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

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181–190 of 313 posts

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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides If one uses Teams, one would definitely see the edges of where Microsoft just started bolting things on to compete with other platforms. Skype was much closer to AIM with a phone bolted on than Teams. Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Team…

> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can. To be fair, those are two different paradigms, and both are needed simultaneously. This alone makes Teams better than Discord and Slack, both of which - last I checked on them (~3 years ago for t…

> Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die.

I wonder how many people actually find any kind of information in teams logs that are older than, say, a few days.

Even leaving aside the fact that it's a horrendous experience because of the lag and messages jumping all over the place as they're loaded, the search function is an absolute joke. Half the time it doesn't find anything, and the other half it'll just give you give the message that exactly matches your query, without any kind of context.

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

#182
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking. The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox. The explosive growth from Chrome can't be explained just by it being better than competition, or Firefox would have replaced IE in 6 months earlier. The real explanation is that Chrome benefited fr…

I think you're forgetting some of the key benefits: * auto-updates when firefox was still: HELLO WEDNESDAY'S VERSION HAS DROPPED WOULD U LIKE TO DOWNLOAD IT? * tabs were isolated per process where an entire Firefox session could still get taken down by one tab not responding * That super sexy tab handling code where the resizing happened when you clicked away meaning you could close multiple tabs by simply clicking a…

You seem to be missing the point.

My point is that being incredibly more advanced than the incumbent browser was simply not enough to have a great adoption, as evidenced by FF or Opera's market progression before Chrome's introduction.

People who make that claim in 2023 simply ignore how important Google's advertising was in securing Chrome's position.

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind. For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring fea…

Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?

In the web version, I just have one tab open for each of those.

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

#184
post #113
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking. The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox. The explosive growth from Chrome can't be explained just by it being better than competition, or Firefox would have replaced IE in 6 months earlier. The real explanation is that Chrome benefited fr…

Chrome was much much better than Firefox at the time, mainly because of V8. Firefox only got it's first JIT 9 months after Chrome. On my 2003 PC the difference was very noticeable. I switched instantly.

Did you try Opera back then?

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

#185
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it a good replacement for Teams?

Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start? This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.

There seems to be addon for Matrix to do that. https://github.com/nordeck/matrix-meetings

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

#186
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then I remember switching to Chrome for these reasons: 1. Feeling faster than firefox (still does) 2. Process separation for tabs. Firefox used to crash the whole browser, whereas chrome would crash just a single tab. 3. Shipped with support for Flash and PDFs

Speed is why I use Safari now. It feels like Chrome did compared to FF back in the day. It’s painful using Chrome by comparison. If it wasn’t for Chromes better dev tools I doubt I’d use it much

May I recommend Orion? It's based on Safaris engine, but imo improves massively on its ui (for example it comes with a fantastic (opt-in) tree-style tab browser). But most importantly it supports chrome and firefox extensions. Most of them do just work out of the box.

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

#187
I would like to see the fines used to develop good open protocols. Each chat flavor tries to be different, making them interoperable sounds like it would take some doing.

The players could vote on topics deemed worthy with 1 vote per 100k users. Fines could be expressed as losing votes. With 300m users ms would have a lot of influence. Losing 1000 votes could me more impressive than large fines?

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

#188
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Search is pretty terrible, which is a big flaw when you’re trying to dig up old info. Splitting chats with people and chats with teams into separate UIs just makes it hard to keep on top of things. Image uploads and embeds work very inconsistently and often break for no apparent reason.

I've noticed that search has got a lot better in the last few months, seems to be pretty quick at digging up stuff from a few years ago. I'll give you the image uploads/embeds - it really can be pot luck if it works or not

The search results view is laggy and it's an unclear interface.

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

#189
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So you say that they can include Edge but not Teams? What is the difference?

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

#190
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you forced to use it? I certainly don't use it. I was able to remove it from Windows without any problems. You don't like it? you can use Linux or buy a Mac. There are very credible alternatives today. Edge is bundled with Windows and Chrome still has 80% of the market or more. I still don't see the problem.

What seems to happen in enterprises is they install Office 365... and Teams comes along. A few months later the repeated suggestion of "Why don't you all switch to Teams?" from the MS account rep seems to sink in. At that point the $0 price tag (when bundled with Enterprise 365) gets compared to Slack's fairly expensive per-user pricing... and it's Goodbye Slack. So, the bundle gets it in the door (where no other com…

The problem is that Slack wants to charge for a Chat app the same amount that Microsoft or Google charge for Spreadsheet, Documents, Slides, Chat, Drive, etc.

The problem is that Slack is too expensive for what they do. If Slacks value proposition was as good as their price ask, that wouldn't happen, or would be much lesser.

You said it yourself: Slack is fairly expensive for what they do.

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