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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

#591

Post by kwanbix »

HendrikAmbacht wrote: post #586
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.

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.

So they couldn't make a good case for the value of paying for that product vs using the free one. You know how many products die because people don't see the value?

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

#592

Post by Rinzler89 »

realusername wrote: post #588
Rinzler89 wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Show me the employees suffering.

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

#593

Post by zelphirkalt »

7bit wrote: post #570
nextos wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Teams works in Firefox. However, Firefox on Android is not supported.

Please share how you make it work on FF then.

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

#594

Post by zelphirkalt »

DaoVeles wrote: post #437
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…

It is an unfortunate state of the world is that those can use unethical moves to quickly crush others will live to fight another day. By the time the law catches up, they have made their billions.

Which is why the fines must depend on the company and be much higher, to threaten their own business.

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

#595

Post by realusername »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #592
realusername wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Show me the employees suffering.

It's in your own example, you are less likely to find remote working, modern development practices or competitive salary at your average SharePoint gig compared to your average fullstack, devops or data engineering job.

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

#596

Post by zelphirkalt »

Supermancho wrote: post #423
zelphirkalt wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a just world, they will of course have to pay for all the damages ... In a just world I said.

> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.

I mean, if someone is physically harmed it is also too late, but still the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.

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

#597

Post by necovek »

dantheman wrote: post #553
OJFord wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not that simple. Imagine you build the next great thing, you open up a new product line for everyone. Your business starts doing well, but then Microsoft or Apple come along, throw money at it and include it in their bundles (Office or OS) by default.

Suddenly, you are the loser, while they are selling below investment cost to simply push you out of the market.

So that's the issue.

Similarly, it should probably be made illegal for VC-backed startups to undercut incumbents just to shut them down: that's very similar to me.

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

#598

Post by Rinzler89 »

realusername wrote: post #595
Rinzler89 wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me the employees suffering.

It's in your own example, you are less likely to find remote working, modern development practices or competitive salary at your average SharePoint gig compared to your average fullstack, devops or data engineering job.

I don't think you know the meaning of the world suffering.

And data science and IT infra/support are different career choices that differ around skills and education rather than choice of OS vendor. Those jobs are not interchangeable.

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

#599

Post by realusername »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #598
realusername wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in your own example, you are less likely to find remote working, modern development practices or competitive salary at your average SharePoint gig compared to your average fullstack, devops or data engineering job.

I don't think you know the meaning of the world suffering. And data science and IT infra/support are different career choices that differ around skills and education rather than choice of OS vendor. Those jobs are not interchangeable.

Sure, if they are happy with those tradeoffs, that's good for them.

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

#600

Post by chucke1992 »

mrweasel wrote: post #572
chucke1992 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the problem is that EU basically wants Teams to be more expensive so that Slack will become cheaper and thus more attractive. It is hilarious that Slack still has not been able to introduce proper video calls while introducing relatively useless integrations.

If Microsoft unbundles Teams, they can still make it available for free and nothing will have been resolved. I do agree with the EU that Teams should be unbundled, but unless you have a cheaper and/or better alternative I don't see it being all that effective. Teams also integrate into Active Directory and the whole Microsoft ecosystem in a way most other systems just doesn't do (not that they can't).

Teams currently requires a separate license no? It is not free anymore with Microsoft 365.

And that's thing - if slack was actually trying to add features and integrations that users actually wanted, it would not fail that much.

I mean, Zoom succeeded without having anything except team conferencing...

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