Live data from Hacker News

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

apnews.com

211–220 of 808 posts

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

#211
post #26

They don't just bundle it, they make it auto-start on screen on Windows machines whether you've got an account or not.

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.

I thought I was going crazy. Glad to know I wasn't the only one going through the same annoying thing

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

#212
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.

Why is bundling Teams illegal, but bundling Word, Excel and the rest of the office bits totally cool?

It shouldn't be! Forcing big companies to unbundle product pricing would give new entrants to the market a fighting change at success.

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

#213
Literally everything from Microsoft is bundled in some anti competitive way. Edge and Windows. Teams and Office. Excel and Word. GitHub and VS. One Drive and Windows. All of it must be forced to split up and operate as separate companies. It is the ONLY way to not distort the market. Additionally, fines must be enacted RETROACTIVELY, along with jail time for executives. Enough is enough.

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

#214
post #174

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.

This I do agree with. While AI feels like it has been shoved in many places it doesn't fit so well, it is amazing when it comes to quickly summarizing meetings.

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

#215
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if we just make them bundle their competitors products if they want to buy dle their own? That means that Firefox nextcloud and bitwarden are installed by default on windows/macs

What about my startup nextercloud? Why am I being discriminated against!?

Be sure the goal isn't to get every alternative there, just enough to stop the unfair advantage of bundling and to make a healthier market.

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

#216

What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences? If this is anti-competitive, is it anti-competitive for Apple to bundle music features/up-sell into the iOS UI, or provide an interface for headphones that no other manufacturer can integrate with?

> What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences? The availability of APIs for third-party developers to create a similar competing experience.

Also an actual monopoly (windows OS).

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

#217

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…

The problem is that big companies are distorting competition simply due to their size. Smaller companies cannot compete. Startups are mostly doomed. How can they compete when a bigger player can copy their innovation, bundle it, or sell it at a loss, or for free? You can’t afford to sue them. You may note ven prevail given their ownership of numerous patents. There is no fair competition if these companies are not broken up. Or in the least, they need to be taxed differently.

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

#218
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do Windows users try so hard to keep defending their OS's shitty behaviors? It's always "you can disable it" (but it might come back automatically after an update), and when you can't disable it (one drive), it's "just don't use it".

I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my default browser either. I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues. That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. Th…

I think the general principle people are operating out of is that: The USER should be the one deciding 1. what gets installed onto their computer, 2. what gets run on the computer and when, and 3. the configuration of their own system. The OS vendor should not be deciding these things, nor the manufacturer of the computer.

It's not enough that we can just ignore or correct these things that are just happening on our own computers without our consent. These things should not be happening to begin with.

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"? Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.

Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom. Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging…

I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the US not targeting Adobe with antitrust for bundling together tools for typesetters, marketers, video editors, animators, etc, etc?

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

#220

Hate teams! I have heard many friends quit companies as they could not stand using teams after companies abandoned slack to jump on the free teams bandwagon. They had to hire Microsoft experts to manage the IT infrastructure which was just auto-managed before Microsoft sold them the stack.

I have heard many friends quit companies as they could not stand using teams I could believe that one might have a friend that is privileged enough (and petty enough) to quit over such trivialities. But “many”? Color me…skeptical.

I’ve moved to a place with it and if they’re remote workers, I could see it. It’s really bad for remote work, in the sense that it simply discourages effective chat communication patterns for teams (yes, Teams is bad for teams). I could absolutely see that getting bad enough that someone would leave, largely because the tools the company selected were wrecking communication and making everything miserable.
Post reply on HN