Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

windowscentral.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 313 posts

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

#221

Post by dboreham »

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…

Quick contrary datapoint: I'm a heavy Windows user but the only interaction I've ever had with Teams is to figure out how to delete its icon from the task bar.

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

#222

Post by xxs »

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…

I quite confident if there would be a group of people attempting to make Teams worse, exhibit a different buggy behavior on a weekly basis, they would absolutely fail miserably.

Teams is a peak example of what 'tying' looks like.

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

#223

Post by vel0city »

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…

If you're going to go by "people complained about it" then I guess you just won't use any software, ever. I hear complaints about how terrible Teams is. I hear complaints about how terrible Slack is. I hear complaints about how terrible Mattermost or Element or Jabber or whatever is.

For practically any given piece of software, you'll find a crowd of people who will tell you how absolutely trash it is.

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

#224

Post by xxs »

drvd wrote: post #155
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.

The latter...

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

#225

Post by spacebanana7 »

dahwolf wrote: post #220
spacebanana7 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case Microsoft had a chat app several years before Slack was created. Admittedly, it was rebranded and upgraded a few times - however Skype for Business had group chats before Teams came out.

If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft's chat apps were never part of Office. That's the issue at hand. Microsoft is not forbidden from making competing products, it's forbidden from misusing a dominant market position in A to seize the market in B.

According to the top level comment in this thread those chat apps were bundled in office.

user: llimos > there has been a chat app as part of Office since 2007

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

#226

Post by vel0city »

dahwolf wrote: post #220
spacebanana7 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case Microsoft had a chat app several years before Slack was created. Admittedly, it was rebranded and upgraded a few times - however Skype for Business had group chats before Teams came out.

If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft's chat apps were never part of Office. That's the issue at hand. Microsoft is not forbidden from making competing products, it's forbidden from misusing a dominant market position in A to seize the market in B.

Office Communicator came out in 2007. Hard to say "Office Communicator" has no relationship to Office. That's six years before slack's initial release.

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

#227

Post by vel0city »

hotshiitake wrote: post #201
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…

> And a chat app is very much not out of place in an office productivity suite. I have to say, I don't understand the merits of this case at all. The article talks about M365/O365, but I suspect the bigger issue might be that Microsoft includes Teams Personal (WebView) in Windows 11. From what I understand this version will eventually reach feature parity with Teams for Work & School (Electron) https://www.techrepubl…

> It's not clear to me if Teams Personal will be kept as a separate app

It's pretty clear if you use the Teams preview version. It already is a unified app in the Preview. You can sign in with a work and a personal account at the same time.

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

#228

Post by justinclift »

kwanbix wrote: post #190
justinclift wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

The problem is that Slack wants to charge for a Chat app the same amount that Microsoft or Google charge for Spreadsheet, Documents, Slides, Chat, Drive, etc. The problem is that Slack is too expensive for what they do. If Slacks value proposition was as good as their price ask, that wouldn't happen, or would be much lesser. You said it yourself: Slack is fairly expensive for what they do.

> You said it yourself: Slack is fairly expensive for what they do.

Yep. It's hard to beat $0 and "already installed with O365".

Oh, you were wondering why MS is being investigated for anti-trust abuse... perhaps those are something to do with it?

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

#229

Post by AceyMan »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #94
_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…

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

My parent corp guaranteed no one would use it as a knowleldgebase by implementing a 30-day maximum retention period in Slack. (Same for Teams chats).

Lots of our staff got caught out when all the channels got truncated. Oof.

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

#230

Post by graypegg »

nineteen999 wrote: post #104
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…

> 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.

So, I had this exact same experience, until IT turned on whatever group policy allows you to see the New Teams toggle switch. [1] You might still be on the “old teams”. In classic Microsoft fashion, it’s 1000x more complex than it has to be.

Guess what? It still sucks. I still hate using it. I still do less work because of it. Can you scroll back thru messages without seeing a 10sec loading spinner every 15 messages? No. But it’s faster… in the general sense!

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-d...

Post reply on HN