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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

#721

Post by isodev »

nextos wrote: post #441
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…

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…

Also Safari, for years it wasn't even possible to sign-into Teams (even to chat), let alone calls (all while apps like google meet had no trouble to provide both features).

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

#722

Post by dijit »

Fysi wrote: post #566
georgeecollins wrote: post #386

Teams is a pain in the neck! If you make an office calendar appointment for a zoom, Microsoft "helps" you by creating a teams invite in the text of the invitation that gets sent out. So there is always a chance someone you invite will click on the wrong link to be in the meeting. If you ever click on this link yourself teams will install on your system and try in the run in the background every time you boot your com…

This is a convenience feature in Outlook that is enabled only if you have a Teams licence, specifically that when you create a meeting in Outlook, it sets it as an online meeting. You can turn this off, but last I checked can also set it to stuff like Google Meet, Zoom, WebEx, Facetime, etc if you have the relevant plug-in for Outlook.

I got sufficiently pissed off that this that I ranted about it: https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly/

It would automatically reactivate that "teams" toggle.

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

#723

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

> wouldn't this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle?

That’s absolutely the basic idea of antitrust.

Using dominance in Market A to get advantage in market B

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

#724

Post by throwAGIway »

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...?

Why should I care what a protectionist government agency thinks? As a customer, I am very satisfied with the deal Microsoft offered.

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

#725

Post by rufius »

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.

Another anecdote - I hate slack. Indifferent to teams, but loathe slack.

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

#726

Post by nova22033 »

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…

What did you project management startup do that dozens of other non-MS companies don't already do?

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

#727

Post by viridian »

leokennis wrote: post #711
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…

The elephant in the room here is companies who "do their chat and collaboration" on Teams. If you work in an organization with 10,000 people using Teams, no one is going to join your Google Meet meeting - if you're even allowed to create one. As someone who uses Teams all day for work, I have to say since they created the "New Teams", the performance is a lot better and especially if you also use OneDrive, Outlook et…

This doesn't really match my experience. Friction for most video calls is very low. Our org uses teams, but my team uses old zoom accounts we got during early covid, for small groups we use slack huddles, and when we talk to AWS product folks we use chime. Once in a blue moon someone will even send a google meetup my way.

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

#728

Post by ZeroCool2u »

eggy wrote: post #716
DANmode wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, Bloomberg Terminal is excellent. Is that the "exception that proves the rule"? What else ya got? Genuinely interested.

Bloomberg Terminal is a hardware/software dynamic duo! Reuters and Dow Jones have competitive packages too. Other software in finance: kdb, for time-series analytics [0]. AmiBroker - amazing tech analysis package, and AmiBroker Formula Language (AFL - found this because I like J and APL), an array-based PL with debugger built-in to the AmiBroker platform. Fast [1]. I have been programming since 1978 starting on a Com…

KDB is the epitome of finance software. Cool in theory, and a decade ago probably the right choice if you needed to separate compute/storage and just get crazy high performance, but god damn I hate actually having to deal with it. Would rather DuckDB or even just Polars every time these days.

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

#729

Post by indoordin0saur »

doron wrote: post #715
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hard to argue that Slack is significantly better; it got increasingly messy over time. It's not that teams are better; the alternative isn't.

As someone who uses both I still contend that Slack is superior. The messiness seems to come from too many channels being made and needs to be actively pruned by management and company practices around Slack need to be communicated to employees.

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

#730

Post by GFischer »

cogman10 wrote: post #668
cereal_cable wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. My company was seriously considering slack, but then teams came in the o365 bundle they were already paying for, so we went with teams. It's better than where we were (Cisco jabber) but also worse than what's out there.

The company I work for used Slack, we were happy, but higher ups were looking to cut costs and they noticed they had Teams for free, so guess what... bye bye Slack.

Absolutely a monopoly maneuver.

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