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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

#611

Post by _cenw »

nextos wrote: post #466
djbusby wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.

"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

there's two kinds of teams calls. the kind attached to a meeting is hosted on an actual server and the one where you call someone directly is some p2p mess that is a lot less reliable (and doesn't work on those browsers).

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

#612

Post by jadengeller »

kwanbix wrote: post #587
teitoklien wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

it's not a great market for consumers if we allow big business to undercut pricing and kill competition

government should help us coordinate to prevent this Nash equilibria

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

#613

Post by DANmode »

SassyBird wrote: post #576
DANmode wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen enough financial software to know that someone in your world may be used to slow, tire-fire software. In that context, maybe Teams is user-friendly and high-performance!

You must not have seen Bloomberg Terminal then. Most devs on this forum wouldn’t be even able to build anything this performant and ergonomic.

True, Bloomberg Terminal is excellent.

Is that the "exception that proves the rule"?

What else ya got? Genuinely interested.

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

#614

Post by shiroiushi »

glasss wrote: post #554
shiroiushi wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, even now we already have Red Hat (IBM), SUSE, and Oracle providing support for enterprise customers for the Linux OS. The US government is a huge customer of Red Hat.

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

#615

Post by jadengeller »

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?

is it actually free? or are we collectively paying for it by allowing the big business to gain control of an otherwise competitive market and jack up prices

individuals are not pricing that in. coordination is needed. that's why we regulate the market

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

#616

Post by 3D30497420 »

j-r-d wrote: post #571
throwaway2037 wrote: post #456

Earlier 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".

Because companies were already paying for it. Where I work now moved to Teams and they openly said it's not as good as Zoom, but we need to move because we're already paying for Office and so it doesn't make financial sense to pay for an additional duplicate service.

That seems to be the reason for a lot of services. Amazon/YouTube/Apple/etc. Music don't need to be better than Spotify, but just good enough that someone won't pay for a competitor. This limits the competitors potential revenue and helps keep them from growing into stronger competition.

Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings).

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

#617

Post by _Algernon_ »

bee_rider wrote: post #467
Aeolun wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the governments will have to fork and audit the code Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.

When you sell somebody code you have an ethical responsibility to have done your best (and maintained a reasonable level of professional competence) to ensure it is defect free. Lots of companies don’t take that very seriously, which is bad, and a great reason to switch away from them. At least the government can bring the CEO before congress and waste his day. With open source code the responsibility is taken by the…

Red hat has managed to make FOSS useable in enterprise environments since 1995. There is no reason why this model could not be applied to other FOSS projects.

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

#618

Post by zer00eyz »

3D30497420 wrote: post #616
j-r-d wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because companies were already paying for it. Where I work now moved to Teams and they openly said it's not as good as Zoom, but we need to move because we're already paying for Office and so it doesn't make financial sense to pay for an additional duplicate service.

That seems to be the reason for a lot of services. Amazon/YouTube/Apple/etc. Music don't need to be better than Spotify, but just good enough that someone won't pay for a competitor. This limits the competitors potential revenue and helps keep them from growing into stronger competition. Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings)…

>>> need to be better than Spotify

I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify.

The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...

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

#619

Post by iLoveOncall »

constantcrying wrote: post #609
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 wit…

Yeah the truth is those project management SAS companies are a dime a dozen, I see ads for at least 3 of them on my daily commute to work.

Failure to innovate kills those companies.

Just look at the latest "innovation" of the OP: a wrapper around SES (5x more expensive!), like thoudand others exist.

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

#620

Post by constantcrying »

DANmode wrote: post #495
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!

How many of those entrepreneurs are explicitly agreed with by antitrust regulators of major jurisdictions...?

You are just assuming OP is telling the truth. Look at his product: https://taskulu.com/ it wasn't killed by Teams, but by Jira.
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