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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

#161

Post by Grayskull »

EGreg wrote: post #126
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…

What if there was a free, open source alternative for Teams? I don’t mean Matrix or Mastodon. I mean something you could run on-prem and it would have chats, meetings, attach files etc. Do you know anything like this?

Well if you are not looking for Matrix (although it perfectly fits your description), XMPP is probably the closest.

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

#162

Post by jon-wood »

impendia wrote: post #141
_cenw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind. For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring fea…

I have some sympathy here, mostly because Outlook's calendering is horrible. I also think most people don't exclusively use Outlook for their calendar, even in environments where your calendar there is meant to reflect your availability for meetings.

I've never understood why neither Google or MS have the ability to give their calendar tool an ical feed and have the availability from that reflected in your corporate calendar.

I guess it made sense in the days of everyone being in offices on a fixed schedule, but in the modern world where people's work life and personal life increasingly intersect I'd love to be able to drop things like needing to pick my son up from school in the calendar and have that shared with my partner without also needing to duplicate that same entry in my work calendar so no one books a meeting with me.

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

#164

Post by TeMPOraL »

reaperducer wrote: post #147
impendia wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind. For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring fea…

Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?

No, people at Microsoft just didn't realize most users forgot how to work with multiple windows. You can have a separate calendar window if you care for it, you can even read individual e-mails in separate windows (that one is annoyingly bound to double-click...). That works on the web too - at least for people realizing you can have the same app open in two tabs, and then break them out into separate browser windows...

Beyond that, maybe I'm thoroughly infused with corporate culture at this point, but I find this perfectly obvious and natural bundling. E-mail, calendars and TODO lists belong together.

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

#165

Post by justinclift »

kwanbix wrote: post #27
justinclift wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What seems to happen in enterprises is they install Office 365... and Teams comes along.

A few months later the repeated suggestion of "Why don't you all switch to Teams?" from the MS account rep seems to sink in.

At that point the $0 price tag (when bundled with Enterprise 365) gets compared to Slack's fairly expensive per-user pricing... and it's Goodbye Slack.

So, the bundle gets it in the door (where no other competitor could) and the free pricing / sales channel gets it adopted.

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

#166

Post by justinclift »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #129
nineteen999 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By mid-April was in a usable state. Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.

I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major. So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deplo…

"Incredibly lucky" this time around I'm thinking. :)

Oh, are you using it on an Apple Silicon mac?

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

#167

Post by mehdix »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #151
eddieroger wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Slack added threads somewhere last year iirc.

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

#168

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

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?

This drives me nuts. Teams UX is a joke, at least on mac.

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

#169

Post by zokier »

kwanbix wrote: post #32
Hamuko wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Basically, yes. The fact that Apple and Google are still reasonably evenly fighting in the mobile market means that the rules are laxer for them than they are for MS who has far more dominant position in office suites.

That is why MS got under fire for IE but Safari got free pass. The degree of market control is critical aspect here.

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

#170

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #151
eddieroger wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Threaded conversation applies to both. I want it for both. Why don’t you?
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