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…
Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
561–570 of 808 posts
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#562This 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 confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#563I love Github. Before MS bought it I was a CTO at a company where we happily paid for it. Now MS offers it for free. I don't currently pay them anything. We also use Github actions. We don't pay for that either. You get 2000 free build minutes per month. So no need. That's great for us of course. But it's horrible for independent providers of CI services, which I used in the past. How can you compete when big companies like MS just pretend build minutes and hosting the world's software projects costs 0$?
I say pretend here because of course in reality MS spends a lot of money on all that infrastructure needed to do that. But they make their money elsewhere. This is just an anti competitive move to ensure enough customers end up paying them. It's a lock in mechanism. But it's also an anti competitive move. It ensures competitors don't stand a chance. Because how do you compete with free?
Of course the flip side is that a lot of things in software become commodities where the price of something goes to zero quickly after the open source world starts providing free and open source alternatives. Zoom is a great example of a commodity with little intrinsic software value. There's very little in there that you can't replicate with free and OSS components. Most of the real cost relates to infrastructure and networking.
Which of course like Github isn't actually free. So MS is subsidizing the cost of having massive amounts of companies run all their meetings on Teams with money they squeeze out of them elsewhere via unrelated products. That's what the EU called out as anti competitive. Microsoft spends many millions/billions on ensuring people get locked into their free offerings just so they can continue to be valued at trillions because of all the revenue they get from us elsewhere. This is not charity. That's how they became this big.
IMHO Gitlab would have strong case too. They are a European company actually (Dutch originally). So this is a clear cut case of a local competitor being squeezed out of the market by MS spending large amounts of money ensuring there is no market.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#564I 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.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
Yes, they broke this somewhat recently. Video &c. doesn't work in Chromium either. So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.
Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#566Teams 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…
You can turn this off, but last I checked can also set it to stuff like Google Meet, Zoom, WebEx, Facetime, etc if you have the relevant plug-in for Outlook.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#567Teams 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…
Honestly, Microsoft blurring the lines between meetings and calendar invites was great, in my opinion. I was sad the day they took away some of that functionality (made it a non-default setting). Queue the calendar "meetings" where everyone is scrambling to find a Teams meeting link but it's nowhere to be found because the creator forgot to tick it as a Teams meeting, and everyone only noticed like 1 minute before the meeting starts.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".
Teams actually has adoption. Those other options didn't, when compared to Teams.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ask about the tools I will be using during the interview process. There are several that I refuse to work with and will end the interview at the next possible polite point if they are required. Microsoft Windows is on my blacklist. The entire point of private retirement accounts and transferable skills is that you aren't required to stick with one employer. If your employer requires you to use bad tools then find a…
>then find a better employer What a clueless and entitled point of view. Entire industries are almost exclusively Microsoft (basically all those that make the modern civilized world work: medical, transportation, semiconductor, logistics, automotive, industrial, architecture, infrastructure, CAD, etc). Your choice then is unemployment. Not everyone is an app/web developer who can freely choose employers based on stac…
Going through the Windows stack has significant disadvantages to your career as well. Those companies are likely to pay less than their competitors, they are usually less modern and offer less remote options or modern development organizations. It's a lose, lose choice.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#570This 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 sim…