Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

apnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 808 posts

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

#671

Post by Wytwwww »

Perseids wrote: post #665
Wytwwww wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors. Focusing on short term repercussions for consumers has significantly hurt long term consumer interests and there is evidence that it hurt the economy in general. In the decades preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and t…

> preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and that extreme power concentration (as we e.g. see today in the IT sector)

Yet Bell wasn't broken up until 1982 so I'm not sure if it was a such a turning point. IMHO allowing AT&T's monopoly to exist for that long was much more detrimental to consumers than whatever MS, Apple and other tech companies are doing these days.

But yeah I certainly overall agree that competition has generally been the driving force behind most of human progress and economic growth at least over the last few hundred years. It's just not entirely clear what measures should governments use to maximize the competitiveness of markets without introducing inefficiencies and costs that slow down economic growth and technological progress (while not providing that many benefits to consumers either).

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

#672

Post by ItsBob »

daemin wrote: post #657
ItsBob wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. If you want a great example of this, look no further than Jira!

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

#673

Post by Perseids »

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…

Market concentration is really the underlying problem. Microsoft should never have been allowed to buy GitHub. Microsoft Windows should have long been split into a separate company to Microsoft Office etc. If there wasn't this one gigantic business, then whichever smaller business made Teams would have a much more equal footing with other competitors, as they would not be at an unfair advantage for integration into other currently-Microsoft-owned products as well as the aggressive bundling Microsoft does with Teams.

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

#674

Post by kevincox »

layer8 wrote: post #275
stonemetal12 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is bundling Teams illegal, but bundling Word, Excel and the rest of the office bits totally cool?

Bundling is not illegal as long as the bundling is not forced. When Microsoft got into trouble by bundling Media Player with Windows, the fix was to offer Windows with or and without Media Player (“Windows N”). The bundled offer became legal by also offering the unbundled version.

If you ask me they should also be forced to sell Windows Media Player separately.

Although I may be ok with no requiring them to port it to OSes other than Windows. But you should at least be able to gaze at the bytes without buying Windows.

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

#675

Post by SkiFire13 »

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…

Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams. That's actively harming customers, because they didn't get the choice to pay less and only buy what they wanted (which is just Office).

Once customers bought Office+Teams the cost of using Teams is 0, because they paid for it. How can competitors make a cheaper product then? You can't get cheaper than that! Even if someone wanted to use your product they most likely would still have to pay for Teams by buying Office.

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

#676

Post by Rinzler89 »

realusername wrote: post #625
Rinzler89 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if otherwise, it's not like you can move from .NET dev to DS jobs on a whim whithout any kind of experience or specialization. And where I live .NET jobs are far more abundant and better paid than DS jobs which are few and have loads of coopetition from newgrads due to all they hype they genrated.

That's exactly what I meant by suffering from the market yeah. That's another reason why I'm not working on windows. I'm enjoying higher salaries and better working conditions thanks to that. Also development is a global market nowadays so that makes it even worse for this kind of jobs since they don't usually offer a remote option. It's telling that you say "where I live", where I live there's just no development jo…

You still haven't proven how those people making a living on .NET/Microsoft stacks careers are suffering. Habe you actually seen people suffering, like from war and poverty?

Also, dvelopment careers being "global" is mostly in theory. In practice it doesn't work everywhere. Some countries don't have global remote work opportunities due to tax and labor laws making that very difficult meaning you're stuck with what the local market offers. And those few global remote jobs get hundreds of applications so actually getting one is almost impossible especially in the current bear market.

There's no shortage of full stack developers globally willing to work for cheap. Competing globally in this race to the bottom is no good if you work in a high CoL area unless you score a high paying FaNG or scale-up but getting such jobs is insanely competitive that's not realistic for most people I know.

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

#677

Post by Wytwwww »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #675
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams. That's actively harming customers, because they didn't get the choice to pay less and only buy what they wanted (which is just Office). Once customers bought Office+Teams the cost of using Teams is 0, because they paid for it. How can competitors make a cheaper product then? You can't get cheaper than that! Even if someone wanted to use your p…

> Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams

True, but that also applies to every other single app and service that they are bundling with the subscription. I only want Excel but I'm also forced to pay for PowerPoint. And how deep should we go? Should they be forced to turn Edge into a paid product you have to buy separately? They crippled if not outright killed the consumer anti-virus industry by starting to bundle Windows Defender/(whatever it's called)? That certainly wasn't fair to McAfee/Norton/Kaspersky/(any other shovel ware provider) but did it hurt consumers? One might argue this would also apply to [File] Explorer and every other basic app.

How is the situation with Teams at all different and where exactly do we draw the line?

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

#678

Post by antifa »

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…

> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.

MSTeams hurts users 24/7 around the clock.

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

#679

Post by sylware »

But the basic digital regulations are still missing:

Enforcement of noscript/basic (x)html interop (no massive and grotesquely complex big tech web engines required), minimal file formats (for instance utf8 text), png for images (I have suspicions of unstable complexity with webp).

This is not perfect, and sometimes there is kind of nothing: printing oriented file formats is an issue: pdf/ps. PDF was kind of highjacked at ISO by msft putting complexity at its core, even "programming complexity" there.

I wonder how complex are PS/PDF(max 1.4 I guess), because you know big tech wants the possibility to code a _real-life_ alternative to be a nightmare.

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

#680

Post by atribecalledqst »

WheatMillington wrote: post #305
sunaookami wrote: post #73

I already know how this will be solved: Microsoft will pay a (small) fine and file it under "the cost of doing business" while the damage is already done. Teams is one of the absolutely worst products ever programmed, it's hiliarious how bad it is. It only reached its market share because Microsoft gave it away "for free" with Office 365 or MS 365 or whatever it's called now.

I use Teams every day for work, I'm not sure why it's considered so bad? It seems user friendly and useful, to me. Non-tech worker (finance).

The thing I hate most about the new version of Teams is that it flashes the taskbar when a new message is received. You can disable the pop-up notifications, but that doesn't affect the flashing taskbar for some (??) reason. The old version of Teams didn't work like this, it was possible to turn off all notifications & alerts so that you only got notified when a meeting started or somebody @'d you.

You can go into do-not-disturb mode to stop the flashing, but then pings aren't delivered and you can't do 1-on-1 calls. So there's a pretty significant tradeoff. I wasn't able to find a way to disable them any other way (registry hacks I saw recommended online didn't work).

This sucks because if I see the taskbar flashing, I MUST go and check out Teams. It's too distracting to leave on. So there can't be a background group chat where I'm not taking part and doing other things -- I get dragged into checking every message which is extremely annoying. I suspect that 'immediately check out the app causing the taskbar to flash' is basically a conditioned response for most computer users so I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

----

I also strongly dislike the vibe of the Teams emoji set. The :) looks like it's playing dumb, and it adds that connotation to messages I see from people using it. (admittedly I've only seen it be used by my dumb coworkers)

Post reply on HN