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

451–460 of 808 posts

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

#451

Post by OJFord »

lolinder wrote: post #443
OJFord wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience. I 100% believe that is your experience as 'HN-commenting SWE/tech bro/STEM worker', but just as strongly doubt that that is correct in the broader market.

Like I said, every source I found claims the same thing. Do you have data showing it as a distant second?

I see that too on Statists for example, which doesn't state a methodology that I can see but I suspect it's users (every Gmail account?) or 'I have used Docs/Word365'.

This site claims Office365 absolutely dwarfs Google Workspace in # business customers/licences , which is more in line with my expectation: https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/

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

#452

Post by djbusby »

nextos wrote: post #441
farhadhf wrote: post #405

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round…

Last time I checked, they also arbitrarily excluded Firefox, which works fine on other WebRTC platforms such as Google Hangouts or Zoom. Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem. Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during sim…

I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.

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

#454

Post by hx8 »

cosmojg wrote: post #418
hifromwork wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing I can think of when reading this is the "damn, you live like this?" meme. I can't imagine using OS that does this to you and not being angry all the time (I'm not tribalistic, Linux has its own set of infuriating problems, but at least it feels like I'm in control).

Many workplaces will restrict your choice of operating system and email client.

I ask about the tools I will be using during the interview process. There are several that I refuse to work with and will end the interview at the next possible polite point if they are required. Microsoft Windows is on my blacklist.

The entire point of private retirement accounts and transferable skills is that you aren't required to stick with one employer. If your employer requires you to use bad tools then find a better employer.

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

#455

Post by sgc »

Osiris wrote: post #434
halfcat wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not only Teams. If I send a meeting invite from my gmail with a Zoom link, it gets replaced with a Google Meet link. I have to Slack a Zoom link to everyone before the meeting every week.

My company uses Gmail and zoom and zoom is integrated into the new event screen. I've never seen a meet link on anything.

I have never seen this either. I am usually not a heavy zoom user, but I went through a relatively busy zoom stint the last 6 months or so - with links both in free gmail and in google workspace.

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

#456

Post by throwaway2037 »

farhadhf wrote: post #405

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round…

I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".

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

#457

Post by shiroiushi »

tpmoney wrote: post #375
adam_arthur wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would likely employ advertising, just as YouTube does. Are you saying it's not profitable to run a video hosting service? YouTube is evidence of that already. A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators. Bundling becomes anti-competitiv…

They're asking who's going to cover YouTube's costs for providing their videos via API. Or is the expectation that if you use a 3rd party client you'll see youtube's ads to cover their costs, and then additional ads from the client?

We already have 3rd-party YouTube clients: SmartTube, ReVanced, etc. They work quite well, in fact, much better than YouTube's own client.

They don't need any money to cover their costs; they're FOSS. As for YouTube's costs, they don't show YouTube's ads, so basically Google is covering the cost there, though perhaps not willingly. But Google makes the YT API usable by these apps, and after all this time hasn't done too much to try to shut them down. We'll see how long that lasts, but there seem to be real technical limitations to how much Google can force ads, without resorting to recoding videos with ads in them which they surely really don't want to do.

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

#459

Post by jjoonathan »

eindiran wrote: post #219
gostsamo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom. Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging…

I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the U…

It should be. "Allowed in the US" is a bar so low that you can get oil out the end of it.

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

#460

Post by nemomarx »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #456
farhadhf wrote: post #405

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round…

I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".

Anecdotally, Teams has a lot more penetration compared to Lync and co, since it kinda took over Slacks marketshare once that was an established thing to use.
Post reply on HN