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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Microsoft critic on lots of fronts, but I can't understand how people consider bundling teams with office to be anti competitive. Isn't team communication essentially a modern feature of a productivity suite that you'd expect to see included? Why is it not considered to be meeting market demand. I consider it a plus to have everything integrated together (even if I don't particularly like Teams). What's the legal or moral basis for calling it anticompetitive? If anything it feels like a normal result of competitive pressure.

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It is anti competitive because it destroys the potential market for others.

The correct course of action is to have an API that allows other apps to integrate and provide this feature in Office.

To give an example, Google, when adding storage APIs to Android KitKat worked closely with competitors to Google Drive to ensure that the storage API worked with third party providers. Google are not perfect, but that is a fine example of the right general idea.

But it seems to be in denial that markets evolve.

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

And why are all the other office suites allowed to have video/chat?

How many office suites like that there are competitive for Word et al.?

Google, for one. They have integrated chat, and a capable document platform.

I don’t think any of Googles many abortive chat applications are ever a good example of company acting anti-competitively. Honestly Google seemed to have made a sport out of shooting themselves in the foot.

With regards to Google’s productivity suite vs Office. Googles stuff is very impressive, but honestly not even in the same league as Office. Googles stuff is pretty useless for anything beyond pretty basic editing, and I say that as some that used Googles offerings extensively in a professional environment for many years.

I didn't think Google as comparable, since there is fully featured free tier for documenting. For Word, Teams and so on, there is not.

Google for sure. Zoho may be a distant.

Companies undermine potential markets for others all the time - that’s what adding new features does. Facebook adding chat was a huge blow to MSN messenger. Reddit adding image uploads natively to their platform was a huge blow to third party image hosts. Excel adding python scripting is a huge blow for a large class of data analysis tools.

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.

That's a bad situation to be improved upon. Not a standard to accept.

The difference is that Office has almost complete market dominance in productivity suite space. Using that dominance in one market to crush competitors in an unrelated market is generally a big no-no. It doesn’t result in better products or better prices, it just allows a company to abuse more customers.

You claim that Slack doesn’t offer enough value to justify its price, then why did people pay for before? Teams is cheaper, sure. But is that because it’s actually cheaper to operate, or is it because Office is a giant cash cow, and Microsoft are subsidising Teams pricing with Office profits?

Teams is quite clearly a separate product to Word or Excel. Both Teams and Office represent entirely distinct products that are fully featured and can be used completely independently of each other without any real loss of functionality. There’s no reason why they should be bundled, Office was perfectly profitable without Teams for many decades. It not even vaguely the same as Excel adding Python support, Facebook adding chat, or Reddit adding image uploads.

> Using that dominance in one market to crush competitors in an unrelated market is generally a big no-no.

Phone lines have always been part of a functional office. Not sure how you can argue that communications (voice, video, screen share) is not part of a modern, WFH enabled office suite.

You know there are people out there with office jobs that need chat tools and not word right? Equally there are plenty of jobs that need word processing tools but not chat tools. Why should people be forced into by both together?

And what does comms and phone lines have to do with Offices market dominance? Are you suggesting that Office should come with a mandatory bundled phone line as well?

Yes, that's why we have laws to promote healthy free-market competition over monopolies.

Are you also in favor of unbundling office chairs from their wheels? After all it's uncompetitive behavior preventing the development of a booming chair wheel industry

Sure, I love standard wheel sizes since it prevents me from having to throw away the chair. I also like the integration in android to share/print/BT transmit with whichever chat app I have installed, though obviously all these apps should be replaced with google talk plus circles for teams.

It's a piece of junk but my employer went for it since we're already using the M358 suite, so there are no extra licenses, no extra contracts, no extra procurements, and no extra costs.

The product performs very poorly because its quality is not a major driver of its sales - many if not most customers select it for the reasons I just mentioned above.

This causes Microsoft's competitors to not be considered at all, losing customers (and here you have the anticompetitive aspect), while Teams lags and underperforms because quality is hardly a metric.

It is a plus to have them integrated, I believe the issue is m$ was basically giving it away for free for anyone who has the office suite. As a CTO faced with reducing spend on SaaS, do you cut slack for essentially a free clone of it? Not a hard call, but that becomes anticompetitive behavior. Similar to the shipping of IE with windows back in the day.

> I believe the issue is m$ was basically giving it away for free for anyone who has the office suite.

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".

Thinking Teams is a clone of Slack suggests neither Office nor Teams is being fully used.

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.

Bundling <new function> with <random product> even for free is not problematic.

Bundling <new function> with <extremely dominant product> is extremely problematic for obvious legal and moral reasons.

If you're serious that seems ridiculous.

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.

Hackernews has higher standards for discussions. Attacking strawmen is not worth either of our time.

Then perhaps you could explain how the comment you're replying to misrepresented your earlier comment that it's in reply to?

Apple is expected to add a new type of lens to the iPhone in a few weeks, which will signficantly improve optical zoom and decrease the utility of many point and shoot cameras. Under your morality, should Tim Cook be thrown in jail for this?

You can't understand leveraging one distribution channel to expand into another market segment could possibly be anti-competitive? Like using Windows to expand into web browsers?

It's a bit confusing to young people, because in this millennium enforcement has been so lax as to be almost nonexistent.

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.

> I don't see anyone prosecuting Google for bundling Chrome with Android

The EU did this: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/MEMO_1...

> pushing Chrome in Search,

I really wish this had happened, but maybe no-one made a complaint?

> prosecuting Microsoft for pushing Edge with Windows.

This will 100% happen, but the wheels move slowly.

I guess I just consider them the same market segment. We don't get upset at car manufacturers when they bundle wheels and tires with their cars.

Last I checked it was pretty hard to use a car without wheels or tires. But some how the world managed to use Office for decades without Teams.

But markets change. Video calling and team-based chatrooms weren't considered necessary in the space before, and now they are. When market demands change, products could change accordingly-- the point of the debate here is it's a little odd to say Microsoft isn't allowed to add new features to their software that the market is asking for.

What? Why does that mean team communication tool must be bundled with office tools?

They’re hardly “just adding features” to existing software. It not like teams is just a “feature” in Word or Excel, it’s entirely separate. Do you think that Office and Teams should be bundled with Windows as well? So your only option is to pay a subscription for windows, and get Office and Teams “for free”?

I think it's anticompetitive because MSTeams is a software of a very low quality, lacking lots of features found in other software for years, yet everybody is using it because... nothing. So how can we encourage competition if the most used software in a field got there not because of its merit, but because of corporate practices?

"I can't understand how people consider bundling teams with office to be anti competitive"

It's a judgment call to be sure. Google has integrated Meet with their office tools, but nobody (AFAIK) has shouted about it being anti-competitive.

Does Microsoft block or make it more difficult to add Zoom info to a meeting in Outlook? It's pretty easy with an add-on to add that info via GMail. If they're adding barriers to integration, that would be strong reason to consider the bundling anti-competitive.

I briefly used Office/Teams when I was at Intel. My recollection was that Teams was really tightly integrated as a Slack/Zoom replacement through the whole suite.

Because Teams is not an alternative client to a messaging platform. It is the platform.

You may realize that they are still allowed to bundle Outlook because it is just an alternative client for E-Mail.

Every business which is in the Office365 ecosystem will never use a competitor to teams, because it is just bundled with Office "for free". There were competitors before teams was a thing, but the regulators realized if Microsoft would go forward with this, an entire Market Segment would just die.

Making an Antitrust Case out of this, not only protects current communication system providers but also opens the market up for more competition.

It's the same story with Google Workplace. If I'm writing the checks, you'd better have a really good rationale for why I should pay for some alternative collaboration component rather than using the (typically well-integrated) one that comes as part of the suite.

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.

> I'm a Microsoft critic on lots of fronts, but I can't understand how people consider bundling teams with office to be anti competitive. Isn't team communication essentially a modern feature of a productivity suite that you'd expect to see included?

No. Team communication can happen just fine without some ridiculous chat program. Many businesses just want office and have other methods of communication, and want to use other chat apps. If teams is included in Office, it will make it harder for other companies to sell their products. People should pay for what they want, and not get a bunch of useless, bloated junk along with it.

> Isn't team communication essentially a modern feature of a productivity suite that you'd expect to see included?

Seems to me a rather circular definition, because I'm not sure anyone except Microsoft has a 'productivity suite'?

Other than Google, but I wouldn't count gmail and a dozen cancelled chat platforms as an IRC/Slack competitor except in the very loosest sense.

> Seems to me a rather circular definition, because I'm not sure anyone except Microsoft has a 'productivity suite'?

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.

It's funny how for many years the push to switch to almost-but-not-quite as good OSS solutions has been the cost savings. Then MS gives Teams away for free and all of a sudden it's "oh those evil monopolists". Would it be any different if Teams was OSS? The client is basically worthless to them. The licensing fee covers hosting costs.

This was the same 20 years ago. Netscape lost the browser wars not because of bundling. Netscape lost because Netscape Navigator 4 was crashy garbage, possibly the worst browser ever made. The reason Firefox was developed was because Netscape was so intolerably bad, an alternative to the alternative needed developed.

You know the old saying, "If you can't beat them, go cry to the European Commission."

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