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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

#461

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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…

I am amazed the EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies. WE should be doing that. This is how capitalism thrives. Break up large companies in different markets. Also break up Amazon and AWS already.

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

#462

Post by shiroiushi »

isk517 wrote: post #356
Neil44 wrote: 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.

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…

Why should they care about goodwill? Treating customers as they have has made them one of the most profitable companies in the world. People whine and complain about them all the time, but continue to throw barrels of money at them. Goodwill isn't going to improve their profitability.

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

#463

Post by crowcroft »

WheatMillington wrote: post #416
Vespasian wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody needs Office. There really is no practical way around it for businesses Now companies get a "free" (initially) software in addition to what they actually want. Microsoft can only afford that because they already get Money from their Monopoly product and can finance it that way without the customers having the ability to object (because Office has a market domineering position). Business chat competitors can…

Are we really going to consider the provision of free software to be bad for consumers?

I think the best argument I've heard against this is that it kills innovation. If products win in one category by default because a company already won in a different category then we lack the healthy an competitive environment for innovation to thrive in.

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

#464

Post by FireBeyond »

hinkley wrote: post #433
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.

As of now, I don't notice the battery impact of having it running on my iPhone 14.

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

#465

Post by [deleted] »

EasyMark wrote: post #248
lotsofpulp wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Excel is probably far more used than Word, and word could be dropped from many people’s computers and no one would notice. Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software? My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.

Wouldn’t it be that we have a fairly widely spread defecto definition of “office suite” as word processor, spread sheet, presentation, email as it’s been that way for decades? Not sure about “communications”however I think it is a serious argument to consider that a separate product, but not the others, they’re kind of like peanut butter and jelly or Bonnie & Clyde or the three stooges.

[deleted]

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

#466

Post by nextos »

djbusby wrote: post #452
nextos wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sim…

I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.

"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

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

#467

Post by bee_rider »

Aeolun wrote: post #444
bee_rider wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When you sell somebody code you have an ethical responsibility to have done your best (and maintained a reasonable level of professional competence) to ensure it is defect free. Lots of companies don’t take that very seriously, which is bad, and a great reason to switch away from them.

At least the government can bring the CEO before congress and waste his day.

With open source code the responsibility is taken by the user instead. For me, and probably a lot of people here, we all mostly just ignore that, but it’s fine, because we’re free to ignore our responsibility to ourselves. In the case of a government supplying open source code to their citizens, the responsibility defaults to the provider, that is, the government.

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

#468

Post by trelane »

pyeri wrote: post #367
jodrellblank wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We did get Libre office and Apache OpenOffice due to that? I think they both should become obsolete in an ideal world where folks converse in fluent markdown to achieve everything they want in a document.

No, LibreOffice (and Apache OpenOffice, but Apache OpenOffice is pretty much dead and nobody should use it) are descended from Sun's OpenOffice.org, which is descended from their acquisition of StarOffice. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

LibreOffice uses the OpenDocument standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

Microsoft's "open" standard, "Office Open XML" was created in response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML The standardization process was incredibly irregular (see Wikipedia and LWN from that time period.) I'm sure the naming was not intended to sow confusion at all.

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

#469

Post by andreimackenzie »

jodrellblank wrote: post #306
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…

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

I've observed that the quality of third-party SDKs for Microsoft office formats improved substantially. The .xls format was notoriously fickle to process or produce from outside of Excel. As of .xlsx, the open source community produced myriad SDKs in various languages, and the ones I have experience with worked quite well. The format becoming less arcane and better documented was important to enable this.

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

#470

Post by _heimdall »

immibis wrote: post #198
_heimdall wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blurry lines and gray areas in law? Absolutely, I'd rather not accidentally break a law that is only defined after the fact in court.

In corporate antitrust law, specifically. Nobody is going to jail over this. They might just have to change the sales terms. Is this so terrible?

That just depends on how you look at it and what your opinion is with regards to what the role of governments should be.

I'd argue that its terrible from the angle of government overreach, this still seems well within the realm of a free market problem.

I'd also argue its terrible that corporate law is almost entirely boiled down to fines with no person really having to live with the consequences of their actions. That effectively makes it an accounting game, you're totally fine breaking the law as long as (a) its just a corporate expense and (b) you believe that you'll make more money breaking the law than you will lose in court.

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