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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

#701

Post by rexreed »

Here's what I don't get. Almost everyone I talk to hates Teams. But they use it anyways. Nothing is stopping them from using Zoom or Google Meet, or some other alternative. Yes, these other alternatives have their own problems and tradeoffs. But Teams is just substantially worse than these alternatives. I'll take a Google Meet meeting any day over Teams crap.

Nothing is forcing people to use Teams, but they do. It can't solely be cause it's just bundled and free. People don't want to spend any effort to do better? Is the friction that high?

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

#702

Post by biddit »

rexreed wrote: post #701

Here's what I don't get. Almost everyone I talk to hates Teams. But they use it anyways. Nothing is stopping them from using Zoom or Google Meet, or some other alternative. Yes, these other alternatives have their own problems and tradeoffs. But Teams is just substantially worse than these alternatives. I'll take a Google Meet meeting any day over Teams crap. Nothing is forcing people to use Teams, but they do. It ca…

> Here's what I don't get. Almost everyone I talk to hates Teams. But they use it anyways. Nothing is stopping them from using Zoom or Google Meet, or some other alternative.

Maybe in startups and small companies without a dedicated IT team, but an enterprise IT group will absolutely stop you. And Teams is very easy for them to administrate if they are already deploying MS products.

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

#703

Post by aphit »

rexreed wrote: post #701

Here's what I don't get. Almost everyone I talk to hates Teams. But they use it anyways. Nothing is stopping them from using Zoom or Google Meet, or some other alternative. Yes, these other alternatives have their own problems and tradeoffs. But Teams is just substantially worse than these alternatives. I'll take a Google Meet meeting any day over Teams crap. Nothing is forcing people to use Teams, but they do. It ca…

I must be in the minority. In the early days Teams had some pitfalls but for the most part, it's rather great. I don't understand what all the fuss is.

I regularly use both Teams and Google meet and don't find any significant differences that matter... so at the end of the day, use the one that is bundled with the rest of your software instead of having a different dependency.

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

#704

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

antifa wrote: post #678
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. MSTeams hurts users 24/7 around the clock.

Agreed. No company settles on MSTeams because it's good.

They use it because it's effectively free (1), and Slack is not.

It doesn't have to be good. And so it isn't.

1) Free with existing MS Office licences.

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

#705

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

What makes this so difficult is that it would be hard to fix even if there was agreement on the problem.

If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines, it would effectively stop all investment in disruptive technologies because any real disruption most likely infringes on some of these laws.

If you stop large companies from expanding into neighbouring industries, e.g by bundling new stuff with their existing offering, you stop them from becoming bigger but at the same time you are reducing competition. The risk is that you might end up with smaller companies but even less competition.

I'm not ideologically opposed to government intervention. I just don't know how to do it. All discussions on how to break up some tech giant quickly reveal how devilishly complex the problem is. And it's different for each of them and for each industry.

What would be a general rule to prevent growing concentration without damaging innovation, ossifying existing market structures and make impossible demands on the political system in terms of keeping all those detailed rules up-to-date and fit for purpose?

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

#706

Post by dathinab »

mort96 wrote: post #669
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…

Eh Firefox doesn't work fine with at least Google Meet in my experience (which covers both Firefox on macOS aarch64 and Firefox on Linux amd64). It's alright in the beginning, but if Firefox has been open for a while, the out-going audio gets choppy and the recipients don't hear anything. Restarting Firefox fixes it, but this is enough of a problem for me to have Chrome installed on every computer where I may have to…

I haven't had that experience, but then when it comes to audio there can be so many e.g. device (hardware+various OS parts) specific issues that only some of the browsers might have workarounds for that it's quite viable (but AFIK not the norm, and not limited to works on Chrom but not Firefox, the other way around is possible too).

Either way it doesn't matter much because:

- jitsi meet even when they still was a small startup managed to provide high quality video calling on all browsers/platforms

- MS Teams has more then enough resource to make things work, they just don't want to (same for properly maintaining their Linux app, which given that it can be a local deploy of the web-app a very little other code could be a 1.5 person job (the +.5 person in case the first is sick)) and have a good reason not to (they have been pushing edge hard, including using inappropriate means like deceiving windows users into using it when they clearly signaled they want to use another browser)

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

#707

Post by osigurdson »

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…

Pivot maybe? Direct, undifferentiated competition with a giant company is never a good idea.

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

#708

Post by realusername »

Rinzler89 wrote: post #676
realusername wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

That's some hyperbole right there, I'm just saying that they get paid less than they could and generally have worse working condition that they could have, that's all. Again, that's okay if they are aware of this tradeoff.

> There's no shortage of full stack developers globally willing to work for cheap.

That has to be the worst argument here, even Microsoft themselves outsources their own .NET work to India.

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

#709

Post by rexreed »

aphit wrote: post #703
rexreed wrote: post #701

Here's what I don't get. Almost everyone I talk to hates Teams. But they use it anyways. Nothing is stopping them from using Zoom or Google Meet, or some other alternative. Yes, these other alternatives have their own problems and tradeoffs. But Teams is just substantially worse than these alternatives. I'll take a Google Meet meeting any day over Teams crap. Nothing is forcing people to use Teams, but they do. It ca…

I must be in the minority. In the early days Teams had some pitfalls but for the most part, it's rather great. I don't understand what all the fuss is. I regularly use both Teams and Google meet and don't find any significant differences that matter... so at the end of the day, use the one that is bundled with the rest of your software instead of having a different dependency.

You are in the minority. Out of 392 people in our internal CoP group that uses Teams on a weekly basis for our checkin, in a poll, 276 asked to switch off Teams to something else, and only 5 people wanted to remain. My guess is that you'd be one of those 5. Sadly in this IT ecosystem, the minority rules.

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

#710

Post by jabroni_salad »

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".

All of those products were actually rather difficult to implement, to the point that they were job creators. It's honestly a case study for saas dominance: some ornery cludgery dying to 'it is a website'
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