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Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

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Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#171

Post by LegitShady »

Neil44 wrote: post #90
skrause wrote: post #28

My employer is a prime example for this case: We use Microsoft 365 because we need Microsoft Office and use their email hosting. And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"? And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality…

And the rest of the MS ecosystem is full of dark patterns to funnel you onto it also. Create a new meeting in Outlook - there's automatically a Teams link in it that nobody asked for. Even if it's a Zoom meeting.

We have teams and zoom. My outlook has three different buttons - new zoom meeting, new teams meeting, and new meeting.

Maybe your system admins just suck?

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#172

Post by techdragon »

jon-wood wrote: post #157
draugadrotten wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets adde…

Why would anyone not think that putting a document in a public channel would result in people who can join that channel having access to it? Isn't that the whole point?

Because the correct minimum set of people is those who are in the channel when it was shared to the channel… and most people aren’t thinking of possible future information leaks when sharing documents directly into a channel with specific people the document is intended for…

The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#173

Post by dotnet00 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #129
nineteen999 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By mid-April was in a usable state. Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.

I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major. So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deplo…

Same experience here, at most I might've run into file attachment issues a handful of times, but otherwise Teams has been flawless for video conferences. Zoom has given me way more trouble than Teams on Windows, Linux and Android devices.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#174

Post by DrThunder »

"In April, it was reported that Microsoft was considering allowing users to install Office without installing Teams in an effort to appease regulators and avoid additional scrutiny or official investigations by the EC. Similarly, Microsoft was also set to charge different prices for Office with and without Teams integration."

Ummm, we have 365 without a teams subscription and I've pushed it out to users without the teams install as well. Is this not an option in the EU or something?

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#175

Post by zokier »

kwanbix wrote: post #139
ethbr0 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good for you, but you are aware there are many, many Microsoft shops? And those people are often forced to use Teams because Microsoft sold to the VP/C*?

So? What you are saying is that Microsoft cannot add functionality? So then make all companies only sell one product. One company sells Excel, one company sells Google Sheet, One company sells Work, one company sells Google Docs, etc. Is that what you want?

The rules change if company is found to have dominant position on the market. Its not rocket science, nor is it matter of opinion.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#176

Post by LegitShady »

skinkestek wrote: post #39
theonlybutlet wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The get out jail free card is that the engine is open source chromium, not actually held by Google. Others are free to use it.

Seeing that they already nerfed ad blocking possibilities in Chromium before completely killing Firefox, what do you think they will do once it is completely gone? Those who use Chromium - either end users or browser creators who build on Chromium - are dependent on the whims of Google.

Firefox zombie here, never noticed it dying. Firefoxs problems are generally things Mozilla does to itself.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#177

Post by mcny »

skrause wrote: post #28

My employer is a prime example for this case: We use Microsoft 365 because we need Microsoft Office and use their email hosting. And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"? And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality…

My complaints are not even big ones.

It costs Microsoft ZERO dollars to remove the asinine keyboard shortcut control + shift + c to start a call. Who does that? Why is this right next to the ctrl + shift + v (for unformatted paste) What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it?

My complaint against Azure DevOps: Why is there no "date" field? From what I've heard there are internal people at Microsoft who suffer because of this nonsense. How hard is it to give a date only option? And no, 00:00:00 is not the same as date only.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#178

Post by vel0city »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #129
nineteen999 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By mid-April was in a usable state. Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.

I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major. So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deplo…

Other than it using more CPU than it has any right to, Teams generally has worked well for me as well. The workplace has pretty fully embraced onedrive and SharePoint. Running on Windows.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#179

Post by delecti »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #129
nineteen999 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By mid-April was in a usable state. Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.

I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major. So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deplo…

My experience aligns with yours. Calls almost never drop, it's easy to do ad-hoc calls/meetings of arbitrary groups of people, it's easy to attach a teams call for an outlook event, having persistent chats associated with recurring meetings is great. I really just don't have any complaints whatsoever.

Re: Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365

#180

Post by idkyall »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #156
metacritic12 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I chalk this one up mostly to just international trade mercantilism. The EU relatively weaker at developing international software, so slapping "antitrust fines" on Microsoft (which probably have nonzero merit) is a good way of "group negotiation" to get a bulk discount on Microsoft (US) products. The analogy is how the USA is relatively less good at making quality cheese and wine compared to the EU, so the…

Per the article, it seems that it's Slack that's been making the noise and pushing for this, and EU is just playing ball (perhaps because of the mercantilism you mention).

But Slack is owned by Salesforce, a US company
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