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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

#261

Post by manuelabeledo »

jowea wrote: post #254
manuelabeledo wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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]

This is vastly different from advertising a product in the company website. Amazon got caught peeking into their own partners data, then leveraging that knowledge to unfairly compete with them.

> 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]

Again, not the same. "Refusal to deal" means that Google would prohibit Microsoft from advertising Edge, their Chrome competitor, in their ad network, which is not happening.

But it's worth noting that Microsoft does the same with Bing and Edge, displaying a modal if you are using any other browser. They also got caught displaying large banners in the Chrome download page, which I personally think is even worse [0]

[0] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-now-injecting-full-...

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

#262

Post by xigoi »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #159
EGreg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Great. I just want a system that allows me to view a PDF file that my teacher sent me without having to click through a dozen menus and wait several minutes.

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

#263

Post by jowea »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #261
jowea wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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] This is vastly different from advertising a product in the company website. Amazon got caught peeking into their own partners data, then leveraging that knowledge to unfairly compete with them. > By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it coul…

I admit, the cases are different, and I may be more stating how I think it should be than what a court would decide. But yes, Microsoft is doing even worse now, because the government failed to act previously.

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

#264

Post by Yabood »

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…

There’s a bit more to it I think. Pricing and basic messaging aside, you can build robust applications on top of MS Teams and have complete freedom over the UI, functionality, etc., but you can’t do the same with Slack. In many cases, MS Teams can replace Slack, but Slack can’t replace Teams.

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

#265

Post by esafak »

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?

zulip

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

#266

Post by esafak »

AceyMan wrote: post #229
throwaway2990 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not sure if that counts as a success or a failure. More like a failure because you learn after wasting a whole month. And then everybody has to learn the same lesson.

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

#267

Post by tauchunfall »

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.

Scrolling the teams channels is also far from smooth. when you scroll up the message threads load slowly. You see they tried to improve it using virtualized lists but it did not work out.

Several coworkers and me also had the problem that we were unmuted but it said we were muted. Just today the teams screen blacked out when someone presented something.

Notifications are a mess too. And when you have multiple teams with the same channel names (project with microservices) it only shows the channel name, but not the team name in the notifications and in the UI.

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

#268

Post by dahwolf »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #225
dahwolf wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm old. I've used every single version of Office both at home and in the Office and none came supplied with a chat app. The only exception at one point being Skype for Business, but I'm fuzzy as to whether this was a default or optional package.

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

#269

Post by tomjen3 »

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?

Sure they do - but you can have Outlook show your upcoming meetings in your Outlook sidebar, so you can see everything upcoming on a single computer screen.

Individually all of these apps are shit, the value is that they work well together. This is not unlike, say, the Apple computer which can do things like go back from sleep in 1 to 2 seconds because the software is written for one particular chip.

As a side note, it is not obvious to me that Teams is a separate product that you get for free. I would say it is just as correct to look at what you buy from MS is a standard office communication and organization service and Teams is just a part of that.

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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