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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

#191

Post by simiones »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #136
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…

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…

I did use Lync back in the day, and it was the same as Skype for Business (which was anyway just a re-branding of Lync as far as I remember). There were a few Outlook-Lync/SfB integrations as well, but mostly those were part of Outlook rather than Lync I believe.

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

#192

Post by BenFranklin100 »

BenFranklin100 wrote: post #149
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…

Teams main feature is that it is a front end to SharePoint. Not chat. Not video. Even before the pandemic we were using Teams for project management (via the OneNote integration) and file sharing. Each team is a full SharePoint group. Now that we are all back in the office and don’t use video, we are using Teams even more. The chat is a nice function we’ve adopted since the pandemic, but it’s a side offering really.…

It’s ridiculous this comment is downvoted. It’s a straightforward comment from the perspective of a long time user of Teams n a small business setting.

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

#193

Post by pmontra »

Shrezzing wrote: post #57
_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…

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…

Huddles... I never understood what they are for. Slack already had video calls with screen sharing. They were easy to start and they worked well. Then they added these huddles, more difficult to see (sometimes people do not realize they are invited to one) and they seem like the old video calls with a worst onboarding. There are only huddles now. So nothing changed except the setup of the call.

By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."

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

#194

Post by kwanbix »

zokier wrote: post #169
kwanbix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the last 5 companies that I worked at, all used Google Workspace.

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

#195

Post by lost_tourist »

_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…

I don't use teams, but doesn't it have a web interface that runs on any platform? I have to say we use slack and the web version work just fine for me and I don't need anything fancy, chat/share files&code/threaded chats off to the side.

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

#196

Post by selykg »

CSMastermind wrote: post #91
jp_nc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you liked Screenhero you might like Pop

https://pop.com/home

> In 2013, I co-founded Screenhero, an app that enabled remote pair programming and made developer collaboration over the internet “better than being in the same room” (to quote our old slogan).

https://pop.com/screenhero

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

#197

Post by cglong »

Bootvis wrote: post #124
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 don’t like Teams either but in my corporate environment it’s mostly without bugs at the moment. They dropped support for disabling incoming video for some unknown reason but that’s my only complaint right now.

It's still available, at least internally; it did move fairly recently though. Try looking under View > More options :)

Edit: confirmed location

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

#198

Post by falsenapkin »

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…

As a tool to casually/ephemerally chat I rank best to worst Discord, Slack, Teams. The threading/replies in Discord is easily better than whatever Slack/Teams are doing. Casual VC is better in Discord, code blocks are better in Discord.

Teams I am frequently confused on where anything is and whether notifications are important or not. People never know if they should chat/share in the meeting thread or the team thread but oh wait we invited this random person so it really should be in the meeting cause they're not in the team but oh wait these 2 team members weren't invited but they really need to know as well... I see what they were going for and maybe it's just UI issues but at the moment it's a bad UX.

Knowledge does die in Teams though, hard disagree on them avoiding that fate.

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

#199

Post by dahwolf »

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…

"Can I make a standalone Excel competitor and then claim Microsoft is anti-competitive for "bundling" Excel?"

That's not a fair comparison.

Imagine that there is no Excel, instead one awesome company making a standalone work sheet product that is widely popular.

Next, Microsoft lags behind, comes up with a clone of it and bundles it for free as part of Office.

That's anti-competitive.

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

#200

Post by matwood »

Shrezzing wrote: post #57
_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…

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…

> I think Slack really dropped the ball

IMO, Slacked drop it again. The old slack video worked much better than the new one. I use the zoom plugin now for quick chats.

Teams is a dumpster fire every time I'm forced to use it. Not much to say about that.

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