EU opens Microsoft antitrust investigation into Teams bundling
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How are you going to compensate competitors? The problem is that over and over again, companies like MS have already accounted for the fine in their planning.
If we want to end this practice, regulators need to deal a crippling blow to MS. Forbid for the next 15 years to provide any solution in the realm of messaging. Hand out a fine so high that it breaks the company and will lead to executives being sued by shareholders.
Neither would have Chrome to be fair. I remember being a PC user in the late '00s and Chrome ads and downloads links where absolutely everywhere. On Google, on Youtube, on GMail, on any kind of SW installer for Windows would come with a pre-ticked checkbox that would shove Chrome down your throat and then also set itself as the default browser on your system, like ad/-spyware. Naughty-naughty.
It was impossible to escape Chrome not getting on your Windows machine back then, it was like a disease. Sure, it was also hip and cool back then, like all brand new products launched by Google back then that generated hype and curiosity getting people to talk about it and recommend it further, but it wouldn't have reached such insane popularity on pure merit and word of mouth alone.
I was a Firefox user at the time (was using it when it was Firebird). People were already starting to shift away from IE towards Firefox at the time. A sequence of events where a person's computer was infect with malware, they asked a computer savvy friend for help, the friend "fixed" it, installed Firefox and told them to stop using IE is how most people switched browsers in those days. But Firefox was a slog and Chrome was a breath of fresh air when it was first released. So the sequence was tweaked to "install Chrome and tell you to stop using IE".
Chrome became what it is because Microsoft had tried to neuter the internet because they saw the web app potential and understood that it could undermine Windows market share. And when they realized that there was no stopping the internet, they spent several years incompetently trying to improve IE (and eventually Edge) before eventually going the "can't beat em, join em" route.
However, Google was smart enough to know that being superior doesn't count. Firefox was not horribly slow, the leap from firefox over IE was massive. Chrome over firefox wasn't quite the same leap.
The average user has been pushed aggressively, they weren't going to do research on web browsers when they even didn't know what a web browser is. Google knew that.
Chrome didn’t. It was noticeably faster and more reliable.
Switching browsers isn’t something that people generally do lightly. You lose them, you lose them for a decade+.
That and Mozilla behaviour hasn’t been great over the past several years; like, forced advertising extensions, crypto, more advertising to turn off on a fresh install than _google_…
Manifest v3 will probably be the straw that forces me to switch back again, but reluctantly.
Chrome gained traction because IE was really, really bad. Now it has mindshare and you might could argue that Google maintains this mindshare with malpractice.
But Chrome was just better than Firefox when it launched so it accelerated the IE decline.
This feels exactly like the whole Mac M1 thing. Every techie person seems to think that the M1 was going to cause all sorts of people to switch to Macs. Guess what? Nobody gives a shit about a 5% faster processor except for power users.
Regular people don't care about Chrome being "better," either and that's not how it got market dominance.
We live in the 1950's, I work for Maddison Street and build a massive ad campaign putting ads everywhere you look about smoking, saying how it's so cool and beneficial for your health and how all people should do it if they wanna be cool and healthy. After a while, consumers already happy with breathable atmospheric air become smokers en-masses, voluntarily, putting toxic fumes in their lungs to look cool as advertised.
Who's responsible here?
Really it's just market forces at work and the cigarette manufacturers developed a superior product and should be rewarded for it.
IE was awful, and Firefox was…perfectly cromulent. Chrome was so much better than any of the competition.
- They found the internet had gotten a new icon and had no idea how it got there. (bundling with popular software)
- They were instructed by google.
That is how chrome came to top. See other comments for more context.
The fact is, browsers aren't a product, they're a platform feature. Users have zero incentive to ever switch from whatever their OS came bundled with, unless you make a massive advertising push. The fact that Google managed to get people to switch to a non-platform browser at all is a shocking achievement.
Would you rather everyone still be using IE? Because that's exactly what would have happened otherwise.
Btw, the EU has fined Google in the past for promoting their products over competitors in their search results. That was already the hint that google has gotten too big to be not in conflict of interest anymore.
The damage was done, people learned to "download the internet" from google first. And if they forgot, all Google services kept pushing them till they did.
They all had checkboxes for Chrome and other ad-ware. If you didn't pay attention to unchecked them during installation you'd find your default browser changed and other crap. Those who did "tech-support" for family members remember.
Average joe: next next next done.
Don't ever fantasize about average users back then doing research if there would be a better web browser and then going ahead to download and install chrome on their own.
"What is a web browser?"
Eventually the Google Toolbar itself would just auto-upgrade to Chrome as well.
Anecdotally, my father liked the Google toolbar for giving a separate search box in IE, but disliked Chrome and was confused when Chrome auto-installed and the Google Toolbar partly became a big ad for "congrats, you can use Chrome now", and that was one of his reasons to (finally) switch to Firefox for good (he used both IE and Firefox for a long time prior).
I remember that I had to specifically uncheck this during installation of freeware back then. People I helped with their computer had no idea where chrome came from, the internet changed on a sudden day. They believably told they didn't download it. Most likely it came with some freeware they did download. For some it could be that they __did download it__ in fact by being tricked into it by weasel wording from google. There was a real strong push, I remember the chrome ads and links to chrome where pushed everywhere in google's services.
Aside, ask a friend what the internet is and they point to chrome. We keep overestimating the average Joe. Young people are not necessarily any wiser, to the contrary I would say.
Chrome copied lots of stuff from Opera, and Opera had 2.5% of marketshare. Firefox (who I personally didn't enjoy as much as Opera) had benefited from a grasroots campaign had taken years to get 35% of marketshare. Both were nobrainers compared to how broken IE was, and they were on the market years before chrome.
So.. Yeah. Chrome was a good product. But competitors had showed that being a good browser without insane advertising was never going to be enough.
It definitely wasn't better or faster after it forced your system to start heavily using a swap file on spinning rust storage.
That's not to say IE was better than Chrome. I just don't think it appearing on the desktop was a deliberate decision for many. I'd be surprised if many even realized they had installed it.
One especially awesome feature was a built in pdf creator. You did not have to download cutePDF or whatever.
It was also more reliable and crashed less, and probably other things I forget.
Upon its release it also predictably had compatibility problems, leading Google to implement a wrapper around the IE engine. Firefox had compatibility issues as well. I'm not trying to say one was better than the other. I think people tend to forget the environment Chrome was released into.
Do while IE wasn't great, it was far more stable for me. I favored Firefox, but it was in a bit of tumult at the time. I'm sure Chrome was a better experience for others. I think at the time Google was still basking in its adulation from tech enthusiasts, papering over Chrome's flaws. That was back when people got excited for new Google products and trusted them to not be evil.
As a bonus fun fact, Chrome created a massive headache for Selenium because Firefox's internals where called "Chrome" and "chrome://" was a URL scheme. Selenium used those URLs and got stuck with loads of support requests from the ensuing confusion. Everyone thought Chrome was just an internal project name and that Google would surely pick something that didn't conflict with another browser.
Google paid vendors so that Chrome installed and made itself the default without users even knowing what had happened.
The "purposely mis-function" thing isn't a mis-characterisation either. It became fairly well documented over time.
It was just soooo much better than the competition. I mean, Firefox was better than IE6, but that was not a high bar to pass in the first place. The thing that won over developers IMO was the developer tools: Firebug was slow as molasses and an utter memory hog. And that didn't change for many years - but by the time Firefox caught up, it was too late.
While there was for sure a long period of time where Chrome was significantly faster than Firefox, there was never a time where Firefox was particularly bad. Firefox always oscillated between "really good" and "totally ok".
I’ll agree with you that Chrome really changed the web development experience with incredible tooling compared to what you could get back then but this had no impact on most users experience.
I totally remember Chrome being the fastest/snappiest browser, especially the first versions but Firefox has never been slow.
Yes, but guess what the developers started pushing onto their friends who asked for a browser? The one they were personally using.
Word-of-mouth is insanely powerful and FF alienated way too many of the key people.
Aggressive marketing is not malpractice.
Huh what? IME, it's many MANY miles better in user experience than Cisco Webex and Skype for Business, these were absolute clusterfucks, unlike Zoom it doesn't do very weird hacks in the installer that led to security issues [1], and unlike Slack it has absolutely zero problems scaling to hundreds-of-users videocalls. Haven't experienced using landline telephony gateways with it yet, but I'll be glad to get rid of Cisco Jabber as well. Sorry to say it but Cisco's stuff is stuck many years in the past, their focus was on insanely expensive telephony systems and fancy conference room setups for too long. If there's one company that deserves disruption, it's them.
The point that competitors can rightfully complain about is the seamless integration with the rest of Office 365 products (create/provision Teams meetings from Outlook directly, and streaming Powerpoint presentations directly to clients as files instead of screengrabbing)... but hey, again, the UX is so much better.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/16/users-of-...
And you want to talk about user experience…if you go afk, you stop receiving all new messages…that is until you move your mouse again. Dark mode can’t be synced to the system on Mac. Native notifications weren’t a thing on Mac until like a year ago. Performance is horrid. Click anything, change channels, press any button and you’re waiting hundreds of milliseconds if not seconds! The only cure for that is using a souped up M1/2 processor. The list goes on. Teams might be better than webex or Skype but that bar is loooooooow.
Which... makes sense? Nothing worse than a colleague going for lunch and not setting afk/dnd, so a constant "bleep" notification sound.
> Dark mode can’t be synced to the system on Mac. Native notifications weren’t a thing on Mac until like a year ago.
Valid points, although I did like the separate notifications - I used Focus Mode of macOS to silence everything else but still Teams notifications got through.
> Click anything, change channels, press any button and you’re waiting hundreds of milliseconds if not seconds! The only cure for that is using a souped up M1/2 processor.
Common problem for Electron apps, an issue it shares with Slack, or most modern web apps in general (if I were to guess, I'd blame ReactJS for that trend with all its encapsulation)... both keep zero local state it seems and request the actual content from scratch every time you change the current view or its scope. Damn annoying.
Makes absolutely zero sense. You set yourself away, or the system sets you as away and messages come in silently. In its current state, you get ZERO messages, even if your screen is open to the Teams chat where the messages are coming in. Moving your mouse after any period when you're away makes your computer look like a VCR fast forwarding through a movie. That's stupid. AND it was added within the last 6-9 months. To save bandwidth? Probably to monitor workers.
> Common problem for Electron apps, an issue it shares with Slack, or most modern web apps in general (if I were to guess, I'd blame ReactJS for that trend with all its encapsulation)... both keep zero local state it seems and request the actual content from scratch every time you change the current view or its scope. Damn annoying.
Slack, discord, matrix clients (I use element and neochat) are a dream in comparison. I realize I'm probably in the minority but I feel those milliseconds hard and it's a tough pill to swallow when one of the most responsive electron based apps happens to be made by the same corporation...If I could use Teams chat in vscode lol...of course I'm being facetious but god damn Microsoft could use some cross-pollination right now.
The latter option needs a time threshold and risks either annoyed coworkers or the system going off unintentionally while watching a youtube video. For the former, I'm one of those people who constantly forget to remove AFK when they are back from whatever. I'm rarely looking at the small blip in the top right corner of Teams to notice that.
> To save bandwidth? Probably to monitor workers.
Employers these days have far better tools to monitor their slaves.
> of course I'm being facetious but god damn Microsoft could use some cross-pollination right now.
You're not alone. It seems the only ones getting this somewhat right are AWS and Apple. Everyone else is just working in silos - and even though Apple is infamous for that, they still manage to deliver seamlessly integrated solutions and uniform design/UX.
I've also not found an option to only enable the sound for people calling while disabling it for random chat messages.
As to the away thing, I've noticed that it will set itself to away if the pc session is locked. Not sure if it's the locking itself that triggers it, or just a timeout. But when I get back on the PC, it'll stay in away mode as long as I don't interact with the Teams app.
Also, the whole indicator thing is an absolute joke. I've been multiple times on calls with people who appeared as offline for the entire duration of the call.
Shared files are added to a team directory, which is okay I guess. If you upload a second file with the same name, it asks you if you want to create a copy (temp(1).txt). If you do it again, you'll get 2 popups (temp.txt already exists, then temp(1).txt already exists). If you do it again, you get three.
... like, I get that it can make sense to integrate long term storage, but can you maybe not break the entire use-case for why we were using an ephemeral chat the first place?
It is the Skype For Business, but just rebranded. You can still see some cruft where certain dialog boxes still refer to it as Skype for Business.
Meh:
Typing anything complicated is a weird mix of WYSIWYG and knock-off markdown, which causes confusion and frustration. Codeblocks and snippets in particular.
Random delays in getting rid of an indicator as there are weird, in-built checks and timers, forcing more clicks.
Bugs out messages, not able to send or receive (anecdotally only colleagues had this).
The weird split between Teams and Chats tab, which has practically no similarity to its competitors. The Teams tab feels clunky as a result compared to the Chats tab.
The Teams tab was randomly decided to scroll bottom-to-top, while the Chats tab is still top-to-bottom.
..and more. Making something better than Skype, Cisco and other stuff isn't that difficult given the underlying tech has drastically improved. Even so Teams routinely messes up trivial things over weird business decisions, and tries to shoehorn features that have been solved since the times of Teamspeak/Ventrilo/etc.
It's not terrible, but it's apparent Teams isn't that great and routinely emphasizes the wishes of management types over the wishes of end-users. No self-respecting developer would encourage one-click calls without the ability to turn it off. Voice channels solved that issue decades ago.
- Every idea is worth implementing
- Get it into the hands of people ASAP
- Hopefully we can make it performant later
So all in all a typical Microsoft product. But not bad by any stretch of the imagination.
And yeah…it’s bundled with Office 365 “for free”…Apple also bundles a lot of free stuff with your Mac purchase…is that abusing your market penetration or just reaping the benefits of it?
Zoom just works better for me than either, but I'd prefer Webex to Teams. My last Teams meeting with a customer I had to apologize 3 times then send a zoom because Teams simply refused to authenticate me or when it let me in, my video was not working.
Yes, except that it has a killer feature: absolute integration with office365. Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you, but for companies that is a very big factor.
I don't have any conferencing app installed aside from Teams. I join the others in the browser.
Maybe so but I think Slack is still hot garbage.
And I say this as someone that runs Linux at home and doesn't touch MS dev tooling or languages. Including VS code.
There are much to be done on that front. Divest Facebook into different entities (ig, WhatsApp, Facebook, Oculus), Amazon (AWS, marketplace, Twitch, whole foods, etc...), Microsoft (azure, office, teams, etc..).
This will foster competition and fairness. They have too much power now.
But I find Teams much better than Google Meet, Webex, Zoom, and many of the other usual competitors.
It's stable, the video and audio quality is good, it has very good virtual background support that works well, it can easily record calls, etc.
What Teams is very bad at is being a Slack competitor. My last employer used Teams for video calls and Slack for workplace chatting.
Do we have data on loss of productivity for companies that migrated away from Teams? If it’s so bad how are consumer companies of Teams making it justifiable for loss of productivity to shareholders?
What I’m getting at is that it’s a more complex equation than just laziness being a parameter. Cost and ROI are the other two (among more likely).
> Do we have data on loss of productivity for companies that migrated away from Teams?
"We have no time for that. MS recommends Teams and it comes for free"
I will tell you a dirty secret. Most company os images only ship with the default MS browser. I had colleagues using Internet Explorer or later Edge when Firefox and Chrome had already run out of sight. Had to help them over Skype or Teams.
"just laziness being a parameter." Competence is an other one indeed. Many sysadmins will follow MS like it is a cult. If MS blesses Skype for business, it will be Skype for business. If MS bundles Teams, it will be Teams.
If its just Microsoft, though, then no, because everyone else is bundling software but they’re only chasing Microsoft.
And yet no one sees enough value in Slack to pay for it. I type this on a mac, which has built in notes, but I pay for my own notes solution. My company uses Zoom DESPITE paying for gsuite. If Slack offered enough value people would pay for it. Unfortunately Slack's just not that good.
I LOVE Slack. Great integrations, fast, solid apps, UX. it makes Teams look third rate by comparison.
We’ve nearly completely done away with email, thanks to Slack. Most of our suppliers use it, so we can chat live to them in Slack rather than email.
Cheap admins, not lazy.
IT Admins often have their hands tied by corporate bureaucracy that makes a DMV jealous.
We aren't lazy, its just a hard sell to buy/manage an additional product when this fully integrated one is essentially free with 365.
Your welcome to come speak to my C's instead if you want?
It was a good choice for whoever is picking the software and Microsoft is not worried at all in trying to improve it because they know people will swallow it.
Unless I have no option I'm not working anymore for any company that uses Teams.
Also, if you're willing, I'd be interested to hear which competing products you use and which areas those products outperform MS Teams?
Sounds like Stockholm syndrome. I was a moderately happy Teams user for conferencing before switching jobs to one that uses Zoom for conferencing, but occasionally has to use Teams.. it's not even close.
Teams was, and still is, a crapshot if it will mangle my audio settings or not (browser, Ubuntu, macOS, doesn't matter). Camera touch-up is pathetic compared to what Zoom does (I have conflicting natural light). Oh, and logging in is often a pain with a million redirects left and right, a timeout from times to times, etc. Also, sometimes I just can't connect to a meeting, it will keep spinning forever, and I have to use the browser version which has the fun benefit of not having all features (sometimes the chat just isn't there on the browser while it is on the "native" "app").
My company is almost exclusively made up of Windows users and overall, I don't hear many complaints about MS Teams.
Hard to watch videos in a Teams team. Why are they files?
Two slightly different styles between teams and chats. I also heard they use two separate DBMSes between chats and teams.
Pasting formatted code is an exercise in patience. Steps:
Click More Formatting
Click language dropdown
Click language
Paste code
Click Insert
Click send message (it doesn't focus)
Images randomly fail to load.
Teams compresses PNGs to JPGs when it sends it to clients, so screenshots of code look like shit. Downloading it gives you the original file.
You can only pin up to 15 chats. What product manager at Microsoft decided this completely arbitrary number that obviously is not a technical limitation at the time?
Viewing a thread just sucks. Messages don't autoscroll when there's a new message. Good luck following a busy thread.
Pasting in stuff from a site pastes formatted. Need to do ctrl-shift-v to paste unformatted.
I have yet figured out the behavior of how inline code is supposed to work. Inconsistently it decides to close the block with a closing backtick. Sometimes it ignores it.
Their webhook endpoint (for sending in messages to channels) can return a 200 if there is actually a problem delivering the message.
I would rather use Slack, IRC, Discord, or even Matrix to name a few.
My biggest gripe is notifications. There’s no distinction between a direct message and a group chat, including meeting chats. To stop being pinged every time anyone talks to anyone else, you have to disable chat notifications completely.
And yes… team channels exist, but very few people actually use them, because ad-hoc group chats are just so much easier. It’s the same with Slack, except that Slack has a reasonable mechanism for handling notifications.
I especially like it when I switch chats and start typing too early and it either drops the first few words I enter, or they get put in reverse order.
I made it a personal rules that no company that imposes microsoft products, let alone teams, shall benefit from my services. It’s one of many potential smells of a mediocre environment.
Google has their own stuff.
Facebook I am assuming use their own stuff like workplace.
Apple I don’t see using Microsoft but I could be wrong.
Netflix used / uses? Silver light so I know they have pushed Microsoft stuff l.
I doubt i’d miss working on code assembly lines. Plus my contracts are there to pay bills, the real coding and tech happens outside. This mentality brought me a mortgage free house, plenty of savings for the next few years and a solid network of folks whom all know whatsup. I’m doing fine with an owned personality. Probably because once a client agrees to such my “absurd” requests, such as letting me work in an environment i am familiar with since early youth, i give my absolute best to deliver the hard money i’m paid. I’ll even put up with crap such as would be agile and bootcamp “grads”. Heck i’ll even listen to how you think ai will take over your job tomorrow. Just dont mess with my os and chat app.
On the actual subject I think "The EU" (really just one agency steered by a bunch of unelected beaurocrats) is way to strict regarding Microsoft and way to lenient towards for example Google. I wonder why that is. Google too bundles it's "Google meet" with it's "office suite". In fact it bundles a lot of stuff. I pay for google's services for their email (mainly antispam) service. I'm getting lots of services in addition. Then let's take Google's play store. You want application analytics? Well firebase is a Google owned service and it enjoys huge privileges on android over everything else (it can collect and send even after the user closes your app). You can even push code and configuration updates. No third party product would ever be allowed to push "unverified" code to android devices via play. How is that not monopolistic? I could name a lot more. There is not even a peep from "the EU" (I put it in quotes, because I too am an EU citizen and I disagree about a lot many of EU agencies are doing,also no one votes for these people, so they certainly don't represent me).
And to be clear, this isn't commenting on the merits of an antitrust investigation; I understand the rationale behind anti-bundling regulations. I'm just talking about the complaints about Teams itself. Are people prejudiced against it because Lync was so bad?
1. Attrocious linux support. I use linux at work and its just a pure shitshow. Teams is only offered as PWA with horrible performance. Its far snappier on windows. There is even a community version called teams-for-linux which at least shows notifications in the tray icon and dock icon on ubuntu unlike the official one.
2. Groups are trash. You just wanna call 3 people? Well we made a group for you. Everytime you call a bunch of people it creates a group and that group is now a contact in your chat window. By now I have a group for every constillation of the team I work in. Its beyond annoying.
3. The text input tries to be too smart. Wanna insert code? You get a popup with your cursor in the „title“ part so if you press the code button and paste it ends up in the title. Great, gotta click in the textbox first.
4. Video calls arent much better. You sit next to a colleague and just wanna mute him cause you can hear him outside of teams? Yeah nope, not possible. Same goes for the missing feature of changing the volume of individual participants.
Discord does all of the things and is free for users. How in gods name is multi billion M$ not able to create a decent communication platform.
Its slow. It's a resource hog. And it seems someone added onClick=sleep(500ms) on every part of the interface.
There is this thing that the message box keeps flashing and either takes a while to load or doesn't load if you search or scroll up too much.
There is this supper annoying thing when sometimes you try to copy text and it brings up the whole message including metadata instead. Who the hell asked for that?
Just those two bugs alone infuriate me on a daily basis (and of course I have list of others as long as my arm). It's not just one Mac, it's the iMac and work MBP. It's not just Intel or Apple Silicon, I have both. It's just plain broke, and I'm continually amazed that it got shipped that way.
Funnily enough, one man's trash is another's treasure. For me groups is a killer feature. just being able to create ad hoc groups for different threads of conversations is what makes teams tick for me. Without the groups, I would have to use channels which for me pretty much useless.
Especially for things hosted by UK universities where it seems like everyone was forced to use Teams, I remember seeing absurd instructions for conference and workshop registrations, like "Please give us an personal email address to use as your login that is not your institutional email address, and that you have never used for any Teams-based conference in the past."
Then actually trying to run conferences on Teams always seemed to work horribly by comparison to other systems. One workshop on Teams I went to (with ~60 people if I recall), for example, couldn't figure out the access controls for screen sharing, and some users would accidentally share their desktops, which they then had trouble stopping. For larger conferences (eg, 100-400 people at a talk), I went to several where, since it seemed that they were already frustrated by Teams but seemed pushed into using it by their university administrations, they would use Teams chats to send out Zoom links.
The whole experience was a mess, and it was largely a mess where it seemed like Teams was being pushed for uses it really wasn't designed for. Slack, on the other hand, didn't seem to push its way into these uses. I've also used Teams things that seem more within its designed use-cases (eg, faculty meetings), and it has been fine, but it generated a terrible reputation by being pushed for everything else in academia.
I actually did use Lync at a small company in the past and thought it worked great, but then MS dropped android support so we moved.
For video, yes, it has a higher quality compared to Slack, but pretty much that's it. Because the joy ends with random crashes for no reason. Like now, I wanted to double check the "New Conversation" way of chatting and it just crashed. Lucky for me I only have to use it for video conferences once in a while.
Sometimes I am under the impression that not even Microsoft uses Teams internally because of how horrible it is.
So even if you are a small company, you'll have a default Team called whatever with a General channel in it. Bonkers.
Of course they never considered any open platform like Jitsi that did not require an actual account
However, the reason for this wasn’t so much MS being evil as Google and others basically ignoring sensitivities about where user data is hosted. MS guarantees (well, sort of) user data is stored in the EU when customers set it up properly.
No one else does (or did, maybe things have changed by then).
So the monopoly MS has here is basically because they do what their customers want them to do.
Jitsi was hosted by a few teachers who voluntarily managed all this infrastructure for schools in my state (Germany, BW). They didn't have enough servers since there wasn't much demand until the pandemic. These scaling problems meant only teachers could use their cam (which most students were quite happy about).
Being an european, I would say that the first cause is cultural. Innovation for the sack of innovation isn't particurlaly viewed as positive as in the US. In many circle it's even seen as negative. Same thing for entrepreneurship, as there is a good chunk of people that see Businesses, especialy big ones, as an ennemy.
Don't be revisionist, Europe is a continent full of innovations, both industrial, scientific, and artistic
This negative mindset only appeared recently, and it seems to be spreading, so what has changed? Perhaps WW I/II, the Marshal Plan and propaganda? Looks like it's very well documented
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
The death of European's giants began:
"The Americans insisted that the German coal sales monopoly, the Deutscher Kohlenverkauf (DKV), should lose its monopoly, and that the steel industries should no longer own the coalmines.[12]: 351 It was agreed that the DKV would be broken up into four independent sales agencies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_Steel_Commun...
It's like if Europe asked the US to break Microsoft into multiple small companies because it is too big lol
This is what affected Europe's ability to innovate, loosing its big industries and its ability to form big and global companies, instead was forced to open its market to the US which could expand its giants as they wish..
Oh and this one is interesting too:
"The loan was followed in 1948 by a free grant of $2.3 billion from the Marshall Plan, with no repayment. In exchange, French cinemas would replace the numerical quota with a "screen quota". This meant that French cinemas were required to show French-made films for four weeks out of every thirteen and leave the other nine weeks of every quarter open to free competition, namely from American films.[5]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blum%E2%80%93Byrnes_agreement
https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue17/HTML/ReviewEtem.ht...
In what areas? Software? Fraud (including anything from crypto shit through Theranos and Juicero)? Maybe automobiles and space, maybe?
In other areas such as aviation, banking, healthcare, music streaming (did you know that practically most music streaming services outside those created by the giants of Apple, Amazon, Google as an offshoot project are European innovations - Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz), maybe edtech and biotech, space and transportation, automobiles etc. European companies out innovate American ones.
Innovation for the sake of innovation isn't cherished in the EU, and of course it's harder to be successful in 27 different small markets than it is in one massive one. Regulations playing a part in possible, but do you have any sources to substantiate your claim it's the primary reason?
Back Market, Doctolib, Ornikar, HelloFresh, GitPod, N26, Yubikey, Revolut have plenty of impact and innovation as startups.
But maybe market cap is what impact means for you, so okay - Airbus? VW? Stellantis? Alstom? Thales? Safran? Sanofi? Siemens? Robert Bosch? Bayer? Literally among the best in the world in their respective branches. For instance, Airbus is outselling and outengineering and outinnovating and outmarketing and out-everything Boeing. Did you know that apart from them not being criminally negligent with basic safety systems, they're also heavily investing in all sorts of alternatives for the future of aviation? They have projects for battery-electric and hydrogen-powered airplanes, delta-wing designs, and collaborate with engine manufacturers (to be fair, it's a French-American Joint Venture) on innovative engine designs. Meanwhile Boeing's only innovation is NASA giving them a ton of money for them to test a new wing design for them.
Only some big names I could think of in France and Germany (and Spain and Netherlands and UK for Airbus). I really should start a list that I keep up for next time this topic comes up, people regularly underestimate innovation in the EU, or are completely unaware that said innovative company is European.
It's a cold, hard fact that the US has had much more successful businesses recently, particularly in tech.
The innovation Airbus is doing is a million times more important (because it can drastically reduce carbon emissions in an area that emits a lot of them and is crucial for a big part of the world) than 99% of US tech startups "reinvention" or "disrupting" common things nobody needs reinventing. Do you count Juicero in your "innovative tech" metrics?
Yeah, hotels sucked in some places, but Airbnb is not a solution but it's whole can of worms aggravating housing shortages.
lol. I have heard of like two of these and even those are tiny companies.
Whenever something good might happen, the EU tries to regulate it to death.
The latest example being AI: we don't have any AI companies or pioneers, but the EU already started drafting regulation around it. It feels like they want to kill every economic opportunity they can.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-signs-off-on-data-transfe...
As if the EU was built to help the US economy and transform the continent into a giant marketplace
> The latest example being AI: we don't have any AI companies or pioneers, but the EU already started drafting regulation around it. It feels like they want to kill every economic opportunity they can.
You're looking at this one dimensionally. AI isn't just an "economic opportunity", there are actual real world things that can be impacted by it (just ask the striking actors and writers in the US). Why exactly is it a problem for there to be regulations? When Airbnb, Uber, e-scooter companies sprung up "disrupting" with no regulations covering them, they made a mess all around. I'm in favour of proactive over reactive regulations.
Not to mention, there literally is an EU startup in "AI" that got tons of money, so it's not like you can say there's only plans of regulations, there are plans of competing as well.
> As an european, the US outpaces us in every area.
Aeronautics, banking and healthcare are great counterexamples where it's not even close.
So we'll start with Alphabet which in September there is progress to put them on trial over their monopoly in search and ads. [1] [2], Then Microsoft who's dominance is overdue to be broken up after destroying Slack.
Finally, Meta. Which once they reach another billion users with another social network product via Threads without federating is almost certain to be investigated this time.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-facebook-microsoft...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/20/doj-antitrust-lawsuit-agains...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/24/doj-files-second-antitrust-l...
Kimberly Clark is a huge diaper manufacturer in the US, they make Huggies and Kirkland diapers.
The market is probably mostly split between P&G and Kimberly Clark though.
Teams benefited from being an existing product that was already integrated with company (and school) identity at a time when people had to work from home. It was the pandemic that stopped competition. What is an admin to do when suddenly everyone is remote - kick off a months long product evaluation, or use the existing bundled one?
Do we want to set a precendent that a future indispensible tool cannot be bundled? How do you know what part of your product is going to be so indespensible in future that you have to charge for it separately now?
Otherwise, isn't AWS bundling essentially all the AWS services together? You're encouraged to use them simply because they're there, why use the google cloud equivalent when your already using AWS.
And not having it, is a huge step backwards. So I do not know how unbundling might realistically work.
eg. in slack if you get a message you want to look at later, you can just click on it, go remind me in 1 hr, tomorrow 9am and a few other logical defaults.
Teams only has some shitty way to create a task that is slow and laggy and doesn't have sane defaults so most of the time you end up just copying the message and making a new outlook appointment.
Which means the new outlook will become a teams tab by year’s end, I guess.
I'm actually most upset about the forced Minecraft migration, because it's a mess and there's no alternative.
Microsoft offers good product for good price. Why not compete fairly and get things together with some other companies to combat them at this same price?
The fact that Slack had to be bought out by a larger company rather than be able to compete on their own against Microsoft despite having a much better product is bad for consumers. That is exactly the point of antitrust action like this one. We should have 25 small players, not just 2 big ones.
Looking at streaming, is it not extremely great following that logic that we have dozen different services. All with their own "better" content. Instead of one lesser one with all content?
For example there’s many more bike manufacturers than car manufacturers. But if anything cars have improved substantially more in price:features over the years.
But Slack competed. It forced Microsoft to improve, then it lost. "Competition" doesn't mean artificially keep competitors alive when they can't survive on their own. If Slack was that much better then we wouldn't be having this convo because companies would see the value and pay for it.
The actual problem is that companies just aren't seeing that much value in Slack.
Not my experience.
What would those 25 small players compete on? Chat and video calling arent terribly difficult to build or maintain, and unless you bundle features into them (like M365 integration), there isn't much to differentiate on, and those integrations aren't terribly hard to build either.
My feeling is that chat and video messaging are expected to be bundled in with every OS and office suite and don't have enough value to be stand alone products anymore, in a similar way that browsers are expected to be free.
At least where we are now, people/businesses can get these features without having to pay more, do more security and compliance attestations before putting their entire company communication into one of 25 small platforms, and all of the major options (teams, slack, zoom) basically work the same, though teams is a resource hog.
I don't think anyone wants to think about their messaging platform, they just want something that works, is secure, and is cheap.
Could companies say no and choose a competitor? Probably. But it would take more effort than saying yes, even if the product is worse. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether MS knew that including Teams the way they did would have the effect of killing competition, which is bad for consumers and therefore illegal.
Not allowing you to change your default browser for example, absolutely anti competition. But this seems a little bit of a stretch to me personally.
(I don't think I use a more appealingly bad piece of software)
Teams is great. Slack is great. And I bet most big corps actually pay for both.
But per the free offerings, full Slack is free while free Teams isn’t full Teams. To get full Teams you have to pay. So not sure where the “bundling is bad” argument is coming from.
And Teams is so well integrated into the MS ecosystem it’s not like Slack at all.
The former is without competition and without any (realistic) chance of there ever being competition so Microsoft can bundle whatever they want and companies have to buy it with no power to negoiate something different/cheaper.
After crushing the competition they can raise the bundle prices and there is another quasi monopoly for MS.
This is very desirable for Micorsoft and very undesirable for consumers and the general public especially outside America.
The free market has failed (in this instance) and there are no prospects that it will solve the problem on it's own without government intervention.
You’re arguing against bundling for dominant players. That seems pretty limiting wrt a common industry practice.
Also, Slack and Teams aren’t close wrt audience target. Business orgs won’t want slack.. dev/IS orgs will.
To quote spiderman: "With great power comes great responsibility".
I don't think it's unreasonable to have stricter rules for bigger players but to be fair I'm not the biggest friend of MS and friends in general.
I think we would be better of with a distinct OS company and an office company and so on (multiple in fact) even if it comes at the price of "efficiency". Besides anti trust measurements to split them up, regulating BigTech is the next best thing to improve competition.
As is I'm relatively certain that microsoft does not allow most companies to opt out of "new" products like teams (and pay an appropriately cheaper price).
The Amazons and Googles of the world can probably do that, but most companies are not in such a position.
It's a part of the email service. It's a part of the calendaring. It's tied into the org structure and identity platform. It's integrated into OneDrive and SharePoint. It integrates the collaboration features of the office products. It's becoming the main portal to all of O365.
That one seems unavoidable and the other is discretionary isn’t strictly down to “bundled or not”
I’ve also worked in Google Workspaces orgs with Slack. No one tried to use free Teams because it’s neutered.
Quite the framing. Some of us consider this to be an amazing feature. I have approximately zero hours per day available to manage machine images and 3rd party integration bullshit.
Do any of these antitrust proponents ever consider the value that many small businesses and startups are able to extract by being able to do everything with one simple bundled offering?
I get the argument and the principles of competition, but can we look at the bundling as a feature in and of itself as well? Should we make the IT experience of SMBs worse on purpose to satisfy the ideological curiosities and principles of a select few participants? Could I frame this as big business trying to indirectly oppress small business?
Similarly, it's why iMessage gained wide adoption, became and stayed the de facto messaging app on iOS despite the users being able to go on the AppStore and download any other free cross platform messenger. It was already on their phones and it worked well enough not to push users to look elsewhere.
So if we can file an antitrust investigation in Microsoft for bundling Teams with Windows, why don't we also go after Apple for bundling iMessage with iOS under the same logic? Or after Google for monopolizing the web browser market with Chrome? Where does the buck stop on these ecosystems that have monopolies in their respective sectors?
We already went through something similar nearly 15 years ago when Windows copies sold in EU would not come with IE preinstalled but would prompt you to choose which of the 4 major browsers at the time (IE, FF, Chrome, Opera) you would like installed (while now those same browsers would be FF and 3 flavors of Chrome, how ironic). Was a good idea at the time that needs updated and refreshed for modern platforms and tools, not just Teams.
WhatsApp is the de facto default messenger even on iOS and despite having to go the AppStore to install it in most of Europe and South America.
The situation has a lot to do with Android not bundling a default messenger. So yes, competition authorities are very much right to be investigating bundling. It’s a real attack against free and fair competition.
Plus it’s not like you are not actually paying for Teams in your subscription. Actually you are even if you don’t use it which is silly. Products should be sold by themselves with a proper price tag.
Well I'm also paying for Spotify subscription but I never listen to Justin Biber yet he's still on the platform I'm paying for anyway, but that's just how bundles work.
Would be nice as a consumer to cherry pick lower priced plans specifically on the exact pieces of SW or products we want out of the larger pool/catalogue, but then I doubt many SaaS would be in business if every customer would just choose only the specific pieces that they need and not get everything as a bundle.
Or maybe it would work from a business PoV, I dunno, but maybe then in a nefarious way.
> then I doubt many SaaS would be in business if every customer would just choose only the specific pieces that they need and not get everything as a bundle.
Maybe the issue is the SaaS business model then. But somehow I doubt it because Slack managed fine because Microsoft started unfairly undercutting them.
In a single country in the world. Everywhere else people use third-party apps that you download from an app store.
*the most financially lucrative consumer market in the world
Not if you don't control your machine like most corporate users? Anyway Slack was installed on my image before Teams existed. Then the company goes well why are we paying for Slack when we have Teams?
To play the devil's advocate, that's the bean counters' job, no? Otherwise, whithout any oversight over finances, the expenses can easily spiral out of control and hurt the bottom line. Probably no big deal in the wealthy US where VC money is plentiful, but in Europe where start-ups need to be scrappy, it starts to add up.
As a consumer, I also ask myself, "well if I pay for Netflix, Prime, etc, can I just get rid of most of them and only keep one?"
Otherwise it's simply abusing dominant market position.
> Otherwise it's simply abusing dominant market position.
Let say someone writes paid CLI-tools for Linux. Could they go around all distros and demand they unbundle things from them so they can offer some way to sell their own inside it? Maybe remove vi, less and so on. Or even entire shell...
Microsoft does gain an significant advantage by bundling Teams. Do linux distributions gain similar advantages by bundling shells? Do they even have similar impact on others in the industy (hh-score)? Bonus question: did they cross-finance from other sources to get the position there?
Who would use a distro with a lesser set of CLI tools? Who would use a distro without a supported shell? Canonical is now using their position to push Snaps, for example. And it's usually financed through enterprise (server) software support contracts, instead of direct payments for the product.
The point is that if we allow very large businesses with a dominant market position to destroy smaller competitors in another market by bundling, then we all suffer.
We get reduced choice, reduced competition, worse software and higher prices.
Many threads in HN are prescriptive, but once in a while we get some wonderful retrospective threads. Of course, hindsight is 2020, but really has European anti-trust and their actions have they resulted in any meaningful change at any level. Or is it a punitive bludgeon they use to beat American tech because of their envy?
EU authorities absolutely go after big European companies.
1. no fine. 2. 67.6 million 3. 750 million (partial Siemens in of one over dozen defendants) 4. No last decision/No fine yet 5. No last decision/ No fine yet
Microsoft (7) cases:
1.AT.37792 - 899.00 million 2. AT.39784 - non-fine decision 3. AT.39530 - 561.00 million
Remaining 4 pending cases
Google 7 cases: AT.40099 - 4.34 billion AT.39740 - 2.42 billion (2 non-fine cases) (3 pending cases)
Last one.. BASF - 4 cases: AT.37533 - 66.4 million (partial one of 10 defendants) AT.37512 - fine imposed (partial one of 13 defendants), fine document not found. (2 non-fine cases)
The amounts Microsoft and Google were demanded are in a different stratosphere. Now, you can comment about the choice of the industry I picked.. the heavy hand of Europe Anti-trust seems to be picking pocket of American tech companies a bit more than German bellwethers.
Thanks for the link!
I did not include Meta's 1.2 billion Euro fine. For the sake of brevity.
Now, that you understand, I do my homework, all you have to do this -- give me a European company that was fined Billion Euros for anti-trust. One case.
(not group of companies or European company a defendant among 10 companies being fined).
I could not find one.
Self-deception is not my field of mastery!