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Comment by browningstreet | Hacker News Reader

So much gnashing about the quality of Teams here.

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.

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This isn’t how boring big corp works - teams is free and slack isn’t. This is because MS office licenses are 100% necessary / paid for already, and SSO is mandatory. I know a big 4 accounting firm I worked at switched exactly along these lines, so that’s ~ a million licenses.

So to me it looks like these companies need to offer a better bundle. That is either substantially better in quality or value than MS is offering.

The issue is that MS uses it's market domineering position in the office / OS market to push it's other (unrelated) products.

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.

Not sure I’m buying this given the complexity of Microsoft licensing tiers.

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.

Dominant players are in a position to abuse bundling more than smaller competitors.

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.

You’re right you may not be able to opt out of paying for it, but a lot of Microsoft licensed features and products need to be enabled via feature flags to be used. It’s part of the implementation requirement and can be left disabled until it’s gone through review and approval processes.

Teams is absolutely a related product to their O365 product lines. It's extremely inter-woven into practically every other product offered. It's not like it's some completely detached and entirely unrelated product that has no connection to the others; it's literally a glue that ties it all together.

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.

Having worked in big boring enterprise orgs, the MS licensing is extremely expensive given the delivered solutions and the Slack license isn’t extremely expensive.

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.

I don’t really understand your comment about office being expensive (it has excel) or it seeming unavoidable, it is actually unavoidable (it has excel).

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