Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says • Hacker News Board

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

#791

Post by mort96 » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 8:26 AM UTC

dathinab wrote: post #706

mort96 wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sm…

You're right that when it comes to audio, there can be hardware + OS specific issues. But we're talking systems as different as aarch64 MacBook Pro running macOS with built-in mic and speakers on one hand a amd64 desktop running Ubuntu with a USB headset on the other hand both consistently exhibiting the exact same issue, but only in Firefox (not Chrome, not Discord, not TeamSpeak). My money's on that being a Firefox issue.

And the issue in Firefox across both those wildly different systems is present in Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and (I believe) Slack's Huddle.

Microsoft has the resources to make it work, sure, but I'm betting "making it work" here means fixing the issue in Firefox.

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

#792

Post by Wytwwww » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 8:47 AM UTC

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…

> defining boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed

So basically entrenched companies in specific markets would be extremely hard to challenge unless you have very large amounts of capital just laying around doing nothing? Even start-ups would struggle a lot more to get funding because no established company outside of that specific market would be allowed to purchase them. I'm not sure overall that would benefit consumers that much (IMHO the complete opposite but it's debatable).

Of course it depends on how the boundaries are defined, but just in tech:

Apple (being a computer company) would have never been allowed to develop the iPod/Phone/Pad without spinning them off into independent companies?

Google (being an OS provider) wouldn't have been able to sell Pixel phones themselves, but that wouldn't be an issue since Android probably wouldn't have been a thing in the first place.

So we'd be permanently stuck with Symbian and Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Blackberry/etc.

Same applies to MS, which is a great counterexample, despite all their resources and power they completely failed to leverage that in the mobile market. Then you have Intel vs ARM, Google and social media, even Kodak to an extent.

Having a lot of money, resources and great engineering is not necessarily such a huge competitive advantage when trying to enter an adjacent market. You must also be capable of developing competitive/innovative products while not being afraid to cannibalize your current revenue streams. Especially if we're talking about major public companies. Pouring billions into some (potential) boondoggle without any immediate return is hard to pull off without generating a severe backlash from your investors.

Having a seemingly "perfectly" competitive market (i.e. margins are close to the "risk-free" rate of return) doesn't necessarily lead to a lot of innovation because companies in such markets can't afford to make risky investments and tend to just focus on maximizing efficiency of current technologies. e.g. yes Google being able to fund Waymo with their Search/Ad revenue/etc. is not exactly fair to their potential competitors but IMHO preventing that would have significantly slowed down any real progress in the field.

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

#793

Post by Wytwwww » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 9:01 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #780

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm not sure that's so obvious these days at least. The era of tech mega corps just being able to buy up all the competition seems to be mostly over(ish) for now (.e.g Figma, ARM, Broadcom/Qualcomm, Visa/Plaid)

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

#794

Post by sqeaky » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 9:47 AM UTC

neonsunset wrote: post #774

sqeaky wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was talking about what at least 2 companies were doing in the past year.

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

#795

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 11:59 AM UTC

bee_rider wrote: post #467

Aeolun wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the governments will have to fork and audit the code Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.

When you sell somebody code you have an ethical responsibility to have done your best (and maintained a reasonable level of professional competence) to ensure it is defect free. Lots of companies don’t take that very seriously, which is bad, and a great reason to switch away from them. At least the government can bring the CEO before congress and waste his day. With open source code the responsibility is taken by the…

> When you sell somebody code you have an ethical responsibility to have done your best (and maintained a reasonable level of professional competence)

Sure, this is why you outsource everything to the cheapest labor possible. It’s easy to say you did your best if you had a team of 40 people all drooling over the keyboard, and the best of them managed to hit the spacebar to commit.

Then you complain that competent employees just cannot be found.

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

#796

Post by talldayo » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 2:59 PM UTC

bongodongobob wrote: post #768

bearjaws wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's now installed by default and in your task bar on Windows 11. It's not even just an icon either, its similar to OneDrive where removing it is non-trivial. https://www.reddit.com/r/Intune/comments/10whv8c/hows_everyo... https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/q4elim/can_we_ta... When will Slack get this same level of access? They won't ever.

What do you mean by "access"?

> What do you mean by "access"?

Strictly speaking, the ability for a third-party application to leverage Teams' features without bundling with the OS like Teams.

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

#797

Post by jbluepolarbear » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 3:16 PM UTC

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 was the product? How did teams bundle kill your growth? Office already bundled Skype and teams was a natural progression for Microsoft in response to slacks and zooms growth in taking Skypes market share. I don’t think Microsoft is innocent in this, but still think it made sense from a business point and from what companies wanted from Microsoft.

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

#798

Post by jbluepolarbear » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 3:26 PM UTC

darkwater wrote: post #694

throwaway2037 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

So, why had Microsoft created Teams, if they were already covered?

I know that a lot of companies (I’ve worked for and colleagues worked for) were asking Microsoft for an all-in-one solution like slack that would integrate with their office and share point systems. They didn’t like that Microsoft had similar products but as different apps.

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

#799

Post by fauigerzigerk » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 3:45 PM UTC

Wytwwww wrote: post #792

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #746

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 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…

> defining boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed So basically entrenched companies in specific markets would be extremely hard to challenge unless you have very large amounts of capital just laying around doing nothing? Even start-ups would struggle a lot more to get funding because no established company outside of that specific market would be allowed to purchase them. I'm not sure overall that would be…

That's exactly what worries me. So if something is done to prevent growing market concentration it better be something that doesn't rely on this sort of fine grained market segmentaion.

One alternative that could work is to mandate open APIs and a requirement for large platforms to carry all legal traffic and content. I know this is incredibly tricky as well. Who pays for the infrastructure? What about security and privacy issues? It raises many questions but it seems more promising as a direction of travel.

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

#800

Post by LightHugger » Thu, Jun 27, 2024, 7:10 PM UTC

bearjaws wrote: post #695

jillesvangurp wrote: post #563

It's a common pattern at several of the big software companies to bundle a lot of freemium stuff with their paid core products that then ends up squeezing independent providers of similar stuff. I love Github. Before MS bought it I was a CTO at a company where we happily paid for it. Now MS offers it for free. I don't currently pay them anything. We also use Github actions. We don't pay for that either. You get 2000…

And in time, GitHub will start charging for private repos again, build minutes will be 40 free per month. Enshittification will follow once they stop getting good training data out of GitHub.

And by then, all competition will have been eliminated. So it goes.