Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 808 posts

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

#531

Post by dmix »

appstorelottery wrote: post #521
dmix wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :-)

Technically Netspace wasnt a startup, they IPOd early and were bought by AOL for 4 billion in 98. They were real large scale contenders where such a dynamic could really be do or die.

There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.

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

#532

Post by dmix »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #478
dmix wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nah. My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true. The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce. But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub). The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no…

Zoom became a major business because of Covid and Slack benfited majorly. Neither were powerhouses like Microsoft before then.

Whether a small European startup would have won out locally without Microsofts market position + price advantage idk. But without details I'm not sure the financial decision making of a Fortune 20 matters in this conversation which was part of my point.

Once your sales team is competing on price vs Microsoft it's basically over for young companies. Your value prop has to be much more than that until you're a mature business.

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

#533

Post by moontear »

talldayo wrote: post #296
bongodongobob wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is one, you can add all sorts of third party add-ons to Teams.

But can your app be integrated into Windows with equal footing as Teams?

How is the Teams we are talking about here integrated into Windows?

Teams is integrated into M365 and taking Outlook as an example you can register another calling/status app just like others do so your online status and calling functionality is not Teams (used to be Skype).

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

#534

Post by shiroiushi »

Jensson wrote: post #522
shiroiushi wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>There is an easy technical solution to this, just stream ads in the video feeds just like TV does.

You mean bake the ads into the stream? I don't think that's so easy to do in realtime. Even TV decades ago never did this AFAIK: they played the programming from one source, and then switched over to the commercial from another source (probably videotape) at the correct time.

Anyway, if you're talking about permanently encoding the ad into the video, that really doesn't make sense. The ad probably won't be relevant to many of the viewers. YouTube is global, so if someone from France watches a cat video uploaded by an American and it has ads in English for Applebees restaurant, 1) they probably won't even understand it unless they happen to speak English and 2) there's no Applebees in France. The same thing applies if it's an ad for a restaurant that only exists in, say, California: viewers in New York aren't going to care, and the restaurant doesn't want to pay to advertise to viewers outside their area. Even worse, ads normally run for limited times, so YouTube would have to constantly re-encode videos to change the embedded ads.

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

#535

Post by sqeaky »

neonsunset wrote: post #446
sqeaky wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Scattered years, a year contract here and there. The toxic culture event was 2023 and EA was 2022. The fist fight was 2006 or so.

But interesting that you throw shade at Ruby with no explanation. Feel free to expand at length. I would like to hear your objections.

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

#536

Post by jbm »

WheatMillington wrote: post #305
sunaookami wrote: post #73

I already know how this will be solved: Microsoft will pay a (small) fine and file it under "the cost of doing business" while the damage is already done. Teams is one of the absolutely worst products ever programmed, it's hiliarious how bad it is. It only reached its market share because Microsoft gave it away "for free" with Office 365 or MS 365 or whatever it's called now.

I use Teams every day for work, I'm not sure why it's considered so bad? It seems user friendly and useful, to me. Non-tech worker (finance).

In my case, because it crashes incessantly and its apps are all web applications bundled for a platform. None of them perform well.

It is somehow worse than mIRC and I used that 30 years ago.

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

#537

Post by bzzzt »

sdwr wrote: post #264
RankingMember wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Teams (new)" is absurd. Have we not learned not to name things this way by now? I say this as someone as guilty as anyone of having created an iterative series of files with "Final_1.txt", "Final_2.txt", "Final_1-new.txt" suffixes in times of mental sketch-padding. I would never release a product into the wild with any of those in the title, though.

"Teams v2 final final (real) skdhajah.exe"

I’m waiting for Super Teams 2 turbo :)

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

#538

Post by dartharva »

cosmojg wrote: post #418
hifromwork wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I can think of when reading this is the "damn, you live like this?" meme. I can't imagine using OS that does this to you and not being angry all the time (I'm not tribalistic, Linux has its own set of infuriating problems, but at least it feels like I'm in control).

Many workplaces will restrict your choice of operating system and email client.

And when it comes to non-technical roles, that "many" turns into "almost all".

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

#539

Post by yellow_postit »

crowcroft wrote: post #190

What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences? If this is anti-competitive, is it anti-competitive for Apple to bundle music features/up-sell into the iOS UI, or provide an interface for headphones that no other manufacturer can integrate with?

How much the corporation pays for lobbying and if they are, or are not, based in the EU it seems.
Post reply on HN