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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

#391

Post by jiggawatts »

jimnotgym wrote: post #385

It is a common comment on HN to say Teams is rubbish and also to ask why anyone would use it. Now we have a problem of market dominance, which demonstrates by how far the HN bubble misunderstands how ordinary people do their day to day business. This is the vacuum MS have been consistently winning in for several decades now, it would be worth you understanding it. Now someone is about to reply that market dominance d…

> choose not to use them

This is definitely a problem in general for the open-source / Silicon Valley crowd.

In this case however the integrations you describe aren’t possible for a third party.

Microsoft has made it absurdly difficult to extend and integrate with Office, and they regularly use anti-competitive (and anti-consumer!) methods to “push” new products via first-party integration.

A random example: One drive is the default save location in MS Office apps. This can’t be turned off or customised back to local files by end-users. I have to jump through hoops every time I save a file because some product manager at Microsoft has a KPI tied their bonus.

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

#392

Post by antihero »

jimnotgym wrote: post #385

It is a common comment on HN to say Teams is rubbish and also to ask why anyone would use it. Now we have a problem of market dominance, which demonstrates by how far the HN bubble misunderstands how ordinary people do their day to day business. This is the vacuum MS have been consistently winning in for several decades now, it would be worth you understanding it. Now someone is about to reply that market dominance d…

Anecdotal but pretty much everyone I know that’s not in tech also fucking hates Teams too.

Microsoft win contracts decided by decision makers at the top of large companies.

Companies like Slack win contracts decided by actual users in companies that listen to them.

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

#393

Post by lolinder »

layer8 wrote: post #269
xmprt wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had.

By this logic I can buy Excel + Word + Powerpoint and avoid Teams. They offer each office product individually or all their office products as a subscription. Why would it be different if they also offered a special subscription that just excluded teams?

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

#394

Post by [deleted] »

navane wrote: post #277
falcor84 wrote: post #130

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.

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.

[deleted]

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

#395

Post by bee_rider »

tpmoney wrote: post #375
adam_arthur wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service? YouTube is evidence of that already. A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators. Bundling becomes anti-competitiv…

They're asking who's going to cover YouTube's costs for providing their videos via API. Or is the expectation that if you use a 3rd party client you'll see youtube's ads to cover their costs, and then additional ads from the client?

The government should move fast and break things in these sorts of cases. Especially in this case… video streaming isn’t very important, take action that might destroy their business model and see if we learn anything about how to regulate them in more meaningful markets.

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

#396

Post by bee_rider »

bilbo0s wrote: post #340
kernal wrote: 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.

Pass regulations that might kill YouTube just to see how it works out. Maybe Google is more robust and cleverer than we expect. Worse case we just lost a bunch of pointless reaction videos and other crap.

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

#397

Post by gregors »

jimnotgym wrote: post #385

It is a common comment on HN to say Teams is rubbish and also to ask why anyone would use it. Now we have a problem of market dominance, which demonstrates by how far the HN bubble misunderstands how ordinary people do their day to day business. This is the vacuum MS have been consistently winning in for several decades now, it would be worth you understanding it. Now someone is about to reply that market dominance d…

It isn't just that Teams integrates well with the Windows world, it's that managers were already paying for 365, and now they're getting this additional app for free. Why pay for this other app you've been paying for previously? Don't discount the pure effectiveness of giving that away.

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

#399

Post by isk517 »

cafed00d wrote: post #368
isk517 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft could easily avoid a lot of legal hassle and earn a lot of goodwill if they just offered a version of Windows with nothing but the most basic stuff pre-installed. Hell, just go the typical/custom install that a most other programs have during the initial start up, most people will just select the option that installs Office and the other crap anyway. The people that don't want it will never use it and curre…

How does one decide what constitutes "basic"? Is a password-manager a "basic" feature? If so, then is "Passwords.app" bundled by Microsoft into Windows an unfair advantage because of distribution when compared to "1Password.app"? Ok, then, can Microsoft make a button called "Passwords" in their "Settings.app" and that qualifies as a non-competitive "basic" "Settings" feature?

Everything that came installed on vanilla Windows XP would pretty much work.

By that standard I'm also including Internet Explore 8 since that should be just sufficient enough to download a modern browser of the users choice. /s (but also a little bit serious)

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

#400

Post by bee_rider »

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.

> It could be legislative but it could also mean governments supporting FOSS development more.

To be explicit, if governments want to use open source software, which seems like a pretty good idea, they of course need to be aware of the fact that lots of it is hobbyist stuff tossed out into the public square with no quality guarantees.

To use open source code, the governments will have to fork and audit the code, and provide customer service for what is now their software. It can be done and it seems like a great way to make this stuff available for the non-technical community, but it isn’t free, of course.

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