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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

#251

Post by jon-wood »

techdragon wrote: post #172
jon-wood wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the correct minimum set of people is those who are in the channel when it was shared to the channel… and most people aren’t thinking of possible future information leaks when sharing documents directly into a channel with specific people the document is intended for… The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking……

I’m still not at all sold. If someone put a file in the Ops Team folder of a shared drive then they’re sharing it with all current and future members of that team. The same is true if you post to #ops-team.

To be brutally honest people need to just stop and apply some basic critical thinking to their actions instead of expecting magic.

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

#252

Post by somsak2 »

eitland wrote: post #38
veave wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"massive ad campaigns" is hardly an antitrust matter. Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.

Who else has been allowed to advertise on the front page of Google? None as far as I am aware of. Not even - again AFAIK - disaster relief after the biggest disasters we have seen after Google was founded. I'd argue that is quite clearly the same league as Microsoft pre-installing Media Player and Internet Explorer: taking advantage of a niche that they completely dominates and abusing it to wedge their way into anot…

Google+

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

#253

Post by somsak2 »

majewsky wrote: post #116
worrycue wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in certain very large EU countries their market share is very high And which EU countries are those? I know a few in the 60s% market share range but that would hardly be considered “very high”.

How is being the market leader by a wide margin anything else than "very high market share"?

When there's only two competitors and the margin is only 20% in some subset of the population, that's not "very high market share." EU-wide, Android is >70%.

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

#254

Post by jowea »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #244
jowea wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Microsoft could get in trouble for bundling its own product (IE) on its own OS (Windows) then IMHO this can in fact be seen as abusing monopolistic market power in the search market to benefit in the browser market.

How is that even in the same category? Google does not force you to install Chrome in order to use Search.

Both cases they're abusing market power in one category to compete unfairly in another market. Apparently this is called "monopolistic leveraging" and is a somewhat unsettled area of law in the US. [0][1]

Here's another example. Amazon using its market power as an online marketplace to benefit in both the logistics market and its own-label goods market. [2]

By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it could also be said that Google is practising "Refusal to deal", which is also forbidden, although I admit that case is somewhat weaker. [3]

> Google does not force you to install Chrome in order to use Search.

I believe that just means they aren't practising tying, which is yet another abuse of monopoly power.

[0] https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

[1] https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1304...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54887650

[3] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

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

#255

Post by Conan_Kudo »

jon-wood wrote: post #162
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…

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…

This is absolutely a feature in Google Calendar. Every calendar has an iCal feed you can pull in. You can enable it from your calendar settings.

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

#256

Post by qlkjwenf »

I don't see Microsoft broke any rules. They didn't buy some competitor, but built and marketed Teams from scratch on it's own. Slack has absolute market dominance in the past, but then they lost more and more to Microsoft, because they just asked too much for what it does. Who want to pay 11$ per month just for a single product if I can get many products from Microsoft at the same price?

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

#257

Post by tracker1 »

_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…

Not just teams on intel macs... running anything under Docker would do similarly... the Intel macbooks in particular would run against thermal thresholds all the time, and freeze sporatically to be nearly unusable. The last one I was issued was replaced with an M1 max after 3 months of being bottlenecked by the thing. And I couldn't underclock/volt it because it was locked down corporate hardware, I could do a lot, but not that.

It was an i9 (10th? gen), and performed worse than a 4th gen i3 in practice.

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

#258

Post by qlkjwenf »

The funny thing is that no one did more to increase Microsoft usage than the EU! They introduced GDPR laws and now companies have to investigate each company in regard of privacy policy. So companies are tired of doing that and just start using only Microsoft products to reduce headache caused by EU-own regulations!!!

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

#259

Post by tracker1 »

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?

I hate that I can't view the calendar separately from the email editor... it is convenient to have the integration in terms of invites/notifications and the availability for scheduling meetings is nice.

My biggest gripe is the distributed db that backs exchange/outlook365 mail on their server... I operate on inbox-zero and when I clear all the filtered mail out, then try to empty the "trash" I either have to wait 2 minutes for all the other deletes to sync to the trash, or empty the trash multiple times.

It's significantly worse than it was in the 90's on dedicated server(s), though back then the hardware was really easy to overwhelm with too much email/activity.

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

#260

Post by tracker1 »

impendia wrote: post #203
TeMPOraL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My attitude -- and I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege -- is that I don't care to share my calendar with my employer. I'm a university professor; there's always pressure to join this or that initiative, to participate in more committees, and the like. But in the long term, success depends on maintaining much of my focus on my long-term research goals, which means saying no a lot. PG wrote about "m…

Could be slightly worse... I can't access my personal calendar and my work calendar on the same device. I have to constantly check both (dr appts on personal) vs work meetings on the company laptop.
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