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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

#341
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.

Each operating system coming from the biggest corporations should offer two paths: express/recommended setup and a fully customizable one for advanced users.

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

#342

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?

Apple still charges extra for the Apple music service, right? Spotify costs $12/month, Apple music costs $11. If that's true then it seems market competition is working decently in that area. If you could launch a competing service and charge $10 you might have a chance.

What Microsoft did was, they said "Hey we have a monopoly on office software. We should have a monopoly on chat too". And they started giving away Teams for "free" i.e. all companies who were paying for an Office subscription were suddenly paying for Teams too with no way to opt out. How is someone going to compete, when most of their potential customers are already forcibly subscribed to a "good enough" competing service.

It was especially egregious here because Teams was such an inferior product so it probably won in no small part due to this tactic.

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

#343

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 hope your code doesn't use colons anyway, :parameter for example is a forbidden word.

Oh, and line breaks get replaced by something that breaks some editors¹, and quotes obviously get mangled.

1 - I mean, look at their name! Teams is right here!

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

#344
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? Would those YouTube clients offer a subscription service to pay for the data they download, or did you expect Alphabet to cover all the costs?

There are an astounding number of people who never stop for even a second to consider the nuts and bolts implications of the ideas they want to foist onto society.

You're talking about the employees of big tech firms, right?

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

#345

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 would replace government with people: people should collectively demand what you have described.

This ultimately is a function of education, which will get better as technical knowledge becomes more widely and freely available.

As you say, it's only a matter of time before the walled gardens start to crumble.

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

#346
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to avoid the ms ecosystem so much that I use teams vs other tools as a litmus test. If I am not desperate for work I tell contracting firms "no teams meetings" in writing when we setting up new contracts. Often, this is isn't a problem and they setup a zoom, webex, or even a plain phone call. Frequently, they try to setup calls on teams and usually about 15m before I remind them that I won't do teams and eithe…

Avoiding C#? That's quite an unfortunate way of looking at the situation if it leads you to missing out on one of the best programming languages of today.

I strongly despise C#, and I say that with about 5 real years of experience with it. I have been on teams delivering real products with it.

It is like Java but married to microsoft while philanders as it pleases. And when I say that out loud some putz always responds "but Mono!" and then the thing I need is inevitably not supported on Mono. When it is working it is stuck on windows server and needing a reboot for some half-assed update microsoft is pushing. With Java I can have all that on a Linux but at least pick which major vendor bends me over! Maybe C# works in Unity, but that is its fan scattering mess.

In C, C++, or Rust I am not beholden to one company and can actually control the hardware to do my bidding. I can go into the compilers to find bugs and the creators are responsive when I make bug reports. Often these are more expressive and have tinier code as well. Isn't C# supposed to be faster to develop in these old crusty systems languages? Why that never the case on real teams I am on?

If performance isn't what I need but rather short development cycles there is Lua, Python, BASH, or my personal favorite Ruby. All of these allow hacking together stuff so much faster, and when I have needed they it offer more control of the garbage collector or other runtime features so I often get better performance out of them.

Then there are the shops using C#. I don't know why, and I see no obvious mechanism that causes this but the culture in C# shops are invariably terrible. I have done 16 contracts in the past 22 years and the least stressful most productive shops are always the nix using professionals or JavaScript slinging kids fresh from college.

The overly corporate C# shops always seem stuck in bad ways, pushing some non-agile scrum, lacking any critical thinking, and are often overtly hostile. These are the shops that buy whatever consultant are selling and force it on me without ever consulting me. I have seen one fist-fight break out in the office and it was in a C# shop. Somehow those backend Unix greybeard wizards are always able to talk through their differences with the 22 year blue haired kid who wants progressive typing on the TypeScript interface that is fed by that wizard's service, and they often do it while discussing technical merit instead of political posturing.

At last C# contract I started I left after 2 weeks (and I am not counting that towards my 16), because the lead developer was preposterously racist and felt comfortable opening up to me about that in that short a time period. I had a lot of self reflection about why he felt comfortable dumping his race war crap on me, and I have no clue why.

C# is not as fast as the slow languages but productive languages. C# is not productive as fast but low productivity languages. And every other thing I mentioned doesn't even have a wiff of vendor lock-in. I am good without C# and the cultures that somehow arise around it.

(and the pay sucks I easily get double doing anything* else)

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

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rant on: I use it in-browser on Linux also: Microsoft's security system is horrendous. I have to log into Teams-based client meetings using incognito browser windows because Teams keeps getting into mystery login loops with regular windows. It was working for a while, but I needed to log into Intel for Altera FPGA information. Well Intel uses Microsoft Azure for identity management (I had to log into Microsoft to log…

The state of louisiana has a similar issue with their domain servers - if you have an errant client somewhere, anywhere, that has the wrong password (or whatever their IDS thought was 'fishy',) you get locked out of your desktop in the office. for two years my wife had to call State I.T. every morning to get logged in. Her office locked so no need to log out until quittin time.

i was never able to track down what device it was, we reformatted a couple of laptops, wiped a couple phones.

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

#348
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.

Teams is a dumpster fire that no one would pay for. But, now that's it's been free and rolled out everywhere, it's a little late for the government to step in.

> Internet Explorer is a dumpster fire that no one would pay for. But, [because] it's free and rolled out everywhere, it's a little late for the government to step in.

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

#349
post #345

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 would replace government with people: people should collectively demand what you have described. This ultimately is a function of education, which will get better as technical knowledge becomes more widely and freely available. As you say, it's only a matter of time before the walled gardens start to crumble.

> I would replace government with people

This is... The entire point of a government. Yes, they're flawed, but they're meant to exercise the will of the people, especially in terms of regulating entities that have outsized power vs. an individual citizen (corporations, wealthy magnates, etc).

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

#350

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…

> Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats They did, Microsoft made Office support some open XML thing, and what changed?

What changed? It's now trivial to write exporters for Office formats for specific use case. Save a sample of what you want to have exported, and then just template the XML, generate it based on source data and zip it.

Most of the time you don't even need to read the specification.

Compare that with the times of eg. closed binary XLS format.

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