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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

#551

Post by pompino »

programjames wrote: post #359
pompino wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What? You shouldn't defend bad behaviour regardless of if you derive a lot of value from the same source. A good organization wants to be called out on shitty practices so they improve.

You can make an argument to convince people of your personal point of view, but there is no reason to be all upset if someone has a different viewpoint. Thankfully we are all at liberty to have our own view on this topic.

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

#552

Post by pompino »

MereInterest wrote: post #447
pompino wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-products.php

Yeah, I don't see Windows in the top 5.

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

#553

Post by dantheman »

OJFord wrote: post #429
Modified3019 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I’m all for monopoly busting, but I don’t understand what kind of criteria are in use here. I’ve yet to see a definition that would allow me to apply rules in a coherent way. My own company uses office 365, and of all the included programs, I basically only use excel, outlook, and teams. I haven’t even opened word in years, all documents are shared as PDFs. As such, word has no more inherent need for “bundling”…

There do exist companies trying to compete on chat and complaining about it, I'd guess. (Whereas Gmail is doing fine and Thunderbird is free.)

That is the essence of anti-trust, it's nonsense. It's merely losers complaining.

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

#554

Post by glasss »

shiroiushi wrote: post #545
TrackerFF wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entire…

Sure, but with open-source software and a third-party support contract, if you get mad at the support vendor, you can get a contract with someone else without having to change your software stack. I don't see how tying yourself to a single vendor is advantageous at all.

Unfortunately I don't think the market of third party support vendors for open source software is robust enough to have enough competitors that can provide the same quality (or at least promise of quality) as traditional vendor support from MSFT or another big company.

You can say the market might emerge if the large corporations or government agencies started shifting that way and generated demand for it, but those entities aren't known to take risks.

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

#555

Post by nikanj »

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…

If you want Teams you can install it.

And if Microsoft wants Teams, Microsoft can install it. Perfect logic according to growth-oriented project managers!

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

#556

Post by Foobar8568 »

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…

In Enterprise settings, I have never seen anything than MS bundling over 20 years for that many clients. To my European eyes, Slack and Zoom have been always an US centric or Linux first small companies centric tools.

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

#557

Post by burnerthrow008 »

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.

> 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's not.

The argument you're replying to is remarkably similar to the ones in the EU+Apple threads: Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such. Why isn't Xbox or Switch a "general purpose" computer? Because people don't consider it as such. The whole thing boils down to circular logic of "it is a general purpose computer because it is".

The same thing is happening here: Why is it ok to bundle Word and Excel, but not Word and Teams? Because people consider the first one ok, but not the second. Ok, but WHY?!?

It's like arguing with a religious fanatic. You are wrong to assume there is any logic behind it.

If you really dig into why Microsoft and Apple, and why not Spotify and SAP, the only real answer is: because the EC defined the boundaries of the DMA to include the types of businesses that are run from America and exclude the types of businesses that are run from European. When you finally back them into a corner, the defenders of the DMA fall back to "well $AMERICAN_COMPANY is a gatekeeper, but $EURO_COMPANY is not a gatekeeper".

Spotify and SAP easily meet the quantitative thresholds that catch MS, Facebook and Apple, but the EC carefully defined that a "gatekeeper" belongs to certain categories of businesses (operating system, social media, etc.) and does not belong to certain other categories (music streaming, business software) so that it does not catch them. And as we saw with iPadOS, the quantitative thresholds don't even matter if the EC feels like ignoring them.

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

#558

Post by intended »

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.

Split them into 4 then ?

2 amazons, 2 Aws

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

#559

Post by _xivi »

gehsty wrote: post #382
colonwqbang wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple still charges extra for the Apple music service, right? Spotify costs $12/month, Apple music costs $11. If that's true then it seems market competition is working decently in that area. If you could launch a competing service and charge $10 you might have a chance. What Microsoft did was, they said "Hey we have a monopoly on office software. We should have a monopoly on chat too". And they started giving away T…

Feels a bit like your forgetting Skype for business and lync already existed. I kinda agree with your point but I also feel it’s unfair on Microsoft, they are giving their customers more services for the same price, and the customers are using the services… I’m not sure the customer really loses out if ms are saving them another subscription + integration cost.

> I’m not sure the customer really loses out if ms are saving them another subscription + integration cost.

Not only the customer will pay the price 10 fold down the line, the entire industry/ecosystem will suffer after Microsoft effectively kill every alternative product.

They're not doing the customers a favor. It's a business 101 tactic to dominate the market. In the end, the customer will be abused and strangled with no other option to turn to.

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

#560

Post by intended »

shiroiushi wrote: post #545
TrackerFF wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 entire…

Sure, but with open-source software and a third-party support contract, if you get mad at the support vendor, you can get a contract with someone else without having to change your software stack. I don't see how tying yourself to a single vendor is advantageous at all.

As a government ?

Getting another contract ?

If the press and opposition don’t get you, the time to get a new contract will.

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