you allow everyone else to do it too. That’s anti-competitive, on the government’s side.

That's the basis of modern anti-trust: bigger companies (by market share) are held to a higher standard to prevent monopolies.

Unregulated monopolies are even more anti-competitive. And it's more competitive to only regulate potential monopolies than entire markets. It's the best of no perfect option.

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

#93

Post by qwerty456127 »

Microsoft should be forced to stop requiring "Microsoft accounts" to activate a box license, let alone binding such licenses to a specific user forever. As a small business you can buy a basic Office box for a new employee and forget about having it back once they leaeve the team. This is bullshit.

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

#94

Post by throwaway2990 »

_cenw wrote: post #36
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 i…

Slack is not a knowledge base. Stop trying to use it as a knowledge base.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

withinboredom wrote: post #89
gls2ro wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what is the market share for MacOS in EU or in US? I bet it is single digit right?

You can’t get mad at someone if you allow everyone else to do it too. That’s anti-competitive, on the government’s side.

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by Dalewyn »

refulgentis wrote: post #83
Dalewyn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Chrome was just like [IE6], rendered whatever it wanted. > JavaShit I don't think the increasingly small # of people who still talk this way about the web appreciate how easily this reads as incorrect extremism.

Chrome's throne is reinforced by the combined factors of websites increasingly becoming only compatible with Chrome, and JavaShit increasingly assuming Chrome-levels of execution speed.

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

#97

Post by Nathan2055 »

kevingadd wrote: post #68
Rarebox wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then I remember switching to Chrome for these reasons: 1. Feeling faster than firefox (still does) 2. Process separation for tabs. Firefox used to crash the whole browser, whereas chrome would crash just a single tab. 3. Shipped with support for Flash and PDFs

It's funny how massive the impact of "bundle a bunch of proprietary stuff into our open browser" was on the browser wars. Between H264, MP3, Flash and PDF, Firefox never had a chance.

The problem is that there simply wasn't a better option at the time.

Ogg Vorbis was a novelty at best, and it was the only decently widely adopted open source competitor for any of the items listed that was available at the time.

HTML5 was only just published when Chrome launched. So Flash was at that point the only option available to show a video in the browser (sure, downloading a RealPlayer file was always an option, but it was clunky, creators didn't like people being able to save stuff locally, and was also not open source). Chrome in fact arguably accelerated the process of getting web video open sourced: Google bought On2 in 2010 to get the rights to VP8 (the only decent H.264 competitor available at that point) so they could immediately open source it. The plan was in fact to remove H.264 from Chrome entirely once VP8/VP9 adoption ramped up[1], but that didn’t end up happening.

Flash was integrated into Chrome because people were going to use it anyway, and having Google distribute it at least let them both sandbox it and roll out automatic updates (a massive vector for malware at the time was ads pretending to be Flash updates, which worked because people were just that used to constant Flash security patches, most of which required a full reboot to apply; Chrome fixed both of those issues). Apple are the ones who ultimately dealt the death blow to Flash, and it was really just because Adobe could not optimize it for phone CPUs no matter what they tried (even the few Android releases of Flash that we got were practically unusable). That also further accelerated the adoption of open source HTML5 technologies.

PDF is an open source format, and has been since 2008. While I don't know if pressure from Google is what did it, that wouldn’t surprise me. Regardless, the Chrome PDF reader, PDFium, is open source[2] and Mozilla's equivalent project from 2011, PDF.js, is also open source.[3] Both of these projects replaced the distinctly closed source Adobe Reader plugin that was formerly mandatory for viewing PDFs in the browser.

Chrome is directly responsible for eliminating a lot of proprietary software from mainstream use and replacing it with high-quality open source tools. While they've caused problems in other areas of browser development that are worthy of criticism, Chrome's track record when it comes to open sourcing their tech has been very good.

[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-i...

[2]: https://github.com/chromium/pdfium

[3]: https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js

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

#98

Post by itsoktocry »

mdasen wrote: post #81
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…

but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"? I definitely understand this argument and I definitely understand how it plays out in the real world. At the same time, it strikes me as one of the ways companies can be foolishly cheap. If a product like Teams is making employees so unhappy, it's definitely worth spending some money to fix that. I've never us…

>I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it.

People will complain about anything, though.

The nature of my work has me dealing with all of these platforms, depending on the clients. Guess what? I don't find Slack to be some joyous piece of software to use. It's better than the alternatives, I guess, but not to the point that I really care one way or the other. Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.

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

#99

Post by nullindividual »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #93

Microsoft should be forced to stop requiring "Microsoft accounts" to activate a box license, let alone binding such licenses to a specific user forever. As a small business you can buy a basic Office box for a new employee and forget about having it back once they leaeve the team. This is bullshit.

A company can reassign licenses as required. Just don’t use consumer accounts.

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

#100

Post by withinboredom »

ThatPlayer wrote: post #92
withinboredom wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t get mad at someone if you allow everyone else to do it too. That’s anti-competitive, on the government’s side.

That's the basis of modern anti-trust: bigger companies (by market share) are held to a higher standard to prevent monopolies. Unregulated monopolies are even more anti-competitive. And it's more competitive to only regulate potential monopolies than entire markets. It's the best of no perfect option.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!
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