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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

#151

Post by TeMPOraL »

eddieroger wrote: post #143
manuelabeledo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t use Lync back in the day, but I used Skype. Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides. Teams, like Slack, aims at bundling the whole workplace experience in a single app, with actual groups and bidirectional integrations. And of course, Teams defaults to Microsoft products for every single integration that can communicate with one. I would say that regulators didn’t care enough, or were awar…

> Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides If one uses Teams, one would definitely see the edges of where Microsoft just started bolting things on to compete with other platforms. Skype was much closer to AIM with a phone bolted on than Teams. Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Team…

> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can.

To be fair, those are two different paradigms, and both are needed simultaneously. This alone makes Teams better than Discord and Slack, both of which - last I checked on them (~3 years ago for the former, and ~6 months for the latter) - try to shoehorn long-lived multiplayer threads into a sequential chat format.

Maybe it is anticompetitive in some ways, but out of the trio mentioned above, Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die.

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

#152

Post by Arathorn »

EGreg wrote: post #144
Arathorn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you mean Matrix? This is precisely what Element is, built on Matrix: https://element.io

Is it a good replacement for Teams?

Well, I think so, but i'm probably biased given it's my company. Empirically we dogfood it successfully as a Teams/Slack replacement (and a WhatsApp/Signal replacement) while building it, and lots of others use it for that use case too: https://element.io/customers.

The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.

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

#153

Post by bob1029 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #98
mdasen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bundl…

> Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.

If you have Organizations that have a lot of loose capital and cowboy investors might be more interested in playing in traffic with 20+ vendors and horrible integration stories, but we (aka our solutions to paying customers or we don't have any jobs in 12 months.

I always hear everyone complain about how expensive it is, but I feel like John Travolta meme each time I look at our Azure/Microsoft account. The per-seat & consumption/serverless billing models feel like dust in the wind when you have so few employees. Everyone is doing a lot, so why not put a lot of power under each seat? If you intend to do more with less people, I really feel like Microsoft is the answer. If you are a F100 org, I totally get it. Fuck Microsoft. Use something totally different. Build your own datacenters.

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

#154

Post by Arathorn »

BarryMilo wrote: post #133
draugadrotten wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets adde…

Teams made me realize no one cares about security until it's too late.

too late being https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-st... ?

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

#155

Post by drvd »

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…

Either we work at the same company or this is a recurring theme everywhere.

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

#156

Post by TeMPOraL »

metacritic12 wrote: post #150
llimos wrote: post #118

This is just weird because there has been a chat app as part of Office since 2007 (Office Communicator, then Lync, then Skype for Business, then Teams). That's way before Slack even existed. Is the claim that it's anti-competitive simply because they made their existing chat functionality better ? Or because Slack decided to launch a standalone product? Can I make a standalone Excel competitor and then claim Microsof…

Honestly I chalk this one up mostly to just international trade mercantilism. The EU relatively weaker at developing international software, so slapping "antitrust fines" on Microsoft (which probably have nonzero merit) is a good way of "group negotiation" to get a bulk discount on Microsoft (US) products. The analogy is how the USA is relatively less good at making quality cheese and wine compared to the EU, so the…

Per the article, it seems that it's Slack that's been making the noise and pushing for this, and EU is just playing ball (perhaps because of the mercantilism you mention).

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

#157

Post by jon-wood »

draugadrotten wrote: post #88
leokennis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Teams integrates with the other MS stuff. If I share files in a channel, in the background it is "just" a SharePoint which in turn I can add to my OneDrive. Meaning I can save a file in Word to that SharePoint and everyone in the channel can access it.

Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets adde…

Why would anyone not think that putting a document in a public channel would result in people who can join that channel having access to it? Isn't that the whole point?

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

#158

Post by konschubert »

I think the EU does a lot of misguided stuff around data privacy regulations.

But this... pretty clear cut antitrust case of using a monopoly in one market to push out competitors in another.

And if you think there is no consumer harm, then you must have never been forced to switch from Slack to Teams ;)

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

#159

Post by TeMPOraL »

EGreg wrote: post #144
Arathorn wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you mean Matrix? This is precisely what Element is, built on Matrix: https://element.io

Is it a good replacement for Teams?

Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start?

This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.

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

#160

Post by konschubert »

fifteen1506 wrote: post #74

The damage is done. Please use the money of the fine to finance with low-interest (Europe's if possible) alternatives to Teams, Onedrive and Office-suite. Would make fines more unbearable :-)

There is mattermost, slack, google drive, dropbox.

I think the problem is that microsoft is killing all these companies, not a lack of financing

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