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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

#81

What market are they monopolizing by having Teams auto start?

Collaboration tooling. It's particularly egregious as - particularly once you get past 250 members of staff - it's a plainly inferior product.

https://www.statista.com/chart/20028/daily-active-users-of-s...

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser is a tricky one. It is the chicken that lays the rest of the eggs. I’m not going to tell my mom how to curl a copy of Brave onto her machine because no browser was provided.

yes, would be unfair towards all the other http tools that arent curl if you bundle it

No one is getting a competitive advantage by bundling curl, which is the entire point of this argument.

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

#83
post #34

You'd expect them to have learnt the lesson with Internet Explorer but, as someone said, there is no way a man will understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it!

Modern productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are something very different than just invading another market and killing the market leader there. The Teams use case as shown a high degree of integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 platform which was not comparable to IE.

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

#84
post #65

[flagged]

You suggest that US government would go to war against its main allies to protect business interests of a software company?

Given that banana countries were a thing, I think it wouldn't be completely out of character for the US to enforce it's (it's own companies) interests. But I don't think it will be war, but rather soft-power.

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

#85
post #63

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.

Because it’s expensive and complicated to bring civil suits against organizations with that many lawyers

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

#86
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defaults and bundling are inherently unfair. Chrome shouldn't be bundled with Android. Google search shouldn't be the default. Google Wallet / Google Pay shouldn't be the default. Same for Apple and Microsoft. Apple Cash shouldn't be the default in Messages, ... the list goes on and on. Platform providers can easily attack businesses outside of their core business by setting defaults. They use these synergies to wiel…

The browser is a tricky one. It is the chicken that lays the rest of the eggs. I’m not going to tell my mom how to curl a copy of Brave onto her machine because no browser was provided.

> The browser is a tricky one

Maybe, but they already solved that once already https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

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

#88
post #65

[flagged]

You suggest that US government would go to war against its main allies to protect business interests of a software company?

War? The EU didn't start a war when the US blew up nordstream 2. In fact they spent a lot of time nervously pointing at everyone except the US (who said they would blow it up).

It's a totally abusive and subservient relationship.

But then again the US doesn't allow the EU to have software companies, so they might not care that the data that would go to Teams is being hovered by a different US company instead.

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

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... .

It's true that the US lawsuit was in 2001, but the EU antitrust fine (the discussion subject here) for failing to comply with offering a browsers ballot screen was in 2013[1], merely 11 years ago.

Roughly the same crew still running the show, it didn't slip through their mind, just the $732 million fine wasn't enough to deter them from doing it again

[1]- https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/technology/eu-fines-micro...

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, would be unfair towards all the other http tools that arent curl if you bundle it

No one is getting a competitive advantage by bundling curl, which is the entire point of this argument.

Except for curl, which now has more users familar with it than say wget or aria2.
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