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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

#321

Post by hifromwork »

Detrytus wrote: post #194
spiralpolitik wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

Acorn was a British company, not European, and had significant help from Apple since 1980s. Nokia never really had any significant share of smartphone market once it took of. Nokia and Ericsson telecom infrastructure is inferior to Huawei's. I will give you Bluetooth and Spotify, but that's just a drop in a bucket.

>Acorn was a British company, not European

Last I've checked UK was firmly in Europe. I assume you meant something different, because literal interpretation makes no sense to me. Can you clarify?

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

#322

Post by chucke1992 »

sunaookami wrote: post #283
EasyMark wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t these “actions”usually include separating the products out the way the EU wants them?aka don’t include Teams in EU installs of MS office or don’t even include office at all? Otherwise a fine is useless.

Doesn't matter if everyone already uses Teams and the damage is done. Look at Netscape vs IE.

Except the end conclusion was that "paying for a browser is stupid".

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

#323

Post by chucke1992 »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #221

Good. In our small company of two dozen people we use Teams only because of external clients. Otherwise we do away with Google Workspace and self-hosted stuff like GitLab.

so "I hate teams but I use another bundled thing" lol

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

#324

Post by shrimp_emoji »

chucke1992 wrote: post #323
RicoElectrico wrote: post #221

Good. In our small company of two dozen people we use Teams only because of external clients. Otherwise we do away with Google Workspace and self-hosted stuff like GitLab.

so "I hate teams but I use another bundled thing" lol

To be fair, anything is better than Teams.

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

#325

Post by adam_arthur »

jad wrote: post #297
adam_arthur wrote: post #281

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost. Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in. Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding) Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the me…

Companies can iterate on their products much faster if they're not required to publish all of their functionality as public APIs. Once the APIs have been published, it's much harder for them to be changed. Doing this also puts them at the mercy of whether or not client applications are willing to support their new functionality. Maybe YouTube wants clients to adopt some feature, but a powerful client application does…

The company doesn't need to expose custom APIs on their data. If they implement a chat protocol, they must allow other clients to interface with it.

For the data side, likely any requirements wouldn't go into effect until a dataset is deemed sufficiently large/societally important, and there could be a period of exclusivity similarly to the patent system to encourage innovation. This system works very well for new drug creation, with competitors free to copy the drug for pennies on the dollar after patent expiry, so I very much doubt it would stifle innovation in tech, especially given the lower capital requirements to innovate.

I'm not suggesting at all the government mandates private companies implement a public write api into their own datacenter. I'm suggesting the privately hosted data must be replicatable and thus hostable by competitors. Likely the practical way to do this, technically, is to support a public kafka/persistent eventing system such that anybody can firehose all historical and new data. Ideally with funding help.

Hosting data is cheaper than ever, and continues to deflate in cost. The companies in this line of fire are already quasi-monopoly behemoths, so I don't buy into the cost-prohibitive/stifling innovation perspective.

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

#327

Post by nox101 »

adam_arthur wrote: post #281

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost. Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in. Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding) Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the me…

I've never used Team but Google Docs/Sheets/Presentation has a chat function

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2494891

Is that required to use an open protocol?

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

#328

Post by yamazakiwi »

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".

I had a friend who worked high up at Lync before they were sold. Microsoft flew him out and threatened lawsuits to coerce them to sign and play ball.

I was working at Microsoft during the switch to Skype for Business and the employees were dogfooding the beta. Terrible time to be alive.

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

#329

Post by adam_arthur »

nox101 wrote: post #327
adam_arthur wrote: post #281

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost. Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in. Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding) Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the me…

I've never used Team but Google Docs/Sheets/Presentation has a chat function https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2494891 Is that required to use an open protocol?

You're not required to use an open chat protocol, you're required to make any chat protocol you use open. (With some exceptions)

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

#330

Post by antihero »

When a company’s initial interview is on Teams I see it as a bad sign. If a company forces you to use Windows for your dev machine it’s a red flag.

If a company forces you to use a Citrix instance for your dev machine honestly run away screaming and take your sanity with you.

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