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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

#171

Post by freehorse »

Neil44 wrote: post #117
xnorswap wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It auto-runs all the time. I've got a work laptop with a teams for the work domain which I want. There's also a completely different copy of teams, "Microsoft teams (Personal)" teams, which I have to close. Not just every boot, even after I close it manually, I still find it running constantly. I've no idea what triggers it, but it doesn't seem to obey any startup settings.

Ha, that's another thing that grinds my gears. Teams, Teams (Personal) Teams (new)... WTF people you're supposed to know what you're doing here.

The same goes for other office products too. For example, there is a business version of Outlook and a personal (?) version of it. They have the same name, the interface is similar enough to not be sure what you have, and the only reliable way to know is to check where you downloaded the installer from. Some business accounts apparently do not work with the personal version. Colleagues were just standing clueless as to why their company office accounts could not sync when they had to reinstall stuff on a computer.

I don't understand why they keep doing this. I guess because the names are recognisable enough that they want them advertised as such for both use-cases, but it is confusing.

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

#172

Post by gmokki »

mhaberl wrote: post #145
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #98

I thought this was going to be about bundling Teams in O365 and other biz deals. It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack. Sadly I know of many, many more companies where the offer is indeed too good to refuse, much to the disappointment of their workforce. I was helping out at a place where two emplo…

> It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack. I don't agree. For many years now I use Linux. I pay for Slack because some of my clients use it and it is convenient. For some other clients I need to use Teams. I like Teams better. I never had issues with them. Slack I reinstall every 2-3 months because i…

Slack with the bundled chrome has been slow to support Wayland, even when it has required just one build time config switch for the past 3 years.

And slack does not support audio/video calls on Linux/Firefox.

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

#173

Post by Semaphor »

SSLy wrote: post #159
xnorswap wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's as if they saw how badly they messed up the Lync -> "Skype for business" transition and thought, "Yeah let's try that again".

Linq is a C# DSL for SQL. You must have been thinking about Lync.

It’s not just a DSL, it’s also the fluent API. Because one thing Microsoft loves more than money, is confusing people with their naming.

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

#174

Post by jwnin »

lccerina wrote: post #121

And I guess the next one will be OpenAI trash (aka Bing chat enterprise or something) bundled in O365

The Copilot meeting summary features in Teams are actually pretty good. It's far more likely that someone will quickly skim the meeting summary than sit through an hour long meeting recording. Costs extra, though.

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

#175

Post by djha-skin »

If you "just want chat" but are required to use Teams at work, you might try pidgin[1] with the MS Teams plugin[2]. The former can be installed via scoop and therefore does not require admin priveleges to install.

This thing still works, and works better than ever, with plugin for modern chat services available.

1: https://www.pidgin.im/

2: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

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

#177

Post by spiralpolitik »

Detrytus wrote: post #132
Ylpertnodi wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am not an expert on anti trust, but I do see that the EU has missed the boat on every new industry in the 21st century compared to the USA. Are you able to cite any examples of 'missing the boat'?

Not the GP, but from the top of my head: - semiconductor manufacturing - Internet and social media, streaming services, etc. - Cryptocurrencies - Smartphones and related app stores - Electric cars - Self-driving cars - AI It certainly feels like all the technological innovation happens in the US, and sometimes in China, but never in Europe.

Some counter points:

ARM originated at a European company (Acorn/Olivetti).

Bluetooth originated at a European Company (Ericsson)

Psion, Nokia, and Ericsson invented what would be considered the basics of the Smartphone (via Symbian, Series 60 etc)

Spotify is a Swedish company.

Nokia and Ericsson produce a good amount of the telecoms infrastructure equipment.

While Europe certainly hasn't had a start-up culture on par with the US it hasn't been a complete slouch either.

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

#178

Post by 13of40 »

xnorswap wrote: post #140
Neil44 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, that's another thing that grinds my gears. Teams, Teams (Personal) Teams (new)... WTF people you're supposed to know what you're doing here.

It's as if they saw how badly they messed up the Lync -> "Skype for business" transition and thought, "Yeah let's try that again".

IMO, the thing that went wrong with Lync->SFB transition was they bought Skype based on the idea that they could do something to merge the code with Lync, but over a year or two found out that that the only value was in the Skype branding, and the code and architecture of it was a dumpster fire. While the whole org was distracted by that, Teams came along and showed them what a rewrite from the ground up could do.

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

joduplessis wrote: post #146

Adjacent point, but I recently bought a Windows laptop (after 10 years on Mac). I've been blown away by the sheer amount of advertising & upsells at OS level. Some of it you can turn off, but others you can't seem to (for me at least). I don't ever remember Windows feeling like you're borrowing it from MS.

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by crazygringo »

frereubu wrote: post #134
kogir wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wget begs to differ. Kidding aside, where exactly does it end? How do you consider when you’ve hit “too much” and how many pieces must be split out when you do? Should every product in the Office suite be offered only individually?

I find these kinds of rhetorical "where exactly does it end" comments really limp. Life is full of choices where there are grey areas. Lay out a bunch of desirable criteria - like not allowing a single entity to monopolise a market -then pick a starting point and iterate until you get a decent balance between the criteria. Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing after throwing your hands up i…

I understand your frustration, but it's genuinely not that easy.

You're right that there are a lot of gray areas in the law, where the two sides are clear but there's a blurry line. One famous example being, should Pringles be taxed as potato chips or as other chips? Because they're not fried slices of potatoes, they're a fried and shaped mixture of dried potatoes, corn flour, and rice flour. People think of them as potato chips, but they're not really. But it's still relatively straightforward to just draw a line somewhere.

The problem with antitrust is that we don't really know how to define it at all. It's not just a single dimension like "is it a potato chip?" where there's just a single line. It's more like a blob with lots of dimensions where different reasonable completely just completely disagree on what the basic most important elements even are.

> Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing

That's where you're wrong. Badly applied antitrust law can actually be much worse than doing nothing.

I'm not saying to give up. I'm just saying, it's not nearly as easy as you're making it sound. There are really smart people who research antitrust and try to come up with recommendations, and they have profound disagreements with each other. The problem is actually a lot harder than you seem to think it is.

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