Alienating the entire customer base, that's the Microsoft I know!
MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
361–370 of 753 posts
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#362I think this is being wrongly frame. This functionality is actually needed in highly regulated industries like banking or government. Which is, you need a way to secure how your employees are accessing information. And when everything is moving to becoming a cloud document (or document hosted on the cloud), not being able to have control over the browser in which that information is viewed with is a huge threat vecto…
Then banks should just prevent employees from installing browsers they didn't approve. There is no doubt in my mind that MS did this purely to push Edge.
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#363I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here: Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile…
I disagree with your premise. I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox. Same with many other things - I…
> I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.
As an iOS app dev with a hobby project iOS keyboard, this is false. Third party iOS keyboards have just as much control over the keyboard UI and how each key (if it even has keys — your “keyboard” can be literally anything) interacts with text as a full fledged app does. In fact there is no way to “skin” the standard keyboard, but I wish there were because building a decent touch keyboard is actually quite difficult and that’d reduce the workload quite a lot.
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#364If shit hits the fan and Microsoft gets sued for Anti Competitive behaviour (again) I suspect their main defence would be: Google doesn't even let users uninstall their apps and apple doesn't even let users install other browser.
I don't use Windows, but can you fully uninstall Defender (or whatever it's called) in Windows 10/11, never have malicious software something scanner or updates run automatically?
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#365I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here: Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile…
>Have they just become Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt like bait to me. They still tried to force trough their shitty open document format, still regularly pull layers of small anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust they try to create but eno…
The whole stack of .NET Core, WSL 1/2, Windows Terminal, and Visual Studio Code has been an effort to keep Windows relevant as a development environment for web apps. Nothing more. It was desperation, but well done. Given their history, I'm quite sure that many people in their ranks pinched their noses at being forced into these moves, but the PR department did fine work in spinning this as a "kinder, gentler" Microsoft. The people who haven't been around since the 90's took the bait, but organizations don't change like that. Old timers are still there (looking at you, Brad Smith), and people who have left have invariably been replaced by similar people. That's how hiring works.
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#366Interesting timing. 2 days ago a place I'm at switched us from Google mail + calendar + meet to Microsoft outlook + calendar + teams. I almost can't believe at how good Google's suite of tools are compared to Microsoft. I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago. Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read. You have to explicitly click the mark as read button. It also…
The web experience of Word, Power Point and Excel, are appalling. Laggy, resource hogs. Excel & Power Point are damn near unusable on anything complicated.
And the group editing in those products...! Every time we've edited Excel sheets with more than one person it quickly restored in unresolvable merge conflicts and forked files. This has always worked beautifully in Google Sheets.
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#367I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here: Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile…
> But they don't.
What are you talking about? The only browser on iOS is safari, the only app store is the Apple app store. They prevent you from collecting any sort of payment without passing through their 30% fee "because we can". How is that any better?
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> features I use are worse than competition, and there are features I don't use that are annoying I hate Teams. I hate Meet. But they work with basically zero training. You have to pick your battles, and successful businesses choose theirs in core competencies.
You lost me at 'they work'. They don't. To the point that I'm boycotting Teams, any customers that force us to use Team can take a hike, I'm not going to spend the first half hour (or more) of every meeting with a new set of people to get them all organized and solve a myriad of audio/video/networking issues. Teams is the biggest pile of junk MS ever released. And don't get me started on the linux client.
You're wrong, there are bigger piles of junk that Microsoft has released.
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#369I think this is being wrongly frame. This functionality is actually needed in highly regulated industries like banking or government. Which is, you need a way to secure how your employees are accessing information. And when everything is moving to becoming a cloud document (or document hosted on the cloud), not being able to have control over the browser in which that information is viewed with is a huge threat vecto…
If you are such an organization and want to force people to use Edge, you don't install other browsers and make Edge the default, instead of doctoring with every app that can contain links for it to use Edge.
Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with your premise. I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox. Same with many other things - I…
Apple doesn't make it easy, but they don't make it impossible either, and at this point it's on the ecosystem to show Apple they want more of this by embracing what they have. So, sure, map links tend to open Apple Maps by default, but they can offer the user the choice to use other mapping apps, which they can check for by seeing if the OS will respond to their open url scheme. Harder? Sure. Impossible? Nope. And fo…
I’d personally like the choice to be enforced by the OS. I’m sick of Google’s popup for opening links in gmail. It confuses my partner into thinking she has the link open in her regular safari, but the option to actually do that is the only one with no icon. On top of that they’re really trying to railroad people into using chrome, and she’s accidentally hit that option a few times. I wish the justice department would treat that as anti-competitive.