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

771–780 of 808 posts

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

#771

Post by Supermancho »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #596
Supermancho wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.

I mean, if someone is physically harmed it is also too late, but still the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.

> the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.

As long as the law already existed

Either a law is inherently useful, or it is not. No need to cry about abuses in the 1800 regarding laws being passed today. The proposal is to fix a situational problem, not a physical one.

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

#772

Post by tacocataco »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #594
DaoVeles wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an unfortunate state of the world is that those can use unethical moves to quickly crush others will live to fight another day. By the time the law catches up, they have made their billions.

Which is why the fines must depend on the company and be much higher, to threaten their own business.

Haven't we been trying fines? Revoke their corporate charter, the survivors will take notice and behave. Or else.

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

#773

Post by trifurcate »

neonsunset wrote: post #693
trifurcate wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mono as a runtime hasn't been relevant in almost a decade now (since the advent of .NET Core). "I can go into the compilers to find bugs" -> yeah, that's what Roslyn is. C# lets you control GC, marshalling, safety, calling convention, inlining, etc. for very fast hand-rolled managed or unmanaged code if you need it.

Mono is alive and well in https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/tree/main/src/mono . It serves Android, iOS, WASM and s390x targets, maybe some other too. It is generally much slower than CoreCLR, but besides supporting more platforms, has features that CoreCLR lacks like IL interpreter (technically, CoreCLR has one too but it has been broken for years and is never used). Ideally, iOS's Mono usage will be eventually repl…

Yes, I wanted to mention WASM but honestly even talking about it is doing more of a disservice to modern .NET than not given the preconceptions about Mono.

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

#774

Post by neonsunset »

sqeaky wrote: post #770
neonsunset wrote: post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t use Visual Studio :) But I guess by the time it installs Rails finally completes serving the first request.

Well I never said anything about rails. I sure would like to see the software development shop that uses C# and not Visual Studio.

There are many companies that employ C# alongside other languages, or C# and F# exclusively, that have teams using Macs with VS Code or Rider. Whichever language/platform you had experience with has little to do with what .NET is for 8 years already, and its unproductive to insist on outdated perception.

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

#775

Post by swores »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #735
Perseids wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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

Voting with your wallet (or with your attention & time for free things) makes sense if there's an alternative you can choose that's as good as the one from the company you dislike, or if you consider the impact on you of any deficits in the alternative to be less important than sending a message by voting with your wallet/time.

But it's completely understandable, and very common, for people to be in a situation that while they want to boycott a company/product because of how they act in some way (from software UI decisions to using child labour in sweatshops to...) but are faced with the choice between using/buying one of their products or suffering from what they consider to be a significantly worse and/or more expensive product.

And if you wish that one or both of Microsoft selling / giving away Github, or MS changing how they run Github, would happen, then why not publicly express blame in the hope that enough similar complaints build pressure, regardless of whether you're avoiding it or feeling you need to use it?

(Personally I don't feel I use Github enough to be a useful voice on how MS have handled it since the acquisition, but I feel like many people have expressed being pleasantly surprised that they've broadly let Github be Github, at least compared to worst-case fears of how much they might try to make it more Microsofty.)

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

#776

Post by rw_grim »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #687
EionRobb wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll get there one day ;( The frontend/backend split of Pidgin/libpurple makes this tricky, and we still don't have voice and video in a Windows release (my main dev OS these days)

> The frontend/backend split of Pidgin/libpurple makes this tricky, and we still don't have voice and video in a Windows release Is that specifically for Teams, or is it a general limitation of libpurple?

It's an issue with libpurple and the user interfaces. It's something we'll ideally be tackling in the next few months in purple3/pidgin3 as we get closer and closer to an alpha release.

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

#777

Post by rw_grim »

djha-skin wrote: post #175

If you "just want chat" but are required to use Teams at work, you might try pidgin[1] with the MS Teams plugin[2]. The former can be installed via scoop and therefore does not require admin priveleges to install. This thing still works, and works better than ever, with plugin for modern chat services available. 1: https://www.pidgin.im/ 2: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

You may want to see the full plugin list as well https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...

If there's something we're missing, please let me know!

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

#778

Post by ClumsyPilot »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #746
pydry wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines There is absolutely no need to do this until you become Microsoft's size and no government has or likely ever will. There was a lot more innovation enabled by the antitrust action against Microsoft in the early 2000s.

>> If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines >There is absolutely no need to do this until you become Microsoft's size and no government has or will. I'm not so sure. Debates about how to break up the tech giants often revolve around which particular activities shouldn't be under the same roof because there is an intrinsic conflict of interest. For insta…

> boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed.

This only applies to dominant companies/ monopolies.

But there is merit to the idea - like should investment banks be allowed to profit from taking a position against the position of their customer, even if that was done on their advise?

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

#779

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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?

If Microsoft start providing kickbacks and bribes to CTOs for choosing Microsoft, many competitors won’t be able to keep up. Is that Microsoft’s problem?

No, it’s our problem. We get to decide what they are allowed to do, whats fair and what isn’t.

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

#780

Post by ClumsyPilot »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #735
Perseids wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> The number of anti-Microsoft people that still use Github is astounding to me

This is silly, they will just buy up all the competition, what choose will you have

Post reply on HN