Microsoft faces antitrust scrutiny from the EU over Teams, Office 365
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And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.
Though one thing that always suffers in Teams is the ability to self-organize. Slack makes it very easy to let everyone write an automation or open a channel. Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations that I saw adopt Teams, at least until they did.
Although it's bad now, in Feb 2020 Teams was genuinely unusable hot garbage, chats didn't work, calls dropped often, files wouldn't attach to messages etc. Microsoft, for all their sins, recognised the imminent need for mass work-from-home tools relatively early, and made huge improvements to the platform before the end of March. By mid-April was in a usable state.
Slack's better software, but better software's not going to be adopted if it's missing or hiding huge key features.
Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.
So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.
I suspect it depends on what you're used to. Zoom fits in better with the Apple design system.
Oh, are you using it on an Apple Silicon mac?
I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share?
Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.
I think Apple Silicon is going to one's experience worse here, not better - because of the "Apple" part.
Was thinking maybe something had changed, but sounds like no. ;)
Guess what? It still sucks. I still hate using it. I still do less work because of it. Can you scroll back thru messages without seeing a 10sec loading spinner every 15 messages? No. But it’s faster… in the general sense!
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/new-teams-d...
That was the real MVP for video conferencing software in the early pandemic, and Slack missed it by years.
Edit: confirmed location
Several coworkers and me also had the problem that we were unmuted but it said we were muted. Just today the teams screen blacked out when someone presented something.
Notifications are a mess too. And when you have multiple teams with the same channel names (project with microservices) it only shows the channel name, but not the team name in the notifications and in the UI.
By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."
Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day.
If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing.
Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?
...but that still doesn't explain why Slack otherwise seems frozen-in-time: none of the significant end-user usability and quality-of-life issues I've had with Slack since I started using it in 2016 have been addressed (e.g. we can't right-click a message to get its context-menu: you still have to hunt for that awkwardly-placed "..." menu button).
See https://slack.com/release-notes/windows - this is their changelist for their Windows release and most of the releases since 2020 are described as "tweaks", was "tinkered with", or is "tuned-up" which, or "minor security updates" - which, as any npm user will tell you just means they ran `npm update` and not much else (well, besides the bare minimum of automated testing).
> In 2013, I co-founded Screenhero, an app that enabled remote pair programming and made developer collaboration over the internet “better than being in the same room” (to quote our old slogan).
The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.
To be brutally honest people need to just stop and apply some basic critical thinking to their actions instead of expecting magic.
Crisis driven decision making is one of the most popular management methods in history.
like Matrix: https://www.freie-messenger.de/en/systemvergleich/team/
We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time.
Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.
IMO, Slacked drop it again. The old slack video worked much better than the new one. I use the zoom plugin now for quick chats.
Teams is a dumpster fire every time I'm forced to use it. Not much to say about that.
My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind.
For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features, which are not something I care to use. I've gotten an increasing number of meeting invitations through this calendar, and Outlook "helpfully" tells me whether I'm available or not. I'm in fact always "available", because I don't use Outlook to manage my schedule.
I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?
Beyond that, maybe I'm thoroughly infused with corporate culture at this point, but I find this perfectly obvious and natural bundling. E-mail, calendars and TODO lists belong together.
I'm a university professor; there's always pressure to join this or that initiative, to participate in more committees, and the like. But in the long term, success depends on maintaining much of my focus on my long-term research goals, which means saying no a lot.
PG wrote about "makers' schedules vs managers' schedules"
http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
and this feels similar to me. Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
Neither do I. Fortunately, my employer doesn't care about it anyway.
> Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
That is 100% true.
However, relevant to this entire thread, it's typical to put "focus time" blocks on the calendar. If you set your free/busy status to "busy" on those blocks (which is the default anyway), then come focus time, MS Teams and Outlook will both show you as "busy" / unavailable for the duration. A little bit of automation, but it does a good job at deterring casual interruptions, as anyone who tries to "invite you" to a meeting, or ask you "a small question, 30 seconds tops" will have their Outlook tell them there's a scheduling conflict, and their Teams that you should not be disturbed and won't get the notification anyway.
Individually all of these apps are shit, the value is that they work well together. This is not unlike, say, the Apple computer which can do things like go back from sleep in 1 to 2 seconds because the software is written for one particular chip.
As a side note, it is not obvious to me that Teams is a separate product that you get for free. I would say it is just as correct to look at what you buy from MS is a standard office communication and organization service and Teams is just a part of that.
My biggest gripe is the distributed db that backs exchange/outlook365 mail on their server... I operate on inbox-zero and when I clear all the filtered mail out, then try to empty the "trash" I either have to wait 2 minutes for all the other deletes to sync to the trash, or empty the trash multiple times.
It's significantly worse than it was in the 90's on dedicated server(s), though back then the hardware was really easy to overwhelm with too much email/activity.
You can; open outlook, right click the Calendar thing, Open In New Window.
I've never understood why neither Google or MS have the ability to give their calendar tool an ical feed and have the availability from that reflected in your corporate calendar.
I guess it made sense in the days of everyone being in offices on a fixed schedule, but in the modern world where people's work life and personal life increasingly intersect I'd love to be able to drop things like needing to pick my son up from school in the calendar and have that shared with my partner without also needing to duplicate that same entry in my work calendar so no one books a meeting with me.
Lots of our staff got caught out when all the channels got truncated. Oof.
It's like when sysadmins get confused when people use the recycle bin as storage and the user gets angry when the bin gets cleared.
It was an i9 (10th? gen), and performed worse than a 4th gen i3 in practice.
but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
Yes, it's included with Microsoft 365, but it seems like the cost of it in employee pain make it far from free. I know the appeal of "free" for companies, but Teams seems like an occasion where they're really ignoring a lot of time/effort/frustration that their employees have to go through and the impact that has on their work.
Slack isn't cheap, but if you have reasonably compensated employees do you really want them wasting time and energy over Teams? Though, as I said, I certainly understand how this plays out in the real world. Many companies look at what something is costing them in their budget without having the ability to measure the pain and lost productivity those decisions might be causing.
People will complain about anything, though.
The nature of my work has me dealing with all of these platforms, depending on the clients. Guess what? I don't find Slack to be some joyous piece of software to use. It's better than the alternatives, I guess, but not to the point that I really care one way or the other. Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
If you have <50 employees and you are standing on principle against the completely bundled cable TV vertical that Microsoft is offering, I genuinely question how much you care about the success of your business. We should be able to have a rational, business-oriented review of their value proposition - as of 2023, not 2010 or 2018.
Organizations that have a lot of loose capital and cowboy investors might be more interested in playing in traffic with 20+ vendors and horrible integration stories, but we (aka our <20 employee org) really need to ship solutions to paying customers or we don't have any jobs in 12 months.
I always hear everyone complain about how expensive it is, but I feel like John Travolta meme each time I look at our Azure/Microsoft account. The per-seat & consumption/serverless billing models feel like dust in the wind when you have so few employees. Everyone is doing a lot, so why not put a lot of power under each seat? If you intend to do more with less people, I really feel like Microsoft is the answer. If you are a F100 org, I totally get it. Fuck Microsoft. Use something totally different. Build your own datacenters.
If you run a <50 person company, and you're bike-shedding about which chat program to use, I seriously question how much you care about your business.
Yeah just like the AD bundling with windows was convenient. Up until you had no other choice than retaining an AD if anyone wanted windows anything.
But when it's your main communication method, you want people to enjoy it, use it, and want to use it more. You don't want people to avoid communication because they have to use a crappy IM client. These small differences have huge impacts.
I've used all of them in the past, and Teams was, and still is, the one I avoid chatting with someone unless absolutely necessary.
For practically any given piece of software, you'll find a crowd of people who will tell you how absolutely trash it is.
The consulting company is providing only warm bodies.
It costs Microsoft ZERO dollars to remove the asinine keyboard shortcut control + shift + c to start a call. Who does that? Why is this right next to the ctrl + shift + v (for unformatted paste) What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it?
My complaint against Azure DevOps: Why is there no "date" field? From what I've heard there are internal people at Microsoft who suffer because of this nonsense. How hard is it to give a date only option? And no, 00:00:00 is not the same as date only.
To sell it later together with other data. There are a lot of bugs and stupid UI decisions which go unfixed by MS and telemetry hasn't improved anything.
New meetings created in Teams do include a Teams link - but isn't that what you would expect?
I like the auto Teams link because it saves me a click when setting up every meeting (and pretty much 99% of my meetings are Teams meetings).
I think this is a case where it makes sense to default on because most people will leave it defaulted on.
I tried using the linux client but it simply will not allow me to connect to anyone and keeps telling me I need to login and enable teams on my "account" (we do not have a microsoft company account).
Somehow, everything works, except for starting and receiving calls. Meetings work just fine, so it's not lack of some browser functionality.
Now that we are all back in the office and don’t use video, we are using Teams even more. The chat is a nice function we’ve adopted since the pandemic, but it’s a side offering really. MS 365 is a godsend for many small businesses.
MS has released a native app for Teams by the way. Performance is much better. I’m not an advocate for MS, I’m just saying Teams is far more than a chat or video app.
Maybe your system admins just suck?
What an awful experience, both the app and the forced move. The only people who like it are warm bodies who can barely use other Office products as it is.
Teams is a peak example of what 'tying' looks like.
That's way before Slack even existed.
Is the claim that it's anti-competitive simply because they made their existing chat functionality better? Or because Slack decided to launch a standalone product? Can I make a standalone Excel competitor and then claim Microsoft is anti-competitive for "bundling" Excel?
And a chat app is very much not out of place in an office productivity suite. I have to say, I don't understand the merits of this case at all.
Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides. Teams, like Slack, aims at bundling the whole workplace experience in a single app, with actual groups and bidirectional integrations.
And of course, Teams defaults to Microsoft products for every single integration that can communicate with one.
I would say that regulators didn’t care enough, or were aware of, the potential risks of Skype being bundled with Office because it wasn’t that popular to begin with. On the other hand, this may be a preventive move to avoid another Outlook crapfest from happening.
If one uses Teams, one would definitely see the edges of where Microsoft just started bolting things on to compete with other platforms. Skype was much closer to AIM with a phone bolted on than Teams. Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can.
To be fair, those are two different paradigms, and both are needed simultaneously. This alone makes Teams better than Discord and Slack, both of which - last I checked on them (~3 years ago for the former, and ~6 months for the latter) - try to shoehorn long-lived multiplayer threads into a sequential chat format.
Maybe it is anticompetitive in some ways, but out of the trio mentioned above, Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die.
Teams I am frequently confused on where anything is and whether notifications are important or not. People never know if they should chat/share in the meeting thread or the team thread but oh wait we invited this random person so it really should be in the meeting cause they're not in the team but oh wait these 2 team members weren't invited but they really need to know as well... I see what they were going for and maybe it's just UI issues but at the moment it's a bad UX.
Knowledge does die in Teams though, hard disagree on them avoiding that fate.
I wonder how many people actually find any kind of information in teams logs that are older than, say, a few days.
Even leaving aside the fact that it's a horrendous experience because of the lag and messages jumping all over the place as they're loaded, the search function is an absolute joke. Half the time it doesn't find anything, and the other half it'll just give you give the message that exactly matches your query, without any kind of context.
Like, e.g., hovering over someone's profile on Teams is the quickest way for me to check if they're on a leave and have auto-responder set for their e-mail. Or, calendars staying in sync, and Teams automatically applying a "Busy/DND" status based on your "busy" blocks. Or, from the more annoying side, how Yammer (Microsoft's pseudo-Facebook for Work) updates pop up in both Teams and Outlook. Or how the same files you exchange inside teams in Teams can also be found via SharePoint, and even pop up in Outlook. Etc. There's a lot of those tiny things.
This drives me nuts. Teams UX is a joke, at least on mac.
Parents will discretely roll their eyes, make a small show of telling the elder kid to behave, so that elder kid behaves and younger kid shuts up, and then they'll go back to the kitchen and try to finish eating their sandwiches before either of the kids lodges another complaint against the other, which would be the sixth one this evening.
In short: nothing to see here, just regular motions of the entrepreneurial game.
Chat app wasn't bundled with office. The base version only came with word, excel and powerpoint. MS is striving to make Teams a default Windows app. It is a default Office app today. Which means you're forced into it as an org with a need for some doc tools. It works poorly on all other OSes. It is simple to synergize between other MS tools but other synergiez magically work poorly (attach file, highlight bash syntax).
Sure, someone who isn't proficient in law _may_ miss these oversteps. Additionally, the US is heavily plagued by corp corruption (aka lobbying) and they'll always signal the OK sign. Luckily, the EU is more mature in the domain of privacy and free market where shady practices are fought early on (relatively). Rather than after it is too late and a large corp killed all competition.
The issue is not just VS Slack. There are a plethora of privacy oriented office products that have zero chance when a corp like MS exploits its OS brainwash to nullify all alternatives.
The article talks about M365/O365, but I suspect the bigger issue might be that Microsoft includes Teams Personal (WebView) in Windows 11. From what I understand this version will eventually reach feature parity with Teams for Work & School (Electron)
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/microsoft-teams-version...
It's not clear to me if Teams Personal will be kept as a separate app, or if the new features will just be subscription-gated from that version. Either way I can see why competitors and regulators might be a bit concerned about it.
Side note - I really hate Microsoft's product naming. Finding resources about all these different versions of Teams is such a pain, not to mention how confusing it is for end users.
It's pretty clear if you use the Teams preview version. It already is a unified app in the Preview. You can sign in with a work and a personal account at the same time.
That's not a fair comparison.
Imagine that there is no Excel, instead one awesome company making a standalone work sheet product that is widely popular.
Next, Microsoft lags behind, comes up with a clone of it and bundles it for free as part of Office.
That's anti-competitive.
user: llimos > there has been a chat app as part of Office since 2007
The EU relatively weaker at developing international software, so slapping "antitrust fines" on Microsoft (which probably have nonzero merit) is a good way of "group negotiation" to get a bulk discount on Microsoft (US) products.
The analogy is how the USA is relatively less good at making quality cheese and wine compared to the EU, so the USA allows any sparking wine to be labeled "Champagne" and any Emmental-style cheese to be labeled "Swiss".
Trump got many things wrong, but got the trade negotiation right when he slapped back luxury wine tariffs on France in return for France fining US software companies -- bulk discounts in both cases.
More broadly - the EU has an interest in the terms of trade in software being more consumer friendly because it's a net importer of software products.
(Massive ad campaigns, and products that had weird bugs in other browsers for no good reason.)
Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.
The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox. The explosive growth from Chrome can't be explained just by it being better than competition, or Firefox would have replaced IE in 6 months earlier.
The real explanation is that Chrome benefited from immeasurable (can't really calculate the cost of chrome being advertised prominently on every Google property) amounts of advertising.
* auto-updates when firefox was still: HELLO WEDNESDAY'S VERSION HAS DROPPED WOULD U LIKE TO DOWNLOAD IT?
* tabs were isolated per process where an entire Firefox session could still get taken down by one tab not responding
* That super sexy tab handling code where the resizing happened when you clicked away meaning you could close multiple tabs by simply clicking a lot (which you couldn't in Firefox because it was resizing them all the time).
My point is that being incredibly more advanced than the incumbent browser was simply not enough to have a great adoption, as evidenced by FF or Opera's market progression before Chrome's introduction.
People who make that claim in 2023 simply ignore how important Google's advertising was in securing Chrome's position.
Now that's done with; I would also suggest that given how much better Chrome was at the time than any other browser that much of its adoption was organic. At the time of its release Google still had a considerable amount of good will from the tech public. I was certainly telling anyone willing to listen at that time to install Chrome because of genuinely good it was.
I tried it a number of times.
The tab close thing was the only thing that was significantly better on my machines,
... and if I really want to close a number of tabs quickly and without thinking I just right-click and chose "close tabs to the right/to the left/other tabs".
And at the top of basically every search in FF, they recommended Chrome.
On my 2003 PC the difference was very noticeable. I switched instantly.
I am one of those who can sense and get annoyed by a few tens of milliseconds lag and for me Linux is a massive UX improvement despite its font issues and alignment issues (actually I can't see them even when I try) because all the random lags from Windows are gone.
I never experienced any improvement on Chrome on any of my setups so I discarded it immediately because the extension API was so crippled right from the start it was mostly just glorified web sites, not actual extensions like on Firefox.
(At that time Firefox had full blown FTP clients implemented as Firefox extensions, and even Firebug [1] was just and extension, so going for a browser that only allowed canned websites as "extensions" for trivial performance gains wasn't an option.)
[1]: not the first such tool but I will argue it was so impressive that it became the inspiration for all later web developer tools in all browsers.
I don't think so. When Chrome came out it was much better than competition too[1]. I don't know if Firefox was that much better than Internet Explorer.
It is also possible that Chrome rode the wave of Firefox i.e, Firefox got people thinking about improved browsing experience by switching from Internet Explorer. Then Chrome came along and picked up many new users who may have otherwise gotten picked up by Firefox.
None as far as I am aware of. Not even - again AFAIK - disaster relief after the biggest disasters we have seen after Google was founded.
I'd argue that is quite clearly the same league as Microsoft pre-installing Media Player and Internet Explorer: taking advantage of a niche that they completely dominates and abusing it to wedge their way into another ecosystem and then completely dominating that too.
You SURE you wanna do that? Edge is better you know. And more secure. And shit.
[ BIG BLUE CONTINUE WITH EDGE BUTTON ]
Arial, 6pt grey on white, "Use my choice" link
Edit: You also can't move or remove the Edge symbol from your desktop without admin privileges. So for a normal, unprivileged user there's just two things you can't remove from your desktop, recycle bin and Edge.
Google does not force you to install Chrome in order to use Search.
Here's another example. Amazon using its market power as an online marketplace to benefit in both the logistics market and its own-label goods market. [2]
By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it could also be said that Google is practising "Refusal to deal", which is also forbidden, although I admit that case is somewhat weaker. [3]
> Google does not force you to install Chrome in order to use Search.
I believe that just means they aren't practising tying, which is yet another abuse of monopoly power.
[0] https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
[1] https://scholarship.law.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1304...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54887650
[3] https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...
This is vastly different from advertising a product in the company website. Amazon got caught peeking into their own partners data, then leveraging that knowledge to unfairly compete with them.
> By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it could also be said that Google is practising "Refusal to deal", which is also forbidden, although I admit that case is somewhat weaker. [3]
Again, not the same. "Refusal to deal" means that Google would prohibit Microsoft from advertising Edge, their Chrome competitor, in their ad network, which is not happening.
But it's worth noting that Microsoft does the same with Bing and Edge, displaying a modal if you are using any other browser. They also got caught displaying large banners in the Chrome download page, which I personally think is even worse [0]
[0] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-now-injecting-full-...
Google, like Microsoft before them, pushes their own products in ways that no others are allowed to:
- Microsoft pre-bundled IE and Windows Media Player when no one else could bundle anything.
- Google pushed ads against Firefox and for Chrome on the front page of Google search (i.e. before a search was typed) something I am not aware if anyone neither humanitarian or commercial entities with the worlds largest marketing budgets being allowed to do.
For me, this example alone is enough to demonstrate behind reasonable doubt that Google, like Microsoft before them (and after them with Teams and Edge) have abused their position in one market to crush all competition in another market.
Everything else like the very convenient issues showing up in Firefox on major Google properties like Search, Calendar and YouTube is just icing on the cake.
Google did not cripple their products to work only on Chrome. It did not force customers to install Chrome on their computers, nor had partnerships with OEMs to preinstall its browser.
> Google pushed ads against Firefox and for Chrome on the front page of Google search
I highly doubt that Google, one of Mozilla main sponsors, had ads against Firefox in their Search homepage. They do promote Chrome in Search and Gmail, but not in YouTube as far as I know.
But that is beyond the point. Google uses its own real estate to promote their products, exactly like Mozilla does with Firefox and their VPN and Relay services. Mozilla also bundles Pocket within Firefox, by the way.
It's not great, but I think that a company should be allowed to promote a product in their own spaces, always respecting the autonomy of the user, and without aggressively pushing it.
Which is exactly why Microsoft is and should be in trouble. They not only bundled Teams in Office 365, but also defaulted to or pointed at Teams for every single operation coming from any other Office application.
Google owns Android.
how about a giant banner when you enter a Walmart store that reads "Just buy it on Amazon" ?
Is it OK when Microsoft force install Teams across every installed machine?
You have to realize google.com isn't just the corporate website of Google, it is their main product.
I'll take your word for it. Also it would just be another example that Google tried to enter social media as well using this tactic.
It ate far more RAM than either Firefox or IE did (and still does), back when RAM capacities were still practically limited, and Chrome was (and is) rendering the internet in Chrome ways much like IE did in Trident ways and Firefox has in Gecko ways. Chrome also had and still has its own UI paradigms, including no title bar, menu bar, nor status bar, and an omnibar instead of an address bar.
What really made Chrome the victor was they kept improving things common people care about, particularly in JavaScript and therefore JavaShit execution, while Mozilla got lazy on "winning" the war and Google dollars and IE was too late in getting back into the game.
1. Feeling faster than firefox (still does)
2. Process separation for tabs. Firefox used to crash the whole browser, whereas chrome would crash just a single tab.
3. Shipped with support for Flash and PDFs
It’s painful using Chrome by comparison. If it wasn’t for Chromes better dev tools I doubt I’d use it much
Does Google still show the old search results page design to Safari users? It did that for a long time.
If those features slow down the web then that’s a knock on those features. Plus I’ve yet to see a single one of these supposedly “missing” features actually matter in the real world.
Supporting the insecure bloatware that is Chrome & FF extensions tho? Massive convenience factor, I get it, but… ewwww
I still use Firefox since it is cross browser but if I change to MacBook as my dev machine I might go all in on Orion as well.
Perhaps Chrome did succeed mostly on its own merits, but it wasn't above techniques used by things like Bonzai Buddy and Ask Toolbar to get the job done.
You don't put a single character into the address bar of Chrome without notifying Google.
Yes, even if you are typing a domain instead of planning to search for something you have told Google about it, which means they know everything you visit, both internal websites at work and everything else.
Ogg Vorbis was a novelty at best, and it was the only decently widely adopted open source competitor for any of the items listed that was available at the time.
HTML5 was only just published when Chrome launched. So Flash was at that point the only option available to show a video in the browser (sure, downloading a RealPlayer file was always an option, but it was clunky, creators didn't like people being able to save stuff locally, and was also not open source). Chrome in fact arguably accelerated the process of getting web video open sourced: Google bought On2 in 2010 to get the rights to VP8 (the only decent H.264 competitor available at that point) so they could immediately open source it. The plan was in fact to remove H.264 from Chrome entirely once VP8/VP9 adoption ramped up[1], but that didn’t end up happening.
Flash was integrated into Chrome because people were going to use it anyway, and having Google distribute it at least let them both sandbox it and roll out automatic updates (a massive vector for malware at the time was ads pretending to be Flash updates, which worked because people were just that used to constant Flash security patches, most of which required a full reboot to apply; Chrome fixed both of those issues). Apple are the ones who ultimately dealt the death blow to Flash, and it was really just because Adobe could not optimize it for phone CPUs no matter what they tried (even the few Android releases of Flash that we got were practically unusable). That also further accelerated the adoption of open source HTML5 technologies.
PDF is an open source format, and has been since 2008. While I don't know if pressure from Google is what did it, that wouldn’t surprise me. Regardless, the Chrome PDF reader, PDFium, is open source[2] and Mozilla's equivalent project from 2011, PDF.js, is also open source.[3] Both of these projects replaced the distinctly closed source Adobe Reader plugin that was formerly mandatory for viewing PDFs in the browser.
Chrome is directly responsible for eliminating a lot of proprietary software from mainstream use and replacing it with high-quality open source tools. While they've caused problems in other areas of browser development that are worthy of criticism, Chrome's track record when it comes to open sourcing their tech has been very good.
[1]: https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-i...
The Edge incident was kind of a perfect illustration of how Google either didn't care or actively threw spikes in rivals' wheels.
> JavaShit
I don't think the increasingly small # of people who still talk this way about the web appreciate how easily this reads as incorrect extremism.
Like half of Javascript, user-agents were a horribly abused concept that many sites have perverted for various technical and non-technical reasons. "weird bugs in other browsers for no good reason" describes most of the 00's web development environment.
Secondly, as a small business, we prefer to just buy box versions (even if they cost more) from the nearest computer store the same way we buy office supplies.
Neither was a problem in the past, everyone could just buy a box, install and reinstall it on any PC.
Now the very meaning of a box version seems destroyed (I don't understand what does it mean anymore).
Meanwhile, there is a EU Court of Justice case saying people can re-sell used software.
Their services are an afterthought in terms of market share, particularly in Europe. For example no-one really gives a shit about iMessage and “green bubbles” here because most folks are just using WhatsApp.
And which EU countries are those? I know a few in the 60s% market share range but that would hardly be considered “very high”.
I look specifically for something of the likes for Enterprise Integration Act of 2002 for software vendors.
Both ISO and IETF could and should do that. IETF in particular seems to be less effective than it used to be - an RFC used to mean something, to carry some weight, but now they're often just words into the void.
When was that? AFAIK, the great differential of RFCs is that they never carried any weight, and as a consequence the process wasn't taken over by entrenched interests.
I don't think anyone really wants to talk to anyone anymore.
Install Office 2021lts and Teams gets installed and set to autostart for all users. This has the feeling of desperation and crap ware IMO … I will launch Teams if I want to use it.
To remove you will find the Microsoft Teams store app and regular app in the add remove programs… scroll down and you will find another Microsoft Teams system wide installer listed… why?
Teams works okay and no need for the program to come at users this way.. it’s just another annoying hook to use a “Microsoft account”
But this... pretty clear cut antitrust case of using a monopoly in one market to push out competitors in another.
And if you think there is no consumer harm, then you must have never been forced to switch from Slack to Teams ;)
It's high times.
(And just to preempt any jingoism: EU-based companies also get their share, just not in tech because tech-in-EU is a joke)
It is almost unusable on my iPhone 14 pro max after the latest upgrade where it takes 1 minute of lag to respond to the join meeting notification.
That same perception is why I think ms tends to be under scrutiny, as it should, but others don't. It's a real shame.
As is Google: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_...
1) Apple 2) Amazon 3) Google 4) Microsoft
Internationally that may be slightly different though. I’d also maybe include meta for their oculus purchase but I think they’ve tied it into their core, “social” business well enough that I’m not very concerned at the moment when there are bigger fish to fry.
Chrome and the way they pushed it with ads on the front page of Google [1]. The way Calendar and YouTube again and again has issues with Firefox.
Or how some things just doesn't work in anything except Chrome - but hey, if you change how the browser identifies itself, suddenly other browsers work too.
[1]: no one else, even disaster relief I thinkhas been allowed a spot there. The market value of weeks in that spot must be billions.
Those who use Chromium - either end users or browser creators who build on Chromium - are dependent on the whims of Google.
What really irritates me is that they are the worst in most cases yet they PR themselves out of this. They sell themselves as the customer-privacy focused, environmentally conscious, smart and young company except that in reality it's exactly the opposite and they apply the most vile corporate tactics ever know to man. Hell, they even invented some.
Not if you look at their respective market share.
And the US government has issues coming after monopolies that are US based and bring a lot of money in (for obvious reasons).
If the US starts regulating these companies more it would harm the US GDP. At least in the short term. There is an argument to be had that it could make the markets more competitive in the long term but without a lot of credible threats from outside of the US why take the hit and the risk?
EU v. Google: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22Alph...
EU v. Amazon: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22Amaz...
EU v. Facebook: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22face...
EU v. Apple: https://competition-cases.ec.europa.eu/search?search=%22appl...
...
It was kind of bizarre realizing all the promises from Silicon Valley about a better world materialized into a monopolistic rent seeking surveillance adtech, basically. Personally, 10 years ago I was still breathing the "let's change the world" -ethos. The world got changed alright, for much worse.
Let's hope EU brings some sanity back into the market.
Windows being tied to AD only was the offense. Windows being tied to IE was the offense.
Google being the place you buy ad services from, and the auction house that places them and the service a website owner sells ad space to. is the offense.
That Microsoft bundles google meet? amazon chime? Slack?
I'm pretty sure force installing even more software and blocking removal isn't what they are going for.
I bet it is single digit right?
Unregulated monopolies are even more anti-competitive. And it's more competitive to only regulate potential monopolies than entire markets. It's the best of no perfect option.
You don't like it? you can use Linux or buy a Mac. There are very credible alternatives today.
Edge is bundled with Windows and Chrome still has 80% of the market or more. I still don't see the problem.
In enterprise, managed-device land, options are severely curtailed.
My previous company used Workspace also, but they used Slack.
For my startup, we use Google Workspace, and I would never ever pay the same amount of money I pay for GW to have Slack.
The value proposition of Slack is not that valuable to charge what they charge. I would happily pay 1 or 2 euros per month per user, no more.
I have never used Teams. Nobody is forcing me to.
So then make all companies only sell one product.
One company sells Excel, one company sells Google Sheet, One company sells Work, one company sells Google Docs, etc.
Is that what you want?
You don't like it? you can use Linux or buy a Mac. There are very credible alternatives today.
Edge is bundled with Windows and Chrome still has 80% of the market or more. I still don't see the problem.
A few months later the repeated suggestion of "Why don't you all switch to Teams?" from the MS account rep seems to sink in.
At that point the $0 price tag (when bundled with Enterprise 365) gets compared to Slack's fairly expensive per-user pricing... and it's Goodbye Slack.
So, the bundle gets it in the door (where no other competitor could) and the free pricing / sales channel gets it adopted.
The problem is that Slack is too expensive for what they do. If Slacks value proposition was as good as their price ask, that wouldn't happen, or would be much lesser.
You said it yourself: Slack is fairly expensive for what they do.
Yep. It's hard to beat $0 and "already installed with O365".
Oh, you were wondering why MS is being investigated for anti-trust abuse... perhaps those are something to do with it?
I installed Windows 11 this week and had to uninstall Teams, Spotify and others. Why are these even being bundled with the OS?
That is why MS got under fire for IE but Safari got free pass. The degree of market control is critical aspect here.
Even on Linux in Edge mostly it feels like a no brainer for any company.
Please use the money of the fine to finance with low-interest (Europe's if possible) alternatives to Teams, Onedrive and Office-suite.
Would make fines more unbearable :-)
I think the problem is that microsoft is killing all these companies, not a lack of financing
The players could vote on topics deemed worthy with 1 vote per 100k users. Fines could be expressed as losing votes. With 300m users ms would have a lot of influence. Losing 1000 votes could me more impressive than large fines?
They don’t care and the EU will not impress either them or me unless instead of shaking fists they actually act: break up Windows, Office, browser, hardware and services, forced opening of any API used by another part, permanent bans on any kind of bundling, permanent vigilance and enforcement with mega fines and product bans.
But that is just never going to happen. The EU only actually acts against parties that don’t talk back and Microsoft will drag this out until they slither out underneath and the EU will find an excuse why they ‘let this one slip’. Because they are totally dependent on and addicted to Microsoft.
Ummm, we have 365 without a teams subscription and I've pushed it out to users without the teams install as well. Is this not an option in the EU or something?
I’m still salty because no one cared enough about Outlook getting bundled in Office back in the day.
If it wasn’t enough with all the proprietary stuff that only works between Outlook clients, it now defaults to adding Teams links to any call scheduled through its calendar.
It does seem like Microsoft can crush any Saas startup by including a "good enough" competitive product in their bundle.
Is there a way we could prevent anti-competitive practices while _also_ encouraging service integration like MS 365 and the Google Software Suite?
Maybe a separate app that integrates various services (that you can swap in and out?) Something like Wavebox but nicer (and free-er)?
Splitting chats with people and chats with teams into separate UIs just makes it hard to keep on top of things.
Image uploads and embeds work very inconsistently and often break for no apparent reason.
I'll give you the image uploads/embeds - it really can be pot luck if it works or not
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/STATEM...
Qatar has shown the EU is quite easily to corrupt.
More like a pre-emptive measure to charge customers more for access to Teams