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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

#261
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you don't have much experience with Windows and MS software. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/why-do...

Not sure about other people here but I really liked how autostart used to work in 7 and before - just drop a shortcut in the Start menu folder and you're done. In 10 at some point, in order to have 3rd party software launched at login I had to use task scheduler. Also, funny thing: clicking this link pushes me thru https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/authori... (...) - feels like they're expecting me…

You can still do that, the folder is at:

  %appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup
I have a few sshfs[1] mounts there.

[1] https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win

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

#263
post #31

Seems a little odd given that they unbundled it in Europe.

How so? I installed office on a computer the other day, and I had to jump through hoops to only install Excel (which is the only one I needed). By default it was installed and set to automatically start for all users.

The article suggested that shouldn’t be the case in Europe. I suspect it wasn’t accurate

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

#264
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.

The "Teams (new)" is absurd. Have we not learned not to name things this way by now? I say this as someone as guilty as anyone of having created an iterative series of files with "Final_1.txt", "Final_2.txt", "Final_1-new.txt" suffixes in times of mental sketch-padding. I would never release a product into the wild with any of those in the title, though.

"Teams v2 final final (real) skdhajah.exe"

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

#265

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.

Seriously. I thought Mac was getting bad but upgraded to win 11 on my gaming pc. How is that acceptable for business environments? One wrong click and you’ve got a new subscription it seems.

Business versions are stripped of that stuff in my experience, no? The home version is rife with it. I haven’t been on windows in a few years though.

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

#266
Maybe a push to eliminate proprietary operating systems and file formats from government-supported processes would be more effective? It could be legislative but it could also mean governments supporting FOSS development more.

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this just seems to me like treating the symptoms instead of the root cause.

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

#267
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The US didn’t “blow up nordstream 2”

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

#268
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.

It fucking autoruns by default on my Linux machine and eventually the only way to prevent it from not auto-running is to remove it. I avoid teams now whenever possible and use a browser session if forced to use teams.

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

#269
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But where do you draw the line? In college, I used Word a lot and barely used Excel. At work I use Excel way more than Word (and often times I could easily just use a simple markdown editor instead of Word so I arguably wouldn't use that either). So they seem to be two different markets. I probably use the integrations between Excel and Teams more than I use the integrations between Word and Excel so bundling Teams m…

You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had. More importantly, installing Word doesn’t also automatically install Excel, and vice versa.

Microsoft wouldn’t have a problem if they provided a choice of Office with Teams and Office without Teams.

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

#270
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Endusers should have a total control over what is getting installed on their machines - just like we used to not so long ago or how some Linux distros allows you to select additional software. Each operating system coming from the biggest corporations should offer two paths: express/recommended setup and a fully customizable one for advanced users.

What if I want to buy a fully integrated, fully bundled install-and-forget OS? If the EU makes Apple unbundle all the good stuff from macOS I'll finally move to the US.

Just use the express setup.
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