Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 808 posts

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

#271

Post by pndy »

BoppreH wrote: post #261
pndy wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I tried that path back then but it still didn't work for me - no program I tried to put there incl Windows ones was able to launch at the login. I had just entries in the task manager's startup page. Maybe something changed in 11 - dunno

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

#272

Post by Apocryphon »

_heimdall wrote: post #17
rlpb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far from a novel question. There is extensive statute and case law in this area across many jurisdictions. You could start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law

Sure, I'm well aware of antitrust laws, the Sherman Act, etc. If you want to look at it from that angle, what are the consumer concerns being violates by Teams being bundled and potentially replacing Zoom that was previously used? Teams isn't forced on Office users and Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose.

In the realm of enterprise software, users aren't the "consumer" anyway. It's whatever executive has buying power to mandate what software is used by the org.

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

#273

Post by Daishiman »

paweladamczuk wrote: post #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.

Capitalism naturally tends towards the concentration of large firms unless regulated; if anything the regulatory intervention is coming in too late.

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

#274

Post by wpasc »

falcor84 wrote: post #133
chongli wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t forget compensation! Microsoft should be forced to pay compensation to anyone who has ever used Teams, scaled in proportion to the number of hours they’ve had to leave it running on their computer.

That actually would be amazing - I would be very much in favour of large companies (e.g. based on number of users / market cap) having to put significant sums of money in escrow ahead of any software release, which would then be distributed to its users as compensation in the case of a data breach or regulatory rulings.

I can't imagine any jurisdiction that tried this would see anything other than large companies prohibiting their software from being used in that jurisdiction. Any company that then grew large would quickly exit. Every iOS update requires 1B+ to sit in escrow?

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

#275

Post by layer8 »

stonemetal12 wrote: post #164
ssahoo wrote: 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?

Bundling is not illegal as long as the bundling is not forced. When Microsoft got into trouble by bundling Media Player with Windows, the fix was to offer Windows with or and without Media Player (“Windows N”). The bundled offer became legal by also offering the unbundled version.

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

#276

Post by guerby »

gostsamo wrote: post #109
ssahoo wrote: 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 this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

EU courts ruled that bundling an OS with a machine was ok.

https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...

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

#277

Post by navane »

falcor84 wrote: post #130
gostsamo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

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.

For antitrust to work, all we have to do is break up the biggest players. There's no point in focusing on (in that market) smaller players. They'll get to them because recursion.

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

#278

Post by crowcroft »

EasyMark wrote: post #255
crowcroft wrote: post #190

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?

Something can be seamless AND separate. Just install the “seamless” apps as needed. Seamless and needing to be installed are orthogonal goals. You can have either, both, or neither. It should be the end users choice and a side effect is that competitors can have a chance as well.

They should be, but are they in practice? It can be quite advantageous to bundle them together.

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

#279

Post by bogwog »

pie420 wrote: post #262
miohtama wrote: post #127

Ask forgiveness. Did Microsoft already wipe out Slack during these four years of bundling since the complaint of 2020?

hopefully this time, the DOJ is not merciful and breaks Microsoft into 3-4 different entities.

All they gotta do is split Office into its own independent company, and so many problems will start to solve themselves.

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

#280

Post by a_e_k »

BigJono wrote: post #100
barryrandall wrote: post #93

Oh well. I guess it's time for Microsoft to discontinue Teams, destroy any related IP, purge any copies from GitHub/developer workstations/backups, forcibly uninstall it from end-user machines, update Windows to forcibly delete any copies installed in the future, and never, ever, ever under any circumstances try to compete in the chat/video conferencing market ever again. The world will survive, if just barely.

What would I ever do without my software engineering team collaboration tool that can't send a fucking code snippet without burning half the screen on whitespace and a 400px font size title lol

I've often wondered about that. I feel like it says something about the development team behind Teams if either, (a) it doesn't bother them, or (b) they don't dog-food their own product this way.

(Just give me fenced code blocks, please!)

Post reply on HN