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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

#601

Post by ItsBob »

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.

> it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product

The problem you have is that the people making the finance decisions are often far-removed from the ones making value-based decisions.

The ones making the decision from a finance-perspective look at the offering from Microsoft, realise that it does video and chat for free (well, they're paying for O365 anyway) and that's it.

They don't care (or know!) that it's a resource hog, buggy etc. The value from the OP's product would not even be a consideration even if it was 100x "better" (use your own definition of "better" here!)

So I think it's unfair to use that comparison in this case

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

#602

Post by mirsadm »

chucke1992 wrote: post #311
mrweasel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It think that one of the issues in this case. Teams rather terrible, but so is everything else. I worked for a company that used Google Chat internally and we'd use Teams with some clients. People kept telling me how much better Slack is, but now that I work for a company that does have Slack, I can't say that it's any better. In fact I'd probably rank Google Chat highest of those three options. Microsoft is giving p…

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.

What are proper video calls? I can make video calls just fine in Slack.

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

#603

Post by geocar »

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.

> You can turn this off

Why the fuck would I want to do that?

"Oh sorry, I accidentally joined the Teams meeting instead of the Zoom meeting, nobody was there for 15 minutes so I left"

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

#604

Post by Angostura »

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".

Because it Teams isn’t just a chat app? It includes things like Planner integration?

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

#605

Post by djtango »

dmix wrote: post #476
caminante wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every entrepreneur wants to assume the counterfactual that but for their startup dying for reason #6354, it would've lived!

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…

I have first hand seen Teams eat a whole bunch of better product's lunches. Overnight Meet Slack Zoom all got poopoo'd by finance because the company was already paying for MS Office

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

#606

Post by hnlmorg »

7952 wrote: post #239
hnlmorg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also because the people who often mandate Teams are more comfortable with the Microsoft ecosystem. They run Windows rather than macOS. They think in terms of Active Directory. If it’s not MS then it isn’t “enterprise” in their world view.

And often their core responsibility will be security, governance, vendor management, digital transformation etc. Not the actual operations of the business or the comfort and productivity of staff.

Indeed. That’s an excellent point

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

#607

Post by ItsBob »

kwanbix wrote: post #591
HendrikAmbacht wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't want it to look like I'm picking on you here (see my other comment above) but that's a naieve take on things.

Not sure you realise but in the corporate world it's about politics and money. People (above entry-level staff) do things to look good to their boss. That's it! And saving money is a great way of getting promoted: "Look boss, I just saved us $500k a year in license fees!".

Saving $X per year using a "free" tool from Microsoft will always trump anything you pay for especially if you are all in on Azure, O365 already. It's a no-brainer.

Not only that, once the decision is made, it will likely never be changed until the higher-up that made the decision moves on, quits, or is fired, no matter how wrong or bad the decision was (well, within reason, of course!)

I'd love it to be as simple as making a good case for the competition, and I've had to make that case many times over the years, but the reality is that a bundled product from Microsoft will win in a place that uses other Microsoft stuff, vs a paid product thats 100x better, faster, stronger, whatever.

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

#608

Post by constantcrying »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #518
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…

Can you mention which startup was it?

Obviously not him, but it is trivial to find out. His profile links to his current company, which has his real name, which Google links to https://taskulu.com/ unless he has another startup doing communications.

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

#609

Post by constantcrying »

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…

Microsoft Teams inclusion did not kill your product.

If a single customer dropped you because he now has Teams for free your product was a failure for that customer anyway and he just suddenly realized you offered him no value.

Just look at https://taskulu.com/ and tell me how Teams even competes with you. Your real competition was Jira and customers dropped you because Jira was a superior product and integration with Teams gave them everything you offered and a chat application separate from project management is an all around better option as there is a single chat for all employees, regardless of them using the project management tools.

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

#610

Post by _cenw »

girvo wrote: post #589
cm2187 wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

for anyone that has been spared, teams is the kind of product where you have to make an appointment for an ad-hoc meeting, or you'll be stuck in some unreliable p2p skype call that doesn't work on anything but chrome or edge.
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