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

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

#681
post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I don't think the market of third party support vendors for open source software is robust enough to have enough competitors that can provide the same quality (or at least promise of quality) as traditional vendor support from MSFT or another big company. You can say the market might emerge if the large corporations or government agencies started shifting that way and generated demand for it, but those…

Well, even now we already have Red Hat (IBM), SUSE, and Oracle providing support for enterprise customers for the Linux OS. The US government is a huge customer of Red Hat.

I don't remember where I read it, but wasn't like a majority of relativly big companies operating servers customers of Red Hat?

I do know my mother is a customer with her business

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

#682
post #497
post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

High resource consumption is an unfortunate side effect of todays trend of making everything a chromium app...

MSTeams only uses chromium as a base, it's degrees of poorly written extends far past the scope of chromium and even beyond the stars.

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

#683

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences? The availability of APIs for third-party developers to create a similar competing experience.

What API exists for third-party developers to create experiences similar to first party Apple apps?

Thats exactly the problem: there aren't. Which is part of the reason why the DMA even really exists.

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

#684
post #672
post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like the old adage of why Enterprise software sucks so badly to use. It's because it's being sold to managers and executives who don't actually end up using it, and never have to deal with the consequences of buying it.

Exactly. If you want a great example of this, look no further than Jira!

Maybe an unpopular statement but I don't think Jira is that bad by itself. It's just a very flexible and configurable system which ultimately ends up reflecting structure and complexity of the host organisation.

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

#685

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…

EU should do this the following way:

Too big company must announce what it tries to do, then EU replies:

- You are too big, you glutton. We don't allow this. Slim yourself down, now gtfo.

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

#686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, your comment is "Thank You Sir May I Have Another?" If no one complains, not even the entitled who have some power, then the screws continue to tighten down.

>On the flip side, your comment is "Thank You Sir May I Have Another?" I never said that. I said in many industries that choice is none existent other than unemployment and people care more about employment than they do about OS martyring.

Sure. But just because that's true of some industries doesn't make it true of all industries. Your comment comes across like rejecting hx8's practice because it could not be universal.

Even your use of 'martyring' is bizarre. My avoidance of Windows for the last 20 years is a mild discomfort, not martyrdom.

There is a long history of using one's privilege to help those with less privilege. If hx8 "entitlement" changes the workplace to allow Ubuntu as an alternative to MS Windows, then those with less privilege may be able to follow.

By rejecting hx8's practice, you close off that pathway.

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

#687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started having a bit of hope, until I read the cons : > Doesn't support calls, provides direct links to the Teams website

I'll get there one day ;( The frontend/backend split of Pidgin/libpurple makes this tricky, and we still don't have voice and video in a Windows release (my main dev OS these days)

> The frontend/backend split of Pidgin/libpurple makes this tricky, and we still don't have voice and video in a Windows release

Is that specifically for Teams, or is it a general limitation of libpurple?

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

#688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you sell somebody code you have an ethical responsibility to have done your best (and maintained a reasonable level of professional competence) to ensure it is defect free. Lots of companies don’t take that very seriously, which is bad, and a great reason to switch away from them. At least the government can bring the CEO before congress and waste his day. With open source code the responsibility is taken by the…

Red hat has managed to make FOSS useable in enterprise environments since 1995. There is no reason why this model could not be applied to other FOSS projects.

I think that’s more-or-less what I’m suggesting. I mean, Red Hat exists to take responsibility for the code.

I guess what I suggested might be more intense than what they do, not actually sure what their workflow is. But it seems like the level of diligence that a government ought to apply, right?

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

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, a GPO. Very reasonable solution for a home user.

not to mention that gp editor is disabled on non pro windows. i think there is some kind of a funky command line or registry hack to enable it. So yeah, I moved on from windows largely because of this force fed software.

Windows licensing is the hardest part of my job. Like if I want to have thin clients running Windows 11 VMs hosted on Windows Server 2022, how do I pay Microsoft so they will let me use the software in this way? I have no idea. I think you need to contact some kind of client services representative at Microsoft in order to figure out the whole licensing thing. By the way if it wasn't clear, I hate all of this. The only good thing about it is that I can make a living by dealing with it so other people don't have to.

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

#690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams. That's actively harming customers, because they didn't get the choice to pay less and only buy what they wanted (which is just Office). Once customers bought Office+Teams the cost of using Teams is 0, because they paid for it. How can competitors make a cheaper product then? You can't get cheaper than that! Even if someone wanted to use your p…

> Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams True, but that also applies to every other single app and service that they are bundling with the subscription. I only want Excel but I'm also forced to pay for PowerPoint. And how deep should we go? Should they be forced to turn Edge into a paid product you have to buy separately? They crippled if not outright killed the consumer anti-virus…

When it's a separate application I think the line has already been drawn.

I don't think you should have to turn Edge into a paid product similar to how I don't think grocery stores should be forced to charge you if you use a shopping cart. If Microsoft wants to include Windows Defender for free but if they're increasing the cost of a Windows License to accommodate that development effort then it's not ok.

Microsoft can offer you a volume discount for buying say Excel + Word + X but bundling is anti-competitve (see every complaint about TV bundles ever).

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