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Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

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Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#61

Post by rekoil »

wccrawford wrote: post #56
LordKeren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet Explorer lawsuit was also 20 years ago

And other companies have gotten away with bundling a lot of stuff since then. I could see why they think maybe the same ruling wouldn't happen today.

There was no framework for fining them, each case would have to be handled separately, now there is such a framework in the DMA and DSA, which greatly simplifies the regulators jobs.

I suspect that many other players are about to see such charges against them.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#62

Post by dacryn »

worksonmine wrote: post #54

I hate on Microsoft every chance I get, but how is this situation different than Google bundling Meet on Android? Should Google be worried?

I have been on android for 10+ years and never has Meet gotten in my way or even launched itself.

It's totally uncomparable. Also google is not actively pushing it's customers to use it to kill their competitors

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#63

Post by ssahoo »

Why don't they apply the laws universally and effectively make this kind of bundling illegal for mega corporations? For endusers, it feels like they are playing with different rules for Microsoft Apple Adobe and Google. Since EU waits until the damage is done and milks them, it barely helps the situation for consumers. For corps they just assume the penalty as cost of doing business.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#64

Post by shagie »

endisneigh wrote: post #35

Soon the EU will charge parents for giving their children undue advantages as well. In all seriousness - giving yourself an advantage is obviously what all companies want to do. Why doesn’t the EU just, for each company, say exactly what they want? I honestly don’t understand the EU - they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors? Seems like an exercise in mediocrity. I…

> Soon the EU will charge parents for giving their children undue advantages as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

> In the year 2081, the Constitution dictates that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, earpiece radios for the intelligent that broadcast loud noises meant to disrupt thoughts, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.

https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#66

Post by shkkmo »

worksonmine wrote: post #54

I hate on Microsoft every chance I get, but how is this situation different than Google bundling Meet on Android? Should Google be worried?

I don't think Meet is bundled with Android. My pixel didn't come with it. It is bundled with some chromebooks.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#67

Post by NBJack »

threeseed wrote: post #24

You could make this argument about any bundling. All of the 365 products as well as similar from Adobe etc have been bundled in ways to lock out competition. Even Spotify is planning to. At some point EU needs to bring clarity to their competition laws and decide what they want the landscape to look like. Because right now they are just making up the rules as they go.

Perhaps, but Adobe and Spotify aren't offering a operating system where this crap is bundled. Neither do those examples have a 72% market share of PCs.

Microsoft basically gave Teams away to corporate customers. Now, couple this fact with how many manufactures include a pre-installed copy Office 365 on consumer devices, add in this automatically included Teams since 2019, and you have a nasty combination. Bonus: Microsoft gets to inflate its numbers on adoption.

Finally, Adobe Creative Cloud has roughly 30 million subscribers. Spotify has about 213 million subscribers. Windows, in general, has about 1.3 billion users.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#68

Post by LordKeren »

red_trumpet wrote: post #58
LordKeren wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet Explorer lawsuit was also 20 years ago

You sure? From the article: > In 2009 Microsoft was also forced to implement a browser ballot box in its Windows operating system to ensure users were presented with a choice of web browsers, after years of Microsoft bunding Internet Explorer with Windows. Microsoft was then fined $730 million in 2013 for failing to include the browser ballot in Windows 7 SP1. That is 15 years at most, and 11 years for the most recen…

Yes, the lawsuit closed in 2001

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#69

Post by londons_explore »

seszett wrote: post #59
worksonmine wrote: post #54

I hate on Microsoft every chance I get, but how is this situation different than Google bundling Meet on Android? Should Google be worried?

I don't think Meet is bundled with Android by Google, it's not there if you use LineageOS. It's probably an individual choice by phone makers (although maybe not a completely free choice). I do agree it shouldn't be bundled of course. But even Chrome isn't bundled for example, so I don't think Google is actually pushing many apps.

It's bundled with all the other Google apps - eg. The play store, docs, search etc.

OEM's have to ship them all or none of them.

Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

#70

Post by kotaKat »

lxgr wrote: post #10
immibis wrote: post #3

[flagged]

[flagged]

Yep. We need to do Google. Every carrier has basically been coerced into using Google's hosted RCS service provider.

https://jibe.google.com/

Funny thing is the last I checked RCS still doesn't have any APIs/third party access and if you use a rooted device Google Messages will fail to send RCS even to the carrier's Jibe instance?

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