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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

#441

Post by nextos »

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…

Last time I checked, they also arbitrarily excluded Firefox, which works fine on other WebRTC platforms such as Google Hangouts or Zoom.

Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem.

Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during simple audiocalls.

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

#442

Post by fragmede »

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.

I have the opposite problem with my hodgepodge of things, where Zoom links get put in where I want Meet links.

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

#443

Post by lolinder »

OJFord wrote: post #428
lolinder wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google is not a market leader Do you have stats that show this? "Market share" sites never feel very trustworthy to me, but they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience. > addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace This doesn't make sense to me as an argument. It sounds like you're saying that becaus…

> they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience. I 100% believe that is your experience as 'HN-commenting SWE/tech bro/STEM worker', but just as strongly doubt that that is correct in the broader market.

Like I said, every source I found claims the same thing. Do you have data showing it as a distant second?

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

#444

Post by Aeolun »

bee_rider wrote: post #400
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…

> the governments will have to fork and audit the code

Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.

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

#446

Post by neonsunset »

sqeaky wrote: post #346
neonsunset wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Which decade did these events transpire in? 00s? It also sounds like the issues had little to do with the language and a lot with specific positions and market...

I fail to recognize the language you are talking about, but perhaps the fondness of Ruby is a subtle hint of warped perception of reality?

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

#447

Post by MereInterest »

pompino wrote: post #236
phito wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do Windows users try so hard to keep defending their OS's shitty behaviors? It's always "you can disable it" (but it might come back automatically after an update), and when you can't disable it (one drive), it's "just don't use it".

Why are you so upset that people derive a lot of value from Windows? Enough that they want to keep using it, and defend it because they don't agree with the "everything is broken" meme.

Because like industrial waste, Windows exports problems to other systems.

1. Windows has an absurdly short maximum path length of 260 characters.

2. On Windows, moving files to a temporary directory can fail, if the temporary directory has a longer prefix than the original path.

3. When uninstalling, the python utility "pip" first collects files into a temporary directory, then deletes that temporary directory.

4. To avoid running into MAX_PATH limits, pip doesn't use a normal temp directory. Instead, it makes a temporary directory adjacent to the directory it is removing. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/6029)

5. If pip is interrupted while uninstalling, the adjacent temp directory is never deleted.

So, in order to work around a Windows-only problem, pip stopped using standard file locations, creating a new problem that only existed due to the workaround. And then I'm left trying to figure out why I'm running out of disk space.

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

#448

Post by crabmusket »

Auracle wrote: post #294
EasyMark wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the issue was that it comes installed by default. Like the old “Microsoft installed a browser to kill netscape” brawl in America.

Where does that end? Is Paint ok to have installed by default? You can generate images in it now using some sort of credit system, so it’s not totally free. Should Adobe sue? I just don’t get the EU’s overzealous regulations. Who is being hurt by Teams? Slack/Discord/Zoom? I doubt any major companies are using Teams just because it’s installed. They may be using it because it’s part of the Office Suite, but shouldn’t…

> Where does that end? Is Paint ok to have installed by default?

These are questions for the democratically controlled regulatory process to decide, which is what's happening with Teams.

If you feel that Paint should be considered a harmful bundling practise under current laws, you can organise and push for that investigation to happen.

Will it be difficult? Yes. These institutions are slow moving as society is vast and complex. Is it worth it? Yes. Democratic institutions and regulations are the best way we've discovered to conduct human affairs at scale.

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

#449

Post by chrismartin »

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…

> Sure there will be some things Slack are not currently getting an API for, but so so much more that they don't use but could, because they don't see why it is important for users.

Right now, Slack is pushing their own "canvas" and "lists" features -- the UI _begs_ you to click on them. Seems like they are testing the waters to become a project management app (with tight chat integration).

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