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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

#521

Post by appstorelottery »

dmix wrote: post #476
caminante wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every entrepreneur wants to assume the counterfactual that but for their startup dying for reason #6354, it would've lived!

Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp. Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense. Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the e…

Netscape would probably disagree. :-)

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

#522

Post by Jensson »

shiroiushi wrote: post #457
tpmoney wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We already have 3rd-party YouTube clients: SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. They work quite well, in fact, much better than YouTube's own client. They don't need any money to cover their costs; they're FOSS. As for YouTube's costs, they don't show YouTube's ads, so basically Google is covering the cost there, though perhaps not willingly. But Google makes the YT API usable by these apps, and after all this time hasn't done…

> without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do.

There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does. That downgrades the user experience compared to easier to separate ads, but if they can see you watch videos without the normal ads they can always do that.

But the main reason they don't is probably that they can't target such ads very well and it is more expensive to inject in a stream rather than send separate videos, so not sure if it is even worth it for them.

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

#523

Post by surfingdino »

osrec wrote: post #345
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…

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.

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

Unfortunately, the level of technical knowledge of the population is going down. People do not care or treat tech as a magic. On a higher level of education, Microsoft can rely on a cohort using Windows at school/home/university/work.

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

Watch what Microsoft and others are doing in the acquisition space. Microsoft is buying into businesses that use their products. What are the chances of those businesses witching away from Microsoft software stack?

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

#524

Post by EionRobb »

djha-skin wrote: post #175

If you "just want chat" but are required to use Teams at work, you might try pidgin[1] with the MS Teams plugin[2]. The former can be installed via scoop and therefore does not require admin priveleges to install. This thing still works, and works better than ever, with plugin for modern chat services available. 1: https://www.pidgin.im/ 2: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

Yay! Thanks for the shout-out <3

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

#525

Post by EionRobb »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #243
djha-skin wrote: post #175

If you "just want chat" but are required to use Teams at work, you might try pidgin[1] with the MS Teams plugin[2]. The former can be installed via scoop and therefore does not require admin priveleges to install. This thing still works, and works better than ever, with plugin for modern chat services available. 1: https://www.pidgin.im/ 2: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

I started having a bit of hope, until I read the cons : > Doesn't support calls, provides direct links to the Teams website

I'll get there one day ;(

The frontend/backend split of Pidgin/libpurple makes this tricky, and we still don't have voice and video in a Windows release (my main dev OS these days)

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

#526

Post by TrackerFF »

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 is almost impossible to pitch software to the government unless it also comes with enterprise-scale customer support.

9 out of 10 times I’ve been part of the buy-side, proprietary software has won due to the support. Even more so when the end users aren’t technical people.

If the software doesn’t come with support options from the vendor, you’ll have to look into third-parties for that - which means another entirely own contract, and set of people to involve.

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

#527

Post by [deleted] »

boxed wrote: post #506
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your idea is flawed. If you split off AWS from Amazon, you have TWO monopolies. That's a useless move. What you need to do is split it down the middle : create Amazon 1 and Amazon 2 each with half the people, hardware, and 100% of the IP.

[deleted]

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

#528

Post by nerdile »

dumbo-octopus wrote: post #512
xzjis wrote: post #401

The problem is that it's already too late. In my company, we used Teams because it was "free" (they even added a free version that lasted between COVID-19 and 2023), bundled with everything else, and now that we have to pay for Teams alone, we won't consider switching to something else because people are used to Teams. We never considered an alternative, and we will never consider one, and it's just more expensive fo…

Not Microsoft’s fault in any way. EU is legally requiring them to charge more. Unless you know a way they could comply with the rules (which state they can’t charge less) without charging more?

By charging the same amount for a bundle of Office + Teams and a lesser amount for Office without Teams.

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

#529

Post by tombert »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #485
antihero wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that, but if you get the job you’ll likely be having to use it for a lot more stuff. It’s a sign of a culture that wants to bundle stuff up and manage it in the corporate way as opposed to using the tools that people want to use to do their job.

So what product should they have been using instead? Meet, which is a Google bundle? Or the China owned Zoom, or god forbid Webex?

We used WebEx a lot at Apple. It was pretty terrible when I first started with a really bizarre client, but when it was updated to the more modern one in ~2019/2020, I didn't think it was so bad, more or less like every other VoIP program.

I still kind of viscerally hate it because I associate it with the boring and useless meetings that the middle-managers at Apple loved to schedule to justify their existence in the company, but that's not really WebEx's fault.

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

#530

Post by kergonath »

palata wrote: post #285
throwAGIway wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The EU wants to give you the choice. You will have the choice to use everything Apple makes. The only reason to move to the US would be because you really don't want to have a choice, but that would be weird.

The probability that they are actually a EU resident and move to the US because of app bundling is close to zero. And yes, that would be completely ridiculous.
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