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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

#651

Post by arnvald »

Rastonbury wrote: post #480
xzjis wrote: post #401

The problem is that it's already too late. In my company, we used Teams because it was "free" (they even added a free version that lasted between COVID-19 and 2023), bundled with everything else, and now that we have to pay for Teams alone, we won't consider switching to something else because people are used to Teams. We never considered an alternative, and we will never consider one, and it's just more expensive fo…

Hate to break it to you but even if they broke out pricing and SKU, the MS rep is going to offer Teams a separate product and majority of the time bosses will buy it out of convenience. Why bother evaluating slack/zoom when mail, calendar, files,call recording and transcript are integrated with Teams especially for old school companies

In some companies yes, but in other ones when comparing two similarly priced products, the decision will be made based on something else than just a budget.

Currently often the narrative is “we have it included for $0, why would we pay $100 per year per employee for a similar product?”

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

#652

Post by miki123211 »

lrem wrote: post #624
3D30497420 wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Oh, Apple is way more forceful than that. I keep finding myself in the situation where I pause YouTube on my headphones, speak for a while with someone, click to unpause and instead of resuming on YouTube that starts Apple Music playing the same U2 album. I'm still refusing to set that damn thing up, much less have it be the default recipient of the play button.

To be fair, this is mostly due to Youtube and their very strict "no video playback when the app isn't open" policies. If you were using any other app, anything from Spotify to really niche audiobook apps, you wouldn't have that problem.

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

#653

Post by linuxandrew »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #647
swores wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors. On the one hand that's a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both pre…

However, this is an interesting problem. By nature of competition, every customer a competitor takes is a customer missed. So when is competition anti-competive? In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had…

> In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?

Well, they should at very least make Teams interoperable like every other goddamn service should be - or be forced to do so.

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

#654

Post by daemin »

gostsamo wrote: post #109
ssahoo wrote: post #63

Why don't they apply the laws universally and effectively make this kind of bundling illegal for mega corporations? For endusers, it feels like they are playing with different rules for Microsoft Apple Adobe and Google. Since EU waits until the damage is done and milks them, it barely helps the situation for consumers. For corps they just assume the penalty as cost of doing business.

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

(This is written as a thought exercise)

Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software?

Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup.

This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together?

Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more.

How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?

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

#655

Post by gostsamo »

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…

Two questions: do Adobe uses their dominant position in one of those markets to influence the clients in another market to use their product? Second, does Adobe's competition wishes to complain? The second part will prioritize the case, I think.

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

#656

Post by cujaneway »

Wytwwww wrote: post #642
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…

That's am understandable perspective but wouldn't this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle? e.g. selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want to enter the document processing/spreadsheet/etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc. Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be onl…

Is hurting competitors not the same as hurting consumers?

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

#657

Post by daemin »

ItsBob wrote: post #607
kwanbix wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

It's like the old adage of why Enterprise software sucks so badly to use.

It's because it's being sold to managers and executives who don't actually end up using it, and never have to deal with the consequences of buying it.

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

#658

Post by redleader55 »

It feels like regulators are trying to solve the problem at the wrong end. Whenever you hear about an antitrust ruling, it's "bundling". IE was the same, now this.

In my opinion, the problem is when a company is happy to eat the losses for a while, in hopes of killing competition and then raising the price when they are alone in the market. Clouds, ride hailing apps... It's fine to price your product at "zero", as long as you hold that price after you become a monopoly.

The problem for regulators is they can't force a price, nor judge on all the externalities that are included in it.

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

#659

Post by throwAGIway »

palata wrote: post #641
throwAGIway wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"They used to sell exclusively hot-dogs, and now they sell hot-dogs and hamburgers. That's the last straw, I'm going back to the US where they only sell hot-dogs!" You have to admit it sounds slightly ridiculous, right?

Yeah it does, not sure why are we talking about that though. It's a complete misrepresentation of the situation.

Let's take Google services as an example. I'm no fan of Google but their integrated search/Maps/PoI/hotels/directions/flight tickets experience was perfect, my workflow depends on it a lot. Now I can't use it without a US VPN, the only thing I get without it are some useless web search results and a small picture of a map that doesn't show anything interesting and doesn't do anything on click.

Not going "back" BTW, I was born in EU. And of course, it's really not just about the online services. Land costs absurd money, wages are absurdly low, energy strategy is completely idiotic and thus energy prices are absurd, business administration is unnecessarily hard, regulations are hard to understand and navigate, and so on. I don't want to live in an environment where a bunch of ideologists chosen by people out of my own state fight my life at every step. Wanna bet when they try to pass Chat Control again? Why am I required to own a Google/Apple controlled device to do basically anything, like register a car or pay taxes?

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

#660

Post by 127 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #563

It's a common pattern at several of the big software companies to bundle a lot of freemium stuff with their paid core products that then ends up squeezing independent providers of similar stuff. I love Github. Before MS bought it I was a CTO at a company where we happily paid for it. Now MS offers it for free. I don't currently pay them anything. We also use Github actions. We don't pay for that either. You get 2000…

Both US and EU blame China of dumping practices, but at the same time Microsoft is doing the exact same thing.
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