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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

#631

Post by mordae »

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.

Random errors during calls, tab freezes etc..

"Supported."

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

#632

Post by consp »

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.

Try sharing a window on linux and see how that goes.

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

#633

Post by cess11 »

cereal_cable wrote: post #565
cess11 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone I work with is constantly badmouthing Teams. It's buggy and flakey and they killed Linux support which my company actually made use of. Either way, it doesn't matter since it's bundled. Literally killed any chance of competition getting a fair shake at our usage. Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.

The customers I'm thinking of are in the public sector and quite non-technical, from us they learn that there are better options and realise that the tooling they have are causing them pain. Together with GDPR cases tightening things up on what software you can use I expect this to make a difference.

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

#634

Post by jimnotgym »

antihero wrote: post #392
jimnotgym wrote: post #385

It is a common comment on HN to say Teams is rubbish and also to ask why anyone would use it. Now we have a problem of market dominance, which demonstrates by how far the HN bubble misunderstands how ordinary people do their day to day business. This is the vacuum MS have been consistently winning in for several decades now, it would be worth you understanding it. Now someone is about to reply that market dominance d…

Anecdotal but pretty much everyone I know that’s not in tech also fucking hates Teams too. Microsoft win contracts decided by decision makers at the top of large companies. Companies like Slack win contracts decided by actual users in companies that listen to them.

Anecdotal, I don't know anyone who hates Teams at all

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

#635

Post by throwAGIway »

kergonath wrote: post #530
palata wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU wants to give you the choice. You will have the choice to use everything Apple makes. The only reason to move to the US would be because you really don't want to have a choice, but that would be weird.

The probability that they are actually a EU resident and move to the US because of app bundling is close to zero. And yes, that would be completely ridiculous.

I said finally, meaning it's the last straw, not that it's the sole reason.

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

#636

Post by jimnotgym »

jiggawatts wrote: post #391
jimnotgym wrote: post #385

It is a common comment on HN to say Teams is rubbish and also to ask why anyone would use it. Now we have a problem of market dominance, which demonstrates by how far the HN bubble misunderstands how ordinary people do their day to day business. This is the vacuum MS have been consistently winning in for several decades now, it would be worth you understanding it. Now someone is about to reply that market dominance d…

> choose not to use them This is definitely a problem in general for the open-source / Silicon Valley crowd. In this case however the integrations you describe aren’t possible for a third party. Microsoft has made it absurdly difficult to extend and integrate with Office, and they regularly use anti-competitive (and anti-consumer!) methods to “push” new products via first-party integration. A random example: One driv…

Rather than a random example, that is an excellent example of something the competition people should focus on. SharePoint is auwful. OneDrive plus SharePoint is awesome on Windows and Mac.

Here are some random examples of things Teams does that are easy to copy from memory.

+ Azure AD integration without making it an enterprise pricing feature. SSO is such an important feature, and yet most apps seem to charge extra for it, and so price themselves out. Make sure your app privileges can be controlled by AzureAD groups.

+ Grab the org chart from Azure AD. Who does Joe Bloggs work for, who are his team. Where does he work. What is his mobile number

+ Sync the Calendar properly! Put my new meeting in Outlook properly.

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

#637

Post by javcasas »

RajT88 wrote: post #335
wvenable wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my default browser either. I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues. That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. Th…

> I think it's a bit overblown. Indeed, they've been playing shenanigans with OneDrive, but you can actually uninstall it now easily. That didn't used to be the case. Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now. I'm pretty sure I solved definitively the Teams autostart problem long ago, easily enough I can't recall what I did. It's not a problem for me, even o…

> Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.

Long, long ago we had names for software that auto-installs and auto enables even after you have removed it: malware, or spyware if it's not very destructive.

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

#638

Post by westurner »

Did they prevent OEMs from tampering with the system install image by adding apps that compete with Teams or from removing Teams?

Are they fascistly on notice for market cap, not antitrust offense?

Is the remedy that EU dominates MS until their market share is acceptable, or did MS prevent others from installing competing apps on the OS they and others distribute?

In the US, no bundling applies to ski resorts working in concert with other ski resorts. Materially, did MS prevent OEMs or users from installing competing apps?

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

#639

Post by Rinzler89 »

constantcrying wrote: post #608
Rinzler89 wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't look like a failed startup to me since it's still active and the poster has several startups under his belt seemingly being a "serial founder" so I was curious to know which of his startups was the one that he claims got killed by Teams to see if it holds water.

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

#640

Post by Mashimo »

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".

> Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

I don't think MS Windows ever shipped with these.

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