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

731–740 of 808 posts

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

#731

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

skywhopper wrote: post #232
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I administer a Windows domain at my job that I do 40 hours a week so your assessment of me is just wrong and also offensive. I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task man…

lol, a GPO. Very reasonable solution for a home user.

Task Scheduler is available on Windows 10 Home. I think of it as "cron for Windows" even though despite being able to schedule the execution of specific tasks, it is really nothing like cron aside from that.

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

#732

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

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.

When I changed from a Slack-using employer to a MS Teams-using employer around 2 years ago, I found it impossible to argue that the usability of MS Teams was even close to the usability of Slack. Slack was significantly better in this regard.

MS Teams had better integration with some other MS services such as OneDrive. That's obviously going to be so, that's what it's for.

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

#733

Post by throwaway2037 »

zer00eyz wrote: post #618
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)…

>>> need to be better than Spotify I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify. The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...

Hi. I use Spotify in a web browser (at the office), on Linux (at home), and Android (mobile). To me, the Spotify UI has barely changed in 3 years.

You wrote:

    > The product has gone to hell
Can you provide some specifics? To be clear, I am not defending Spotify. One big thing that is lacking: They need a plug-in system like modern web browsers. This will allow them to offload a lot of the UI innovation to tech savvy users. At the moment, only Spotify can make changes to the UI.

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

#734

Post by throwaway2037 »

djtango wrote: post #605
dmix wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp. Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense. Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the e…

I have first hand seen Teams eat a whole bunch of better product's lunches. Overnight Meet Slack Zoom all got poopoo'd by finance because the company was already paying for MS Office

Yeah, Symphony chat lost to Team also. Why didn't Symphony add voice and video chat? I never understood that.

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

#735

Post by ThunderSizzle »

Perseids wrote: post #673
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…

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 o…

The number of anti-Microsoft people that still use Github is astounding to me, and then just blame Microsoft for buying it.

At some point, if people want an alternative to Github, perhaps it starts with people not using Github and switching to alternatives.

Honestly, it would seem people like market concentration. I don't think people like having to use multiple repository management websites. However, I do wish it was centralization in experience over a federated system, rather than what we have noe. e.g. a "source control browser" that normalizes github, bitbucket, sourceforce, sourcehut, etc. into a single seamless interface.

But even that doesn't seem to be high on anyone's list.

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

#736

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

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…

> Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless,

Hard to see how.

MS could devote resources to making MS Teams more useful, but they don't have to, so they don't.

It's not competing with Slack on features and usability or fun. It's competing with Slack on "you get a chat app and hey, it's free (with office)" and that makes the board happy.

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

#737

Post by pnutjam »

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…

You can't controls screen on teams with Linux, even running Chrome browser or Edge. Drives me crazy.

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

#738

Post by dumbo-octopus »

nerdile wrote: post #528
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Microsoft’s fault in any way. EU is legally requiring them to charge more. Unless you know a way they could comply with the rules (which state they can’t charge less) without charging more?

By charging the same amount for a bundle of Office + Teams and a lesser amount for Office without Teams.

Ah, the pipe dream approach to argumentation.

As a Microsoft shareholder, I can say I’m damn glad they didn’t go the “let’s devalue our core value propositions” path.

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

#739

Post by hinkley »

FireBeyond wrote: post #464
hinkley wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams on iOS used to chew through batteries like candy. It's supposedly better, but I really should have paid more attention to my battery life when I uninstalled it after leaving my last job.

As of now, I don't notice the battery impact of having it running on my iPhone 14.

Yeah it went from an active problem to not one. But that could still mean 2 hours and I’m not sure I’d notice.

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

#740

Post by Aloha »

Wytwwww wrote: post #671
Perseids wrote: post #665

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. 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…

I fully believe we lost more than we gained from the breakup of AT&T - local access prices went up significantly, and while long distance rates declined, it did so roughly linearly with the decreasing cost of bandwidth.

In the end we pay about as much as we ever have in aggregate - but at a loss of all of the benefits the AT&T monopoly - subsidized general science research from the labs, a plethora of union jobs, and an overall loss of US manufacturing capacity.

My belief having working in the sector, anything that looks like a utility is better off as a tightly regulated monopoly than being open to the winds of competition.

Post reply on HN