Maybe they should address the free cloud credits next, which are a great way to lock you in and kill competition. Just like the bundling of Teams, they might be good for (business) customers in the short term, but will only lead to future monopolies.
Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
691–700 of 808 posts
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#692The problem is that it's already too late. In my company, we used Teams because it was "free" (they even added a free version that lasted between COVID-19 and 2023), bundled with everything else, and now that we have to pay for Teams alone, we won't consider switching to something else because people are used to Teams. We never considered an alternative, and we will never consider one, and it's just more expensive fo…
Hate to break it to you but even if they broke out pricing and SKU, the MS rep is going to offer Teams a separate product and majority of the time bosses will buy it out of convenience. Why bother evaluating slack/zoom when mail, calendar, files,call recording and transcript are integrated with Teams especially for old school companies
Exactly this, the current top comment decries how their sales were affected by Teams, but there is no moat on video-calling software. Without a unique proposition disruption was bound to come knocking. Apple bundles Team's-like functionality with FaceTime, but it's not being targeted. The EU's position is largely driven from who is successful.
But what is success? Anyone who has a pre-existing relationship with the customer is going to be able to have the opportunity to inform the customer about their new products, brand trust and convenience go a long way in co-selling.
People that make basic apps frequently complain that they have had their app "stolen" when a, typically larger, competitor releases similar functionality. However was it truly their "idea", or were they just an early entrant that squandered their early lead?
The majority of ordinary computing functions of today started out as 3rd party applications, some churn is expected - I don't see it as innovation if we give companies false monopolies on ideas. If Apple can't protect the iPhone paradigm as a unique combination of features, no one should expect to keep possession of simpler or smaller ideas.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly despise C#, and I say that with about 5 real years of experience with it. I have been on teams delivering real products with it. It is like Java but married to microsoft while philanders as it pleases. And when I say that out loud some putz always responds "but Mono!" and then the thing I need is inevitably not supported on Mono. When it is working it is stuck on windows server and needing a reboot for som…
Mono as a runtime hasn't been relevant in almost a decade now (since the advent of .NET Core). "I can go into the compilers to find bugs" -> yeah, that's what Roslyn is. C# lets you control GC, marshalling, safety, calling convention, inlining, etc. for very fast hand-rolled managed or unmanaged code if you need it.
Mono is alive and well in https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/tree/main/src/mono. It serves Android, iOS, WASM and s390x targets, maybe some other too. It is generally much slower than CoreCLR, but besides supporting more platforms, has features that CoreCLR lacks like IL interpreter (technically, CoreCLR has one too but it has been broken for years and is never used).
Ideally, iOS's Mono usage will be eventually replaced with NativeAOT, but for now it's still being worked on, not in the least in iOS-targeting GUI frameworks like MAUI to provide better NAOT compatibility. In addition, NativeAOT's linker/trimmer is based on Mono.Linker and Mono.Cecil, so the project became part of .NET as was intended.
But you are right in a way, because the above is often confused with a separate, outdated Mono distribution that some people incorrectly keep insisting on installing on their Linux systems.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#694This 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".
So, why had Microsoft created Teams, if they were already covered?
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#695It's a common pattern at several of the big software companies to bundle a lot of freemium stuff with their paid core products that then ends up squeezing independent providers of similar stuff. I love Github. Before MS bought it I was a CTO at a company where we happily paid for it. Now MS offers it for free. I don't currently pay them anything. We also use Github actions. We don't pay for that either. You get 2000…
And in time, GitHub will start charging for private repos again, build minutes will be 40 free per month.
Enshittification will follow once they stop getting good training data out of GitHub.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#696I already know how this will be solved: Microsoft will pay a (small) fine and file it under "the cost of doing business" while the damage is already done. Teams is one of the absolutely worst products ever programmed, it's hiliarious how bad it is. It only reached its market share because Microsoft gave it away "for free" with Office 365 or MS 365 or whatever it's called now.
I use Teams every day for work, I'm not sure why it's considered so bad? It seems user friendly and useful, to me. Non-tech worker (finance).
It's decent now, but it took 5 years to get there while Slack is still better.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't matter if everyone already uses Teams and the damage is done. Look at Netscape vs IE.
Yet we’d absolutely balk at a computer or phone not coming with a browser by default nowadays. I don’t really think that ruling was on the right side of history.
Yeah, except the bundling wasn't the problem. It was that Microsoft was using their size to build a giant moat around IE. If you wanted modern features, it was all on IE and behind their proprietary scripting languages (vbscript, jscript, mshtml, activex controls)
This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls)
That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
But can your app be integrated into Windows with equal footing as Teams?
How is the Teams we are talking about here integrated into Windows? Teams is integrated into M365 and taking Outlook as an example you can register another calling/status app just like others do so your online status and calling functionality is not Teams (used to be Skype).
It's now installed by default and in your task bar on Windows 11.
It's not even just an icon either, its similar to OneDrive where removing it is non-trivial.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Intune/comments/10whv8c/hows_everyo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/q4elim/can_we_ta...
When will Slack get this same level of access? They won't ever.
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#699Earlier 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…
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.
I do too and I'm not sure what happens in your case but they do block Firefox _for calls_ arbitrarily (it's not that it doesn't work but that the moment it thinks you are on Firefox it refuses to try to work.
Do you maybe only do calls through Chrome? Or maybe you have a user agent spoofing extension (or similar) installed in Firefox?
Re: Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...
That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
> which they're deprecating
and didn't really maintain for at least the last 2 years either
(it basically ran a often very outdated version of the web app + some AFIK unnecessary and buggy custom audio handling)