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

311–320 of 808 posts

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

#311

Post by chucke1992 »

mrweasel wrote: post #188
chucke1992 wrote: post #2

Maybe if Slack offered proper video conferencing tools it would not complain. Should ask Zoom for advice.

It think that one of the issues in this case. Teams rather terrible, but so is everything else. I worked for a company that used Google Chat internally and we'd use Teams with some clients. People kept telling me how much better Slack is, but now that I work for a company that does have Slack, I can't say that it's any better. In fact I'd probably rank Google Chat highest of those three options. Microsoft is giving p…

the problem is that EU basically wants Teams to be more expensive so that Slack will become cheaper and thus more attractive.

It is hilarious that Slack still has not been able to introduce proper video calls while introducing relatively useless integrations.

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

#312

Post by Sakos »

dsalfdslfdsa wrote: post #223
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I administer a Windows domain at my job that I do 40 hours a week so your assessment of me is just wrong and also offensive. I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task man…

You haven't re-created the described problem - Teams sets itself to auto-start again after you start it yourself. After all, it's very reasonable that you might want to join the occasional Teams meeting but not want it running after every boot.

I'm not sure if it's a particular version or environment that does this, but at the very least I can't replicate it on my home PC with Teams (personal). If I disable it in the task manager's autostart, it remains disabled if I start Teams. It won't even let me enable "Auto-start" in the Teams settings if it's disabled in the task manager.

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

#313

Post by barryrandall »

chucke1992 wrote: post #2

Maybe if Slack offered proper video conferencing tools it would not complain. Should ask Zoom for advice.

Or, like, people could just use both. I realize that means running yet another instance of Chrome, but it's 2024. Even Macs can multitask.

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

#314

Post by chucke1992 »

jodrellblank wrote: post #306
adam_arthur wrote: post #281

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost. Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in. Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding) Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the me…

> Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats They did, Microsoft made Office support some open XML thing, and what changed?

People realized that actually it requires a lot of investment to produce an office suite.

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

#315

Post by psunavy03 »

wvenable wrote: post #205
phito wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do Windows users try so hard to keep defending their OS's shitty behaviors? It's always "you can disable it" (but it might come back automatically after an update), and when you can't disable it (one drive), it's "just don't use it".

I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my default browser either. I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues. That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. Th…

> I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.

This goes to explain a lot of reactions that Very Online people tend to have to things. There must be a villain and that villain must be irredeemable. Even when, as the Brits would say, "cock-up" is a more likely explanation than "conspiracy."

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

#317

Post by chucke1992 »

layer8 wrote: post #275
stonemetal12 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is bundling Teams illegal, but bundling Word, Excel and the rest of the office bits totally cool?

Bundling is not illegal as long as the bundling is not forced. When Microsoft got into trouble by bundling Media Player with Windows, the fix was to offer Windows with or and without Media Player (“Windows N”). The bundled offer became legal by also offering the unbundled version.

and the hilarious part is that just like with IE it addressed completely non-existent problem as the future showed that the users went after subscription services and browsing on mobile.

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

#318

Post by kernal »

adam_arthur wrote: post #281

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost. Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in. Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding) Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the me…

>Would YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data?

Would those YouTube clients offer a subscription service to pay for the data they download, or did you expect Alphabet to cover all the costs?

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

#319

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pif wrote: post #34

You'd expect them to have learnt the lesson with Internet Explorer but, as someone said, there is no way a man will understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it!

They probably did learn their lesson -- even if we get fined we'll still profit so we will still do what we want.

Fine the C-suite n years of total income (including unrealised income).

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

#320

Post by chucke1992 »

EasyMark wrote: post #256
gabeio wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While they offer it they don’t hand it to you for free just because you bought their iCloud storage. The issue here seems to be aimed squarely at slack and the like which have been in-theory pushed out of the market by teams. Of course most of us know that’s unfortunate because if they actually used teams for a little they wouldn’t use it even if it was bundled (probably why MS is trying to stick it everywhere).

I thought the issue was that it comes installed by default. Like the old “Microsoft installed a browser to kill netscape” brawl in America.

no, the issue is not with the installation but basically it is about slack (and some other not-used app) complaining that Teams being a part of an office suite prevented slack from competition.

Which is hilarious considering that zoom took off without bundling with anything - while slack STILL is unable to offer a proper video conferencing.

Post reply on HN