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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

#141

Post by Krssst »

josefx wrote: post #139
dghlsakjg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser is a tricky one. It is the chicken that lays the rest of the eggs. I’m not going to tell my mom how to curl a copy of Brave onto her machine because no browser was provided.

Chrome on Android is a completely different issue. It isn't that Android comes with Chrome or any other browser by default. It is that Googles PlayStore licensing outright allows Google to retroactively brick any phone by a manufacturer that fails to make the official Google Chrome binary the default browser on all of its Android phones. It is the reason Amazon had a hard time getting its Kindle productline of the gr…

On another hand, Android respects the user choice of browser. I have not seen it forcefully start Chrome on me once I set Firefox as default.

I cannot say the same for Windows and Edge. Teams open links by default in Edge regardless of OS settings as far as I know (but it can be adjusted in Teams settings). Searching from the start menu also opens Edge and Bing rather than my choice of browser and search engine.

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

#142

Post by eysgshsvsvsv »

sirspacey wrote: post #131
miohtama wrote: post #127

Ask forgiveness. Did Microsoft already wipe out Slack during these four years of bundling since the complaint of 2020?

Effectively yes. They sold to Salesforce for $30B, but they easily could have won the market if not for this move on Microsoft’s part.

There is no could have been in reality. Laws of physics was not broken since Slack was invented. You are reducing a complex system of economics, technology, market, phycology, politics etc into a sentence "could have been". It sounds smart and logical but it has no existential relevance.

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

#144

Post by gostsamo »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #137
gostsamo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.

Because word and excel go together in the needs of a business and those who usually buy one use the other as well. All competition of MS in this space offer similar products bundled in a similar way.

Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.

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

#145

Post by mhaberl »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #98

I thought this was going to be about bundling Teams in O365 and other biz deals. It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack. Sadly I know of many, many more companies where the offer is indeed too good to refuse, much to the disappointment of their workforce. I was helping out at a place where two emplo…

> It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack.

I don't agree.

For many years now I use Linux. I pay for Slack because some of my clients use it and it is convenient. For some other clients I need to use Teams.

I like Teams better. I never had issues with them. Slack I reinstall every 2-3 months because it breaks in some weird way; last time yesterday when I uploaded a 'big file' (csv of a few mb), not only did it crash but restarting it didn't help. Teams work good for chating, for the calendar, and for video calls. I have a lot better experience with Teams for video calls than Google Meet.

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

#146

Post by joduplessis »

Adjacent point, but I recently bought a Windows laptop (after 10 years on Mac). I've been blown away by the sheer amount of advertising & upsells at OS level. Some of it you can turn off, but others you can't seem to (for me at least). I don't ever remember Windows feeling like you're borrowing it from MS.

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

#147

Post by rrrrrrrrrrrryan »

markus_zhang wrote: post #94

They should get rid of Edge and a few other stuffs too. Is there a tool to conveniently remove any feature I do not want? Googled around and looks like Powershell is my only reliable option -- and still I cannot remove Edge.

"Debloater" is the term you probably want to search for.

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

#148

Post by nolok »

dacryn wrote: post #99
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #98

I thought this was going to be about bundling Teams in O365 and other biz deals. It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack. Sadly I know of many, many more companies where the offer is indeed too good to refuse, much to the disappointment of their workforce. I was helping out at a place where two emplo…

it's because teams is not really free It's free per user, but it's quite expensive if you start adding meeting rooms, voip, webinar, ... Zoom+slack are literally cheaper in total, but the startup cost is very visible and teams startup cost is 0.

Oh it's not even free per user.

The moment the EU opened an investigation [1], they reacted [2] by getting it out of their bundle pack [3], and offering it on the side instead, with the new bundles being marked "[bundle name] EEA NO TEAMS", and teams being priced 5€/user/month.

At least I guess kudos to Microsoft for learning a trick Facebook/Meta/Apple keep ignoring, the moment they say it coming they switched gear because they know the EU won't buy their "good for the user" thing.

> Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it. These changes will impact our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. They are designed to address two concerns that are central to the Commission’s investigation: (1) that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and (2) that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites.

They also made it extra annoying to switch from a regular package to that one, and somehow when you search on products in your admin (if you're already a customer) you need to know what to type for those no teams bundle to show up.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...

[2] https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2023/08/31/european-com...

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-...

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

#149

Post by FredPret »

queuebert wrote: post #122
xnorswap wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It auto-runs all the time. I've got a work laptop with a teams for the work domain which I want. There's also a completely different copy of teams, "Microsoft teams (Personal)" teams, which I have to close. Not just every boot, even after I close it manually, I still find it running constantly. I've no idea what triggers it, but it doesn't seem to obey any startup settings.

I have the same problem on my Mac since installing Teams. Now Microsoft Update Manager starts every time I boot, even though it's not listed in the boot items. And it always shows that I have an update available ... to Microsoft Update Manager. It's a software ouroboros.

I had the same thing.

I forget the exact course of action, but from what I remember:

- ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist

- ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft\ AU\ Daemon/

- /Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft\ AutoUpdate.app

Nuke all of that, though for the last one you may have to chmod 000 it.

Then do a search for everything with Microsoft Update in it and delete that too.

This process kind of reminds me of removing spyware infestations from Windows XP.

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

#150

Post by stonemetal12 »

tgv wrote: post #105
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Windows you can use the task manager to configure what programs are started with your computer.

Apart from the fact that most people don't have a clue, and it shouldn't even have started to begin with... how then? I can see e.g. Widgets in the task manager. How do I disable the service permanently from the task manager?

When I look at the task manager, I literally have a tab called startup. It has an entry for Microsoft Teams. I set it to disabled. Teams doesn't start at startup for me.
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