Microsoft is unbundling Teams from Office in Europe to address regulator concern

Webex was just as bad and unreliable as Skype for Business, the only reason why that shit even existed was that it integrated nicely with your existing Cisco telephony and conference room hardware. First, Zoom came in with an extremely easy to use solution right when Covid hit, and Teams sealed the fate of both by being cheap to effectively free and being even lower in barrier to entry - including the effort for compliance stuff like SSO and auditing which eventually grew more important for companies as the "it's a pandemic" excuse ceased to be viable.

Personally, I do not think that there is a chance that MS Teams can be displaced any more in the enterprise space, simply because of the compliance overhead that everyone else has to do while it's considered "done" for companies that already use Office 365. And now that MS is offering VoIP integration, companies are also ditching their expensive and, let's be honest given their reputation for security issues, insecure Cisco stuff.

It's less than half the price of Slack with way more features. We even get Loop knowledge management which is shaping up to be pretty great actually.

If they can squeeze ChatGPT/generative-AI functionality in there for cheap that's a slam dunk.

Zoom supports SSO. I use it every day.

Obviously the consumer product we were all once familiar with wouldn't suffice in terms of features, but I never understood why they didn't stick with the Skype brand.

Sadly it was depreciated for Skype for Business that had fewer functionalities and was just plain worse.

I don't know why you would make up a 'fact'.

Also in this context it makes even less sense as Microsoft bought Skype before Teams existed. I think you can't you steal something you own.

They shared a name for a handful of years. That's it.

Teams does not share components with Skype consumer; at most they both used SILK, but Teams moved to Satin in 2021. It does use [backend] components from SfB as it is the evolution of that service.

I mean they won right?

The competitive advantage the bundling has given them is enormous.

And while un-bundling it now will stop "additional benefits" it won't in any form remove the benefits they already got.

E.g. companies which are on a bundled plan and use both are now used to it and their cross integrations (which won't go away) so as long as it's price wise competitive with other solutions they likely will keep it and now pay for both.

As long as anit-monpoly low doesn't 1) penalizes based on the long term benefits gained 2) shifts more to anti-massiv-power-abuse laws in their phrasing/formulation/public discourse we will just see stuff like that happening again and again. We sadly life in a world where huge companies braking the law is the norm as long as it's expected to yield them noticeable more money then the fall out through penalties and publicity. And that isn't just limited to vague laws like monopoly power abuse, e.g. Ubers operation is quite not so fully legal in a lot of countries.

All of that stuff back then had basically no consequences, which is probably why MS continues to increase their anti-competitive behavior. They will continue to do so until there are consequences, obviously.

Asked another way, why is Apple allowed to bundle Music with the iPhone, but Microsoft is not allowed to bundle Teams with Office?

Bundling is basically their modus operandi.

I believe this may be the first time I've heard anyone say that.

What if slack cost 14 due to all the features beyond chatting, like especially video calls.

Maybe this change now gives them a motivation to provide a "text only" version of Slack for 5 or 7, because if I would guess 50%+ of their operation and development cost come from this additional features?

> is not forced to unbundle them

because monopoly law sadly sadly only applies if you are somewhat winning, but not if you are somewhat irrelevant to a point people forget to even evaluate you when making a choice (in the EU Microsoft 365 is clearly winning huge and e.g. Zoom and Google Workplace are _much_ less relevant/successful compared to the US AFIK).

And yes, O365 adding chat was a big blow for Slack. But I think Teams' displacing Slack has more to do with the fact that Slack doesn't offer value equivalent to it's fairly high price. There are lots of features in O365 that never disrupted "premium priced" competitors - BaseCamp exists despite O365 ToDo, project management tools exist despite O365 Planner, etc.

Smartphones include features that have relegated to niche markets the consumer camera market, consumer dictation equipment, mp3 players, navigation devices, etc.

Teams is a re-imagining of UI atop SharePoint and SfB/Lync APIs or functionality we all loathed, and does a not terrible job of it.

When you realize that "screen sharing" is now "app sharing" instead, and every user can collaborate, a light bulb goes off.

When you realize you can offer Teams with web-based office suite collab at $3/seat to remote collaborators, fireworks go off.

When you realize all of this is fully compliant for regulated industries, there are no other choices, because the incumbents didn't bother becoming compliant for actually collaborating.

Most tools in this space are siloed chat, or presentation viewer, and god bless for permissioned file spaces.

As far as we've been able to find, both at the 2nd largest bank in free world and a startup of just dozens, the M365 E5 suite with Teams backed by SharePoint makes this all work together for role based group access to real time collaboration at scale while remaining seamlessly compliant.

That's the OP's point: what you call "giving away for free for anyone who has the office suite", I call "adding another feature to the office suite". Particularly for features which everyone understands are now just necessary in the space, it's a little weird to say "you can't add new features to your software, that would be anticompetitive".

You're suggesting it's a problem for a dominant product to release new functionality? Like once something gets big enough it can't improve anymore because that would be anticompetitive?

I don't see the obvious legal and moral reasons.

I don't see anyone prosecuting Google for bundling Chrome with Android and pushing Chrome in Search, or prosecuting Apple for bundling Safari and iCloud with the iPhone, or prosecuting Amazon for bundling streaming video with Prime, or prosecuting Microsoft for pushing Edge with Windows.

Some people have individual preferences--even strong ones--but I'm not sure how much there is to truly distinguish the major solutions at this point.

LibreOffice and its descendents (e.g. Collabora) spring to mind immediately. There are a few. Apple has its own tools (Keynote, etc) but I don't think they're necessarily a suite.

There aren't going to be a lot of new productivity suites, due to how overwhelmingly dominant Microsoft is.

In fact, the key metric for any office site isn't its features or numerical prowess, but rather how well it can read and write Microsoft office files.

Whether a company that's orders of magnitude smaller, with nowhere near the same reach and force, would be considered engaging in anti-trust if they did similar bundling is basically unrelated to why Microsoft unbundling their Teams product from Office would stop them from being further investigated. Past violations of the law don't magically stop having been violations just because you decided to stop violating the law.