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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

#581

Post by chillfox »

burnerthrow008 wrote: post #557
lotsofpulp wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

I like the Australian approach to these types of laws. Rather than making some complicated definition that carefully selects the desired targets it's usually just a list that the government maintains. Makes it obvious to everyone how it works.

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

#582

Post by Rinzler89 »

realusername wrote: post #569
Rinzler89 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

My last Windows OS is Windows XP and I've never been unemployed. 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.

>My last Windows OS is Windows XP and I've never been unemployed.

Like I said, not every office worker is a front-end dev. In other industries you have no choice but unemployment. Your lack of empathy towards other classes is showing.

>Going through the Windows stack has significant disadvantages to your career as well.

I don't know many but I've never met a .NET or SharePoint dev who's unemployed. On the contrary. All those crusty non-IT corporations seem to pay very well for others to fix their Microsoft stack. Maybe take your head out of the sand and see the real world.

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

#583

Post by Rinzler89 »

eesmith wrote: post #547
Rinzler89 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

On the flip side, your comment is "Thank You Sir May I Have Another?" If no one complains, not even the entitled who have some power, then the screws continue to tighten down.

>On the flip side, your comment is "Thank You Sir May I Have Another?"

I never said that. I said in many industries that choice is none existent other than unemployment and people care more about employment than they do about OS martyring.

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

#584

Post by Elfir3 »

Fysi wrote: post #566
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…

This is a convenience feature in Outlook that is enabled only if you have a Teams licence, specifically that when you create a meeting in Outlook, it sets it as an online meeting. 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.

That remembers me a virus that was adding himself to every e-mail sent by outlook. What was its name again ?

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

#585

Post by necovek »

eindiran wrote: post #219
gostsamo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom. Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging…

I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the U…

The only reason is that law enforcement is reactive. And usually requires the tactic to be effective before it does (yes, too late by then).

Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.

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

#586

Post by HendrikAmbacht »

kwanbix wrote: post #574
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…

As a product manager myself, it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product. And I mean free as in if you are already paying for a subscription, and it gets added without aditional cost. I have worked at companies that payed for either Google Workspace or Office 365, and they also payed for Slack.

This is a really naive view on monopolies.

I worked in a company that also sold a collab solution and we had technical champions all over the place that 1000% agreed that our product was better than Teams in every single metric, including performance, UX and productivity. Yet they couldn't secure a budget since the higher-ups knew they got Teams for free in their E5 license.

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

#587

Post by kwanbix »

teitoklien wrote: post #580
kwanbix wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a product manager myself, it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product. And I mean free as in if you are already paying for a subscription, and it gets added without aditional cost. I have worked at companies that payed for either Google Workspace or Office 365, and they also payed for Slack.

That’s how monopolies get formed, make it unsustainable for competition to exist, and then jack up prices when they all die. That lower cost people pay upfront thanks to monopolies, is then drained back with interest, using higher prices, reduction in social mobility (of new founders/startups), reduction in innovation & increase in rent-seeking behaviour. Breaking up monopolies has been long overdue, it’s a good thin…

You can choose to also use slack, or the OP app, if you think the beneffit you get by using the app is greater than the value of paying for it. Nobody is preventing you. Since MS included it for free, is not like you can not pay for the other app because you used the money to pay for teams. I personally don't see the value on slack, but like I said before, I have worked at companies where we had both, office/slack or gw/slack.

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

#588

Post by realusername »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #582
realusername wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last Windows OS is Windows XP and I've never been unemployed. 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.

>My last Windows OS is Windows XP and I've never been unemployed. Like I said, not every office worker is a front-end dev. In other industries you have no choice but unemployment. Your lack of empathy towards other classes is showing. >Going through the Windows stack has significant disadvantages to your career as well. I don't know many but I've never met a .NET or SharePoint dev who's unemployed. On the contrary. A…

I'm not a front-end dev either. It's not about "empathy", it's a market, you either play along the market or you suffer from it.

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

#589

Post by girvo »

cm2187 wrote: post #568
girvo wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams actually has adoption. Those other options didn't, when compared to Teams.

I don't think it's end users asking for it though. I haven't met anyone who likes it. Seems to me that it is more of a "good enough for the cattle" decision by the IT department.

Oh absolutely, its not a good product for end-users. Doesn't change the fact that Teams has adoption that Skype For Business can only dream of however

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

#590

Post by jpalomaki »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #456
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 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 was the first tool from Microsoft on this space that was "good enough". The tools you mentioned were mostly for calls and instant messaging, not so strong on collaboration. With Teams Microsoft is really building a collaboration platform. They would like work to take place inside the Teams app.
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