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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

#431

Post by halfcat »

georgeecollins wrote: post #386

Teams is a pain in the neck! If you make an office calendar appointment for a zoom, Microsoft "helps" you by creating a teams invite in the text of the invitation that gets sent out. So there is always a chance someone you invite will click on the wrong link to be in the meeting. If you ever click on this link yourself teams will install on your system and try in the run in the background every time you boot your com…

It’s not only Teams. If I send a meeting invite from my gmail with a Zoom link, it gets replaced with a Google Meet link.

I have to Slack a Zoom link to everyone before the meeting every week.

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

#432

Post by bearjaws »

Wolfenstein98k wrote: post #414

The EU exists to subsidise EU businesses by taxing (fining) American ones. Why is it okay to sell a bundle that has spreadsheets and emails but not messaging and conferencing?

Nobody would use Teams over Slack (especially from 2019-2022) if it wasn't part of O365.

My company switched us off of it and it sucked. But it was included in our E5 licenses :)

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

#433

Post by hinkley »

georgeecollins wrote: post #386

Teams is a pain in the neck! If you make an office calendar appointment for a zoom, Microsoft "helps" you by creating a teams invite in the text of the invitation that gets sent out. So there is always a chance someone you invite will click on the wrong link to be in the meeting. If you ever click on this link yourself teams will install on your system and try in the run in the background every time you boot your com…

Teams on iOS used to chew through batteries like candy. It's supposedly better, but I really should have paid more attention to my battery life when I uninstalled it after leaving my last job.

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

#434

Post by Osiris »

halfcat wrote: post #431
georgeecollins wrote: post #386

Teams is a pain in the neck! If you make an office calendar appointment for a zoom, Microsoft "helps" you by creating a teams invite in the text of the invitation that gets sent out. So there is always a chance someone you invite will click on the wrong link to be in the meeting. If you ever click on this link yourself teams will install on your system and try in the run in the background every time you boot your com…

It’s not only Teams. If I send a meeting invite from my gmail with a Zoom link, it gets replaced with a Google Meet link. I have to Slack a Zoom link to everyone before the meeting every week.

My company uses Gmail and zoom and zoom is integrated into the new event screen. I've never seen a meet link on anything.

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

#435

Post by shiroiushi »

znpy wrote: post #430
farhadhf wrote: post #405

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round…

> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late You should be thankful at all this is happening. On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams is still perfectly legal. I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all.

>I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all.

Gee, I wonder...

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

#436

Post by hinkley »

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…

Most of the APIs that do get published or standardized are so large and complex that they form a kind of regulatory capture. Almost nobody but the biggest boys can afford to make them. Add a few laws that increase overhead, and Bob's yer Uncle.

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

#437

Post by DaoVeles »

farhadhf wrote: post #405

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round…

It is an unfortunate state of the world is that those can use unethical moves to quickly crush others will live to fight another day. By the time the law catches up, they have made their billions.

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

#438

Post by halfcat »

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.

Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

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

#439

Post by tick_tock_tick »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #137
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.

Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.

The EU's economic recovery isn't looking too good so it's time for them to dip into their war chest (USA tech companies).

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

#440

Post by nilsbunger »

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.

The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1.

By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s.

If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!

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