Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

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723 pointscbg0786 comments

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover...

That's am understandable perspective but wouldn't this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle?

e.g. selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want to enter the document processing/spreadsheet/etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc.

Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be only allowed to sell subscriptions/licenses for individual apps?

At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.

> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.

Focusing on short term repercussions for consumers has significantly hurt long term consumer interests and there is evidence that it hurt the economy in general. In the decades preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and that extreme power concentration (as we e.g. see today in the IT sector) is hard to reconcile with efficient markets and political freedom.

See [1] for details, here is an excerpt:

> An emerging group of young scholars are inquiring whether we truly benefitted from competition with little antitrust enforcement. The mounting evidence suggests no. New business formation has steadily declined as a share of the economy since the late 1970s. “In 1982, young firms [those five-years old or younger] accounted for about half of all firms, and one-fifth of total employment,” observed Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But by 2013, these figures fell “to about one-third of firms and one-tenth of total employment.” Competition is decreasing in many significant markets, as they become concentrated. Greater profits are falling in the hands of fewer firms. “More than 75% of US industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades,” one recent study found. “Firms in industries with the largest increases in product market concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins, positive abnormal stock returns, and more profitable M&A deals, which suggests that market power is becoming an important source of value.” Since the late 1970s, wealth inequality has grown, and worker mobility has declined. Labor’s share of income in the nonfarm business sector was in the mid-60 percentage points for several decades after WWII, but that too has declined since 2000 to the mid-50s. Despite the higher returns to capital, businesses in markets with rising concentration and less competition are investing relatively less. This investment gap, one study found, is driven by industry leaders who have higher profit margins.

[1] https://archive.is/HEik3#selection-1737.0-1737.346 (original: https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s... )

> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.

On the one hand that's a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both prevents consumers from having choice, and also therefore in the longer term allows the monopolistic company to raise prices without consumers having any option other than to pay more or go without.

So in reality the harming or competitors can be considered the harming of consumers.

> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.

MSTeams hurts users 24/7 around the clock.

The issue is a ton of companies already had Office subscriptions. Versus Teams being an added cost, so its a no brainer to just go "Well why the heck do we need Slack if we are getting Teams at no additional cost?" and now any startup in said space is competing against Office proper, which is a losing battle and a lot of added requirements to get your product off the ground.

If I were Microsoft I'd reconsider bundling Loop, since it's going to disrupt tools like Notion. I mean, why would I bother using Notion, if I can just use Loop? : - )

> wouldn't this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle?

That’s absolutely the basic idea of antitrust.

Using dominance in Market A to get advantage in market B

Is hurting competitors not the same as hurting consumers?

I think the real problem is that MS can cross-subsidize its Office bundles.

I doubt the price covers the costs, especially after they added Teams.

Kill the competition, raise the price. G-MAFIA/FAANG playbook

Last time I checked, they also arbitrarily excluded Firefox, which works fine on other WebRTC platforms such as Google Hangouts or Zoom.

Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem.

Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during simple audiocalls.

I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.

It is (was?) much worse than that. Last time I was forced to attend a Teams meeting roughly a year ago I used Firefox. The UI greeted me with two grayed out toggles informing that neither video nor microphone are usable. Out of morbid curiosity I enabled the responsive tester mode which, amongst other things, allows you to temporarily set the user agent string. I looked up one for Edge, grabbed the first I could find, reloaded the page, and... it worked. Joined the call with full features.

You can not convince me Microsoft isn't an evil company.

It’s up to the admin of each organization to choose if anonymous guests are allowed or not.

Also Safari, for years it wasn't even possible to sign-into Teams (even to chat), let alone calls (all while apps like google meet had no trouble to provide both features).

High resource consumption is an unfortunate side effect of todays trend of making everything a chromium app...

You can't controls screen on teams with Linux, even running Chrome browser or Edge. Drives me crazy.

Teams works in Firefox. However, Firefox on Android is not supported.

I can share a link to guests just fine

Eh Firefox doesn't work fine with at least Google Meet in my experience (which covers both Firefox on macOS aarch64 and Firefox on Linux amd64). It's alright in the beginning, but if Firefox has been open for a while, the out-going audio gets choppy and the recipients don't hear anything. Restarting Firefox fixes it, but this is enough of a problem for me to have Chrome installed on every computer where I may have to do a video call.

Firefox doesn't seem to be intentionally blocked by Teams in my experience (or at least not anymore?), but maybe it should be.

I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".

Because companies were already paying for it. Where I work now moved to Teams and they openly said it's not as good as Zoom, but we need to move because we're already paying for Office and so it doesn't make financial sense to pay for an additional duplicate service.

Anecdotally, Teams has a lot more penetration compared to Lync and co, since it kinda took over Slacks marketshare once that was an established thing to use.

Every entrepreneur wants to assume the counterfactual that but for their startup dying for reason #6354, it would've lived!

Teams was the first tool from Microsoft on this space that was "good enough". The tools you mentioned were mostly for calls and instant messaging, not so strong on collaboration. With Teams Microsoft is really building a collaboration platform. They would like work to take place inside the Teams app.

The difference is that no one was using those. Since companies already pay for office and Teams is bundled, managements are forcing workforce to use it.

> Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

I don't think MS Windows ever shipped with these.

All of those products were actually rather difficult to implement, to the point that they were job creators. It's honestly a case study for saas dominance: some ornery cludgery dying to 'it is a website'

Teams actually has adoption. Those other options didn't, when compared to Teams.

Because it Teams isn’t just a chat app? It includes things like Planner integration?

So, why had Microsoft created Teams, if they were already covered?

It is an unfortunate state of the world is that those can use unethical moves to quickly crush others will live to fight another day. By the time the law catches up, they have made their billions.

Is Microsoft making billions from Teams? I assume they only made it to enhance the value of their office suite/subscription.

It's a bit like saying that that them bundling PowerPoint together with their other apps is unfair towards any startup potentially wanting to enter that market. Which very well might be true but what's so special about Teams? MS and other companies have been bundling apps together since forever...

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? .. a raiding action by a quasi-legal gang can actually kill your business, and all parties involved know it.

Which is why the fines must depend on the company and be much higher, to threaten their own business.

As a product manager myself, it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product. And I mean free as in if you are already paying for a subscription, and it gets added without aditional cost. I have worked at companies that payed for either Google Workspace or Office 365, and they also payed for Slack.

> it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product

The problem you have is that the people making the finance decisions are often far-removed from the ones making value-based decisions.

The ones making the decision from a finance-perspective look at the offering from Microsoft, realise that it does video and chat for free (well, they're paying for O365 anyway) and that's it.

They don't care (or know!) that it's a resource hog, buggy etc. The value from the OP's product would not even be a consideration even if it was 100x "better" (use your own definition of "better" here!)

So I think it's unfair to use that comparison in this case

That’s how monopolies get formed, make it unsustainable for competition to exist, and then jack up prices when they all die.

That lower cost people pay upfront thanks to monopolies, is then drained back with interest, using higher prices, reduction in social mobility (of new founders/startups), reduction in innovation & increase in rent-seeking behaviour.

Breaking up monopolies has been long overdue, it’s a good thing its starting now.

This is a really naive view on monopolies.

I worked in a company that also sold a collab solution and we had technical champions all over the place that 1000% agreed that our product was better than Teams in every single metric, including performance, UX and productivity. Yet they couldn't secure a budget since the higher-ups knew they got Teams for free in their E5 license.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but this seems to more-or-less read as,

"As a product manager myself, I believe that the use of an advantageous market position to strengthen vertical integration is a reasonable practice, so long as the bundle cost of the final product to the consumer remains the same."

The problem with this, and the reason we we anti monopoly laws in general, is that this practice can be self-reinforcing, and allows for the capture of an entire market, extinguishing all competition. This then allows pricing for the good on offer to be set at whatever arbitrary price the monopoly deems reasonable.

My company switched half the development from Gitlab to Github after many years of being happy customers because they bundle Github pricing also with the rest.

I'm not even talking about azure and the anti-competitive shit they do there. Teams is but a drop in the ocean.

Microsoft Teams inclusion did not kill your product.

If a single customer dropped you because he now has Teams for free your product was a failure for that customer anyway and he just suddenly realized you offered him no value.

Just look at https://taskulu.com/ and tell me how Teams even competes with you. Your real competition was Jira and customers dropped you because Jira was a superior product and integration with Teams gave them everything you offered and a chat application separate from project management is an all around better option as there is a single chat for all employees, regardless of them using the project management tools.

Yeah the truth is those project management SAS companies are a dime a dozen, I see ads for at least 3 of them on my daily commute to work.

Failure to innovate kills those companies.

Just look at the latest "innovation" of the OP: a wrapper around SES (5x more expensive!), like thoudand others exist.

In a just world, they will of course have to pay for all the damages ... In a just world I said.

> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late

Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.

> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late

You should be thankful at all this is happening. On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams is still perfectly legal.

I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all.

> On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams

So is bundling office and PowerPoint which killed a massive number of presentation apps before they were even born. How is this particularly different? Should bundling any apps/sofware/services together be illegal? Should that only apply to specific companies?

>I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all.

Gee, I wonder...

The US is too invested (literally) in Big Tech right now, as it gives them a geopolitical advantage. That's why they have not broken up anything for real lately. But this feed-the-giant policy is already, though slowly, starting to crack. Look at how Congress is caught by the balls by Microsoft (“The US government’s dependence on Microsoft poses a serious threat to US national security,” says US senator Ron Wyden. [1]), and yet they cannot do anything about it because they have no alternative; a self-inflicted wound from decades of inaction.

Like the other comment here, it's ironic that it is the EU pulling from the market/capitalism playbook now.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...

What was the product? How did teams bundle kill your growth? Office already bundled Skype and teams was a natural progression for Microsoft in response to slacks and zooms growth in taking Skypes market share. I don’t think Microsoft is innocent in this, but still think it made sense from a business point and from what companies wanted from Microsoft.

What did you project management startup do that dozens of other non-MS companies don't already do?

Pivot maybe? Direct, undifferentiated competition with a giant company is never a good idea.

Your product failed because there’s better products.

I am amazed the EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies. WE should be doing that. This is how capitalism thrives. Break up large companies in different markets. Also break up Amazon and AWS already.

Your idea is flawed. If you split off AWS from Amazon, you have TWO monopolies. That's a useless move. What you need to do is split it down the middle: create Amazon 1 and Amazon 2 each with half the people, hardware, and 100% of the IP.

What monopolies have they broken up? The EU has only issued fines to enforce compliance.

> EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies

Has that ever actually happened? Or do you have any reason to believe it might in the future?

These are not monopolies.

EU should do this the following way:

Too big company must announce what it tries to do, then EU replies:

- You are too big, you glutton. We don't allow this. Slim yourself down, now gtfo.

Can you mention which startup was it?

Obviously not him, but it is trivial to find out. His profile links to his current company, which has his real name, which Google links to https://taskulu.com/ unless he has another startup doing communications.

Basically, users got a good enough product at no additional charge, greatly reduced costs and operational overhead, and you want the government to force users to pay more?

Teams is a pain in the neck! If you make an office calendar appointment for a zoom, Microsoft "helps" you by creating a teams invite in the text of the invitation that gets sent out. So there is always a chance someone you invite will click on the wrong link to be in the meeting. If you ever click on this link yourself teams will install on your system and try in the run in the background every time you boot your computer.

This is just hostile to the consumer. If I want teams I can install it.

Teams on iOS used to chew through batteries like candy. It's supposedly better, but I really should have paid more attention to my battery life when I uninstalled it after leaving my last job.

As of now, I don't notice the battery impact of having it running on my iPhone 14.

This is a convenience feature in Outlook that is enabled only if you have a Teams licence, specifically that when you create a meeting in Outlook, it sets it as an online meeting.

You can turn this off, but last I checked can also set it to stuff like Google Meet, Zoom, WebEx, Facetime, etc if you have the relevant plug-in for Outlook.

> You can turn this off

Why the fuck would I want to do that?

"Oh sorry, I accidentally joined the Teams meeting instead of the Zoom meeting, nobody was there for 15 minutes so I left"

I got sufficiently pissed off that this that I ranted about it: https://blog.dijit.sh/teams-microsoft-monopoly/

It would automatically reactivate that "teams" toggle.

That remembers me a virus that was adding himself to every e-mail sent by outlook. What was its name again ?

For every one of you, there is probably one of me: That loves that feature!

Honestly, Microsoft blurring the lines between meetings and calendar invites was great, in my opinion. I was sad the day they took away some of that functionality (made it a non-default setting). Queue the calendar "meetings" where everyone is scrambling to find a Teams meeting link but it's nowhere to be found because the creator forgot to tick it as a Teams meeting, and everyone only noticed like 1 minute before the meeting starts.

It’s not only Teams. If I send a meeting invite from my gmail with a Zoom link, it gets replaced with a Google Meet link.

I have to Slack a Zoom link to everyone before the meeting every week.

My company uses Gmail and zoom and zoom is integrated into the new event screen. I've never seen a meet link on anything.

I have the opposite problem with my hodgepodge of things, where Zoom links get put in where I want Meet links.

If you want Teams you can install it.

And if Microsoft wants Teams, Microsoft can install it. Perfect logic according to growth-oriented project managers!

The only thing I can think of when reading this is the "damn, you live like this?" meme. I can't imagine using OS that does this to you and not being angry all the time (I'm not tribalistic, Linux has its own set of infuriating problems, but at least it feels like I'm in control).

Many workplaces will restrict your choice of operating system and email client.

The problem is that it's already too late. In my company, we used Teams because it was "free" (they even added a free version that lasted between COVID-19 and 2023), bundled with everything else, and now that we have to pay for Teams alone, we won't consider switching to something else because people are used to Teams. We never considered an alternative, and we will never consider one, and it's just more expensive for us now (which is Microsoft's way of complying with EU's rules, so Microsoft's fault).

Antitrusts are too slow to happen.

Hate to break it to you but even if they broke out pricing and SKU, the MS rep is going to offer Teams a separate product and majority of the time bosses will buy it out of convenience. Why bother evaluating slack/zoom when mail, calendar, files,call recording and transcript are integrated with Teams especially for old school companies

Exactly this, the current top comment decries how their sales were affected by Teams, but there is no moat on video-calling software. Without a unique proposition disruption was bound to come knocking. Apple bundles Team's-like functionality with FaceTime, but it's not being targeted. The EU's position is largely driven from who is successful.

But what is success? Anyone who has a pre-existing relationship with the customer is going to be able to have the opportunity to inform the customer about their new products, brand trust and convenience go a long way in co-selling.

People that make basic apps frequently complain that they have had their app "stolen" when a, typically larger, competitor releases similar functionality. However was it truly their "idea", or were they just an early entrant that squandered their early lead?

The majority of ordinary computing functions of today started out as 3rd party applications, some churn is expected - I don't see it as innovation if we give companies false monopolies on ideas. If Apple can't protect the iPhone paradigm as a unique combination of features, no one should expect to keep possession of simpler or smaller ideas.

In some companies yes, but in other ones when comparing two similarly priced products, the decision will be made based on something else than just a budget.

Currently often the narrative is “we have it included for $0, why would we pay $100 per year per employee for a similar product?”

Not Microsoft’s fault in any way. EU is legally requiring them to charge more. Unless you know a way they could comply with the rules (which state they can’t charge less) without charging more?

By charging the same amount for a bundle of Office + Teams and a lesser amount for Office without Teams.

> because it was "free"

Being "free" wouldn't have had this effects.

It happened because "they already paid for it" (because of paying for office 356) and because it was "already installed" (kinda).

Also it's one vendor less (some companies care about that a lot).

But IMHO the whole office suite pricing is pretty absurd and unlikely to be based on proper working fair marked, likely even if you remove teams from it.

Why don't they apply the laws universally and effectively make this kind of bundling illegal for mega corporations? For endusers, it feels like they are playing with different rules for Microsoft Apple Adobe and Google. Since EU waits until the damage is done and milks them, it barely helps the situation for consumers. For corps they just assume the penalty as cost of doing business.

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"?

Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.

Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.

The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1.

By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s.

If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!

(This is written as a thought exercise)

Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software?

Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup.

This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together?

Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more.

How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?

EU courts ruled that bundling an OS with a machine was ok.

https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...

Word and Excel aren't really that related either. The only reason we think of them as part of an office suite is because they have been bundled for a long time. As far as I can tell most people don't really use both, they mostly using one or the other.

Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

Why is bundling Teams illegal, but bundling Word, Excel and the rest of the office bits totally cool?

It shouldn't be! Forcing big companies to unbundle product pricing would give new entrants to the market a fighting change at success.

Bundling is not illegal as long as the bundling is not forced. When Microsoft got into trouble by bundling Media Player with Windows, the fix was to offer Windows with or and without Media Player (“Windows N”). The bundled offer became legal by also offering the unbundled version.

No Excel or Word competitors left to kill.

Endusers should have a total control over what is getting installed on their machines - just like we used to not so long ago or how some Linux distros allows you to select additional software. Each operating system coming from the biggest corporations should offer two paths: express/recommended setup and a fully customizable one for advanced users.

What if I want to buy a fully integrated, fully bundled install-and-forget OS?

If the EU makes Apple unbundle all the good stuff from macOS I'll finally move to the US.

They cannot do it before damage is done, it would be like charging people with pre-crime. Nobody wants that.

Well the logical conclusion of that is to break up the businesses. No other remedy or it's just going to happen again and again, in subtle and not so subtle ways (bundling Teams for free was so absurdly obviously anti-competitive no one has even doubted that in this thread so far..)

I wonder if they’ll go after iMessage on iOS too.

It's weird how many people misunderstands the intent behind anti-trust laws. In a nutshell, it's about abusing a dominant position in one market (which is ok) to enter and conquer another market by undercutting competition by providing your product in the new market with the existing dominant product at basically no cost to consumer (there are a lot more nuances).

Having non-interoperable features (like charging ports or iMessage green bubbles) has nothing to do with it, and those are ok (at least for anti-trust laws).

They're going after Apple for other reasons. iMessage was deemed too small to go after.

Because it’s expensive and complicated to bring civil suits against organizations with that many lawyers

Maybe a push to eliminate proprietary operating systems and file formats from government-supported processes would be more effective? It could be legislative but it could also mean governments supporting FOSS development more.

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this just seems to me like treating the symptoms instead of the root cause.

It is almost impossible to pitch software to the government unless it also comes with enterprise-scale customer support.

9 out of 10 times I’ve been part of the buy-side, proprietary software has won due to the support. Even more so when the end users aren’t technical people.

If the software doesn’t come with support options from the vendor, you’ll have to look into third-parties for that - which means another entirely own contract, and set of people to involve.

Sure, but with open-source software and a third-party support contract, if you get mad at the support vendor, you can get a contract with someone else without having to change your software stack.

I don't see how tying yourself to a single vendor is advantageous at all.

> It could be legislative but it could also mean governments supporting FOSS development more.

To be explicit, if governments want to use open source software, which seems like a pretty good idea, they of course need to be aware of the fact that lots of it is hobbyist stuff tossed out into the public square with no quality guarantees.

To use open source code, the governments will have to fork and audit the code, and provide customer service for what is now their software. It can be done and it seems like a great way to make this stuff available for the non-technical community, but it isn’t free, of course.

> the governments will have to fork and audit the code

Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.

"More effective" at what?

The state using FOSS is great but that seems quite orthogonal to preventing monopoly abuse by proprietary software vendors. We can do both.

Edit: I think you may be implying that having a variety of choices available would sufficient to prevent monopolies. That's not true as long as you have multiple companies able to cooperate in doing things like bundling, etc.

The problem here is that governments are really bad at building functional and cost-effective software 99% of the time and 99% of FOSS developers are always starved of resources.

I think the EU can & may be doing both.

AFIK, at least a few countries & research entities over there are using FOSS, at least in part, as well as promoting it.

Hypothetically just because a Government is using FOSS to operate does not mean a company can not still break antitrust rules.

Here’s the thing, though: Linux as a desktop is absolute trash and it doesn’t matter if you have been using it as a desktop operating system for 30 years, it’s still absolutely trash for anyone with an idea of what a desktop OS should be.

It is trash in the exact same way that GIMP is trash compared to professional tools.

The quality just isn’t there, and the quality will never be there so long as design decisions are made by anything resembling a democracy.

The open source model works for code. It does not work for design, and open source developers somehow believe they are as good of a designer as they are a developer, and that has never been true for anyone, ever.

Asking that someone be forced to switch to Linux from Windows or Mac is akin to forcing them to use GIMP instead of Photoshop, and if that sounds like a perfectly fine thing to you, you are blind to some very important things. Being blind to those things is fine so long as you’re aware of that blindness.

Most people interact with a computer only via web browser, office suite and maybe a few additional programs (zoom, teams). I think some of my family members almost wouldn't notice the difference if they were to suddenly start using Linux Mint.

Your idea of what a desktop OS should be feels subjective. I'm using Linux as a desktop operating system for 20 years, I've used Windows before, I use Windows sometimes even today (currently only in VMs dedicated to malware analysis and reverse engineering tools), and - to me - Windows is much more annoying. This feels like personal preference and not an objective statement like you did.

It isn’t trash, it just isn’t trying to provide a customer service like relationship for non-technical users. Why would any distro do that? It just seems like a headache, for no benefit.

Modern windows with unmatched UI elements of various generations, horrible DPI scaling and frankly antiquated design elements is starting to look more like Linux than Linux.

Capitalism naturally tends towards the concentration of large firms unless regulated; if anything the regulatory intervention is coming in too late.

I already know how this will be solved: Microsoft will pay a (small) fine and file it under "the cost of doing business" while the damage is already done. Teams is one of the absolutely worst products ever programmed, it's hiliarious how bad it is. It only reached its market share because Microsoft gave it away "for free" with Office 365 or MS 365 or whatever it's called now.

Don’t these “actions”usually include separating the products out the way the EU wants them?aka don’t include Teams in EU installs of MS office or don’t even include office at all? Otherwise a fine is useless.

I use Teams every day for work, I'm not sure why it's considered so bad? It seems user friendly and useful, to me. Non-tech worker (finance).

Ive used Teams for years and its pretty darn good in my opinion. Sure it has its quirks and from time to time fails to work for the entire hemisphere of the planet - but I kinda like that feature!

Teams is no Google meet but definitely better than zoom.

It's a common pattern at several of the big software companies to bundle a lot of freemium stuff with their paid core products that then ends up squeezing independent providers of similar stuff.

I love Github. Before MS bought it I was a CTO at a company where we happily paid for it. Now MS offers it for free. I don't currently pay them anything. We also use Github actions. We don't pay for that either. You get 2000 free build minutes per month. So no need. That's great for us of course. But it's horrible for independent providers of CI services, which I used in the past. How can you compete when big companies like MS just pretend build minutes and hosting the world's software projects costs 0$?

I say pretend here because of course in reality MS spends a lot of money on all that infrastructure needed to do that. But they make their money elsewhere. This is just an anti competitive move to ensure enough customers end up paying them. It's a lock in mechanism. But it's also an anti competitive move. It ensures competitors don't stand a chance. Because how do you compete with free?

Of course the flip side is that a lot of things in software become commodities where the price of something goes to zero quickly after the open source world starts providing free and open source alternatives. Zoom is a great example of a commodity with little intrinsic software value. There's very little in there that you can't replicate with free and OSS components. Most of the real cost relates to infrastructure and networking.

Which of course like Github isn't actually free. So MS is subsidizing the cost of having massive amounts of companies run all their meetings on Teams with money they squeeze out of them elsewhere via unrelated products. That's what the EU called out as anti competitive. Microsoft spends many millions/billions on ensuring people get locked into their free offerings just so they can continue to be valued at trillions because of all the revenue they get from us elsewhere. This is not charity. That's how they became this big.

IMHO Gitlab would have strong case too. They are a European company actually (Dutch originally). So this is a clear cut case of a local competitor being squeezed out of the market by MS spending large amounts of money ensuring there is no market.

Both US and EU blame China of dumping practices, but at the same time Microsoft is doing the exact same thing.

And in time, GitHub will start charging for private repos again, build minutes will be 40 free per month.

Enshittification will follow once they stop getting good training data out of GitHub.

And by then, all competition will have been eliminated. So it goes.

What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences?

If this is anti-competitive, is it anti-competitive for Apple to bundle music features/up-sell into the iOS UI, or provide an interface for headphones that no other manufacturer can integrate with?

Apple still charges extra for the Apple music service, right? Spotify costs $12/month, Apple music costs $11. If that's true then it seems market competition is working decently in that area. If you could launch a competing service and charge $10 you might have a chance.

What Microsoft did was, they said "Hey we have a monopoly on office software. We should have a monopoly on chat too". And they started giving away Teams for "free" i.e. all companies who were paying for an Office subscription were suddenly paying for Teams too with no way to opt out. How is someone going to compete, when most of their potential customers are already forcibly subscribed to a "good enough" competing service.

It was especially egregious here because Teams was such an inferior product so it probably won in no small part due to this tactic.

Something can be seamless AND separate. Just install the “seamless” apps as needed. Seamless and needing to be installed are orthogonal goals. You can have either, both, or neither. It should be the end users choice and a side effect is that competitors can have a chance as well.

> What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences?

The availability of APIs for third-party developers to create a similar competing experience.

> What's the difference between anti-competitive bundling, and developing seamless integrated experiences?

Software is not like glazing on a cake. You can install different pieces of software on the same machine separately and have them work together. It's not like installing them all at once results in a better experience.

While they offer it they don’t hand it to you for free just because you bought their iCloud storage. The issue here seems to be aimed squarely at slack and the like which have been in-theory pushed out of the market by teams. Of course most of us know that’s unfortunate because if they actually used teams for a little they wouldn’t use it even if it was bundled (probably why MS is trying to stick it everywhere).

And how would chat and video calls not now be a standard part of an office suite anyway?

How much the corporation pays for lobbying and if they are, or are not, based in the EU it seems.

They don't just bundle it, they make it auto-start on screen on Windows machines whether you've got an account or not.

It auto-runs all the time.

I've got a work laptop with a teams for the work domain which I want.

There's also a completely different copy of teams, "Microsoft teams (Personal)" teams, which I have to close.

Not just every boot, even after I close it manually, I still find it running constantly.

I've no idea what triggers it, but it doesn't seem to obey any startup settings.

Microsoft could easily avoid a lot of legal hassle and earn a lot of goodwill if they just offered a version of Windows with nothing but the most basic stuff pre-installed. Hell, just go the typical/custom install that a most other programs have during the initial start up, most people will just select the option that installs Office and the other crap anyway. The people that don't want it will never use it and current resent that you attempt to force them.

Teams is a dumpster fire that no one would pay for. But, now that's it's been free and rolled out everywhere, it's a little late for the government to step in.

except this EU ruling has nothing to do with it being bundled with Windows

In Windows you can use the task manager to configure what programs are started with your computer.

Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost.

Client applications should compete on their individual merits, not coast on protocol lock-in.

Would WhatsApp or YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data? (PII etc notwithstanding)

Protocols compete on the merits of the protocol, clients compete on the merits of the client.

I think this will be the reality/obvious a few decades down the line.

Companies can iterate on their products much faster if they're not required to publish all of their functionality as public APIs. Once the APIs have been published, it's much harder for them to be changed.

Doing this also puts them at the mercy of whether or not client applications are willing to support their new functionality. Maybe YouTube wants clients to adopt some feature, but a powerful client application doesn't like that feature and so won't support it.

The protocol/platform lock-in is a problem, but preserving companies' ability to iterate quickly on features is also very important.

> Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats, if a competitor is willing to host the same data at cost.

Well, that's what happened with the "Office Open XML" standard, which has been a catastrophe. Microsoft perfectly handled every country to have their ISO standard pass. Even though it was in violation of ISO requirements, which many countries voiced. Those complaints "somehow" disappeared. The fact that at ISO you're not allowed to divulge who is paid by which company might be related. Or maybe not. Either way, IMO, the conclusion is that you can't delegate democratic functions to a non-democratic organization.

But I wholeheartedly agree with you on the principle. Interoperability brings innovation and competition. Not lock-ins/walled gardens. And interoperability requires standards not ""technical specification"" which is the new slang for oligopoly.

>Would YouTube have as many users if others could build clients for the same data?

Would those YouTube clients offer a subscription service to pay for the data they download, or did you expect Alphabet to cover all the costs?

As much as I think big tech sometimes abuses their power and leverage unfair advantages we shouldn’t stifle innovation by requiring everything to be totally open from the get go. If there’s zero switching costs to go to a competitor then what’s the incentives for companies to spent a lot of money and time building a product? It’d be very risky (especially for small players actually) and they’ll have to do “safe” incremental functionality until they have a larger user base and can afford to invest in R&D because it’s less likely many of their users will leave all at once. It’s the same reason why we have patents for things - to incentivise the investment in R&D. Maybe there could be a threshold for time+revenue+users that trigger the need for openness? Same should be true for social networks and when we can/should set a higher bar for holding them responsible for abuse on their platform I feel.

The problem is open protocols can just as easily be consolidated down to network monopolies at the application layer.

Look at what happened to SMS (Apple's malicious implementation pushing everyone onto propriety networks like WhatsApp). Or email, where Outlook and Gmail have a bulletproof duopoly, leading to decades of stagnation. Outlook still renders emails with the 2006-era Microsoft Word html engine (Gmail is almost as behind on this), hence why email still doesn't support a lot of modern (>10 years old) accessibility features.

Things like ownership over domain names in the email protocol still create monopolies -- since Google owns gmail.com, it's literally like them owning your telephone number/mailbox. If you're like 99.9% of consumers without their own domain name for email, you cannot switch. Gmail owns you.

> Government should just require open communication protocols/file formats

They did, Microsoft made Office support some open XML thing, and what changed?

I would replace government with people: people should collectively demand what you have described.

This ultimately is a function of education, which will get better as technical knowledge becomes more widely and freely available.

As you say, it's only a matter of time before the walled gardens start to crumble.

I've never used Team but Google Docs/Sheets/Presentation has a chat function

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/2494891

Is that required to use an open protocol?

Communication protocols and file formats IMHO.

This is just going to create a perverse incentive to create really fat clients.

I’m curious what materially changed beyond Slack complaining.

Microsoft has long bundled Lync/Skype-for-Business with Office 365. Hell it did that, I’m pretty sure, before Slack even existed.

skype for business didn't really take off as much as team now. Team spread like a cancer like nothing else before.

If you "just want chat" but are required to use Teams at work, you might try pidgin[1] with the MS Teams plugin[2]. The former can be installed via scoop and therefore does not require admin priveleges to install.

This thing still works, and works better than ever, with plugin for modern chat services available.

1: https://www.pidgin.im/

2: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams

I started having a bit of hope, until I read the cons :

> Doesn't support calls, provides direct links to the Teams website

You may want to see the full plugin list as well https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...

If there's something we're missing, please let me know!

The key features of Teams are having your files and calendars in one spot. It's more than just a chat app, which I feel like HN folks miss the mark on.

Yay! Thanks for the shout-out <3

It is a common comment on HN to say Teams is rubbish and also to ask why anyone would use it. Now we have a problem of market dominance, which demonstrates by how far the HN bubble misunderstands how ordinary people do their day to day business. This is the vacuum MS have been consistently winning in for several decades now, it would be worth you understanding it.

Now someone is about to reply that market dominance doesn't mean your app is best. If you think that in this case then you are still missing the lesson. Teams integrates with Windows OS, Azure AD, SharePoint, OneDrive, PowerPoint and Outlook in a way that is so much more useful to ordinary people than anything the other messengers do. Much of that integration is available to any app developer but they choose not to use them so continue to fall behind. Sure there will be some things Slack are not currently getting an API for, but so so much more that they don't use but could, because they don't see why it is important for users.

The only reason our 2000-employee company switched to Teams was because it was cheaper for the decision-makers (who to this day only use email - seriously!) than paying for slack. It was the only reason. The calculus is not based on features, compliance, uptime, experience, or some NPS score. It’s money.

“No one ever got fired for buying IBM” now changed to Microsoft for the 2020s.

It isn't just that Teams integrates well with the Windows world, it's that managers were already paying for 365, and now they're getting this additional app for free. Why pay for this other app you've been paying for previously? Don't discount the pure effectiveness of giving that away.

Anecdotal but pretty much everyone I know that’s not in tech also fucking hates Teams too.

Microsoft win contracts decided by decision makers at the top of large companies.

Companies like Slack win contracts decided by actual users in companies that listen to them.

> Sure there will be some things Slack are not currently getting an API for, but so so much more that they don't use but could, because they don't see why it is important for users.

Right now, Slack is pushing their own "canvas" and "lists" features -- the UI _begs_ you to click on them. Seems like they are testing the waters to become a project management app (with tight chat integration).

> choose not to use them

This is definitely a problem in general for the open-source / Silicon Valley crowd.

In this case however the integrations you describe aren’t possible for a third party.

Microsoft has made it absurdly difficult to extend and integrate with Office, and they regularly use anti-competitive (and anti-consumer!) methods to “push” new products via first-party integration.

A random example: One drive is the default save location in MS Office apps. This can’t be turned off or customised back to local files by end-users. I have to jump through hoops every time I save a file because some product manager at Microsoft has a KPI tied their bonus.

These rulings happen way too late, the damage is already done.

Maybe if Slack offered proper video conferencing tools it would not complain. Should ask Zoom for advice.

It think that one of the issues in this case. Teams rather terrible, but so is everything else.

I worked for a company that used Google Chat internally and we'd use Teams with some clients. People kept telling me how much better Slack is, but now that I work for a company that does have Slack, I can't say that it's any better. In fact I'd probably rank Google Chat highest of those three options.

Microsoft is giving people free replacement that is in some ways better (but with a worse interface). There's no point in NOT using Teams, when it's at least no much worse. In the same way where people are using Google Chat, or whatever it's called now, because they use GSuite / Google Workplace and the integration is really good. Teams just needs to be cheaper than Slack, unless Slack massively overhauls everything.

Or, like, people could just use both. I realize that means running yet another instance of Chrome, but it's 2024. Even Macs can multitask.

Seems a little odd given that they unbundled it in Europe.

that's what this is about, the EU warned MS to unbundle, and they are not impressed with how they have implemented it.

Yes you can buy teams separate from office now, but MS is still clearly abusing their market dominance to force teams upon you (same about onedrive to be fair)

Regulators likely decided it is worth it to create the precedent that they will be strictly examining Microsoft’s future app releases

How so? I installed office on a computer the other day, and I had to jump through hoops to only install Excel (which is the only one I needed). By default it was installed and set to automatically start for all users.

Oh well. I guess it's time for Microsoft to discontinue Teams, destroy any related IP, purge any copies from GitHub/developer workstations/backups, forcibly uninstall it from end-user machines, update Windows to forcibly delete any copies installed in the future, and never, ever, ever under any circumstances try to compete in the chat/video conferencing market ever again. The world will survive, if just barely.

What would I ever do without my software engineering team collaboration tool that can't send a fucking code snippet without burning half the screen on whitespace and a 400px font size title lol

Don’t forget compensation! Microsoft should be forced to pay compensation to anyone who has ever used Teams, scaled in proportion to the number of hours they’ve had to leave it running on their computer.

Or maybe MS could try real competition.

A standalone product the user can buy and install if he wishes to.

You know, like other companies who don't happen to be the OS developer.

The most beautiful words I've read today.

Can everyone please use Mattermost, Slack, or Matrix chat?

Or just not install it on new windows versions? I mean it’s easy enough to leave old versions intact if they already exist and make IT install teams/office if they’re actually being used.

Why are the tying laws not enforced in the US, or Canada, or the many other jurisdictions where it's illegal for a monopoly to tie products together; and why does it not apply to the tying of Word and Excel or other apps in the Office suite that use to be sold independently and complete with independent products (Lotus 123, Wordperfect)

>Why are the tying laws not enforced in the US, or Canada

Regulatory capture and legalized corruption aka "lobbying".

When a company’s initial interview is on Teams I see it as a bad sign. If a company forces you to use Windows for your dev machine it’s a red flag.

If a company forces you to use a Citrix instance for your dev machine honestly run away screaming and take your sanity with you.

I've had a few interviews that use Teams, but I've always just used the browser version, and it worked fine on a Mac and Linux last time I tried it.

But the basic digital regulations are still missing:

Enforcement of noscript/basic (x)html interop (no massive and grotesquely complex big tech web engines required), minimal file formats (for instance utf8 text), png for images (I have suspicions of unstable complexity with webp).

This is not perfect, and sometimes there is kind of nothing: printing oriented file formats is an issue: pdf/ps. PDF was kind of highjacked at ISO by msft putting complexity at its core, even "programming complexity" there.

I wonder how complex are PS/PDF(max 1.4 I guess), because you know big tech wants the possibility to code a _real-life_ alternative to be a nightmare.

It feels like regulators are trying to solve the problem at the wrong end. Whenever you hear about an antitrust ruling, it's "bundling". IE was the same, now this.

In my opinion, the problem is when a company is happy to eat the losses for a while, in hopes of killing competition and then raising the price when they are alone in the market. Clouds, ride hailing apps... It's fine to price your product at "zero", as long as you hold that price after you become a monopoly.

The problem for regulators is they can't force a price, nor judge on all the externalities that are included in it.

I don't understand how Microsoft gets under fire so easily, but Google bundles everything in Android, and you can't even uninstall most of them (maps, gmail etc.). Same with iphones. This is regulatory tipping the balance.

Google absolutely has come under fire for it and has to now show browser choice dialogs just like Microsoft in EU.

Google was just forced to introduce mandatory choice screens for browser, and search engines on android.

The DMA also forces them to make all of these apps uninstallable.

There’s android phones sold without any Google Apps, read up on LineageOS.

Also both Apple and Android have come under fire about this stuff.

You may have missed it, but Apple is definitely bumping heads with the EU right now.

And what do you mean you can't uninstall google maps and gmail? Are you using a Pixel?

Microsoft has an effective monopoly on business PCs. That may have something to do with it.

Here's what I don't get. Almost everyone I talk to hates Teams. But they use it anyways. Nothing is stopping them from using Zoom or Google Meet, or some other alternative. Yes, these other alternatives have their own problems and tradeoffs. But Teams is just substantially worse than these alternatives. I'll take a Google Meet meeting any day over Teams crap.

Nothing is forcing people to use Teams, but they do. It can't solely be cause it's just bundled and free. People don't want to spend any effort to do better? Is the friction that high?

The elephant in the room here is companies who "do their chat and collaboration" on Teams. If you work in an organization with 10,000 people using Teams, no one is going to join your Google Meet meeting - if you're even allowed to create one.

As someone who uses Teams all day for work, I have to say since they created the "New Teams", the performance is a lot better and especially if you also use OneDrive, Outlook etc. it is a very streamlined and handy tool.

> Here's what I don't get. Almost everyone I talk to hates Teams. But they use it anyways. Nothing is stopping them from using Zoom or Google Meet, or some other alternative.

Maybe in startups and small companies without a dedicated IT team, but an enterprise IT group will absolutely stop you. And Teams is very easy for them to administrate if they are already deploying MS products.

I must be in the minority. In the early days Teams had some pitfalls but for the most part, it's rather great. I don't understand what all the fuss is.

I regularly use both Teams and Google meet and don't find any significant differences that matter... so at the end of the day, use the one that is bundled with the rest of your software instead of having a different dependency.

They should get rid of Edge and a few other stuffs too. Is there a tool to conveniently remove any feature I do not want? Googled around and looks like Powershell is my only reliable option -- and still I cannot remove Edge.

"Debloater" is the term you probably want to search for.

Google did this with Meet. Bundled, over-ride zoom invite with Meet and other stuff that seems very similar to these MS moves. Wonder how/why they don't get similar treatment.

Did they prevent OEMs from tampering with the system install image by adding apps that compete with Teams or from removing Teams?

Are they fascistly on notice for market cap, not antitrust offense?

Is the remedy that EU dominates MS until their market share is acceptable, or did MS prevent others from installing competing apps on the OS they and others distribute?

In the US, no bundling applies to ski resorts working in concert with other ski resorts. Materially, did MS prevent OEMs or users from installing competing apps?

If Teams and Outlook become clunkier because of the EU, that will be a really irritating problem...

I don’t think it’s possible for them to be even clunkier. The only next step is they just stop working at all.

Maybe they should address the free cloud credits next, which are a great way to lock you in and kill competition. Just like the bundling of Teams, they might be good for (business) customers in the short term, but will only lead to future monopolies.

The EU step is complete. Now get all your co-workers and random people in your company to stop scheduling stuff in Teams (better yet, just stop having meetings - a day of them gets mind-numbing, having them practically every day is painful.)

For the cost of zoom, i get teams, office and a boat load of cloud storage. The software is crap, but the deal is hard to beat. Kind of weird how MS keeps undermining their product offering with their stupid shannanigans.

I never understood how Microsoft giving you software you are not forced to use is bad, but apple limiting which software you can run on your device is not.

From anti user perspective MS does a lot worse than adding teams - mandatory online accounts to begin with.

> apple limiting which software you can run on your device is not

If you are talking about iOS and the app store, that is another ongoing battle between the European Commission and Apple. It has been reported here on HN a number of times recently.

> how Microsoft giving you software you are not forced to use is bad

This does not represent the actual reality where MS crams their products down users’ orifices - like so many other companies do too.

> but apple limiting which software you can run on your device is not

This is also bad. Users deserve the respect and right to have general purpose computing platforms be open.

Edit: whitespace

> mandatory online accounts

It's not mandatory - there's a simple 11-step sequence of hacks that if executed correctly will let you create an offline user /s.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...

You'd expect them to have learnt the lesson with Internet Explorer but, as someone said, there is no way a man will understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it!

Modern productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are something very different than just invading another market and killing the market leader there. The Teams use case as shown a high degree of integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 platform which was not comparable to IE.

What lesson though? A slap on the wrist?

They probably did learn their lesson -- even if we get fined we'll still profit so we will still do what we want.

Fine the C-suite n years of total income (including unrealised income).

The Internet Explorer lawsuit was also 20 years ago

I would like to see US regulators bring the hammer down on “platform” tech companies who leverage their power in one market, such as operating systems, to gain massive, unearned competitive advantage in unrelated markets.

Office is bad enough. One reason we’re stuck with the very bad Excel (gives wrong answers) is that you got Office because you want to use less offensive products like Word and Powerpoint so you already bought Excel.

Literally everything from Microsoft is bundled in some anti competitive way. Edge and Windows. Teams and Office. Excel and Word. GitHub and VS. One Drive and Windows. All of it must be forced to split up and operate as separate companies. It is the ONLY way to not distort the market. Additionally, fines must be enacted RETROACTIVELY, along with jail time for executives. Enough is enough.

This. At the least, Office et al should be spun off. The US has lost the will to split up anticompetitive companies.

Very similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40787842 on the front page today.

Good. In our small company of two dozen people we use Teams only because of external clients. Otherwise we do away with Google Workspace and self-hosted stuff like GitLab.

so "I hate teams but I use another bundled thing" lol

I hate on Microsoft every chance I get, but how is this situation different than Google bundling Meet on Android? Should Google be worried?

I have been on android for 10+ years and never has Meet gotten in my way or even launched itself.

It's totally uncomparable. Also google is not actively pushing it's customers to use it to kill their competitors

The issue is not that "Microsoft bundled Teams" but rather that Microsoft came to companies like mine at the time and essentially said "We are deprecating Skype and we are offering this resource-hungry, bug-ridden program called Teams as only replacement. You don't have to use it, but we'll bill you for it anyway".

They knew full well that the average IT department would not approve paying for a second tool and offered no "discount" if you didn't want to use it. It was take it or take it.

My only complaint is that this didn't happen sooner, but I'll cut them some slack for not taking swift action during the notably-unremarkable year 2020.

I don't think Meet is bundled with Android by Google, it's not there if you use LineageOS. It's probably an individual choice by phone makers (although maybe not a completely free choice).

I do agree it shouldn't be bundled of course. But even Chrome isn't bundled for example, so I don't think Google is actually pushing many apps.

I don't think Meet is bundled with Android. My pixel didn't come with it. It is bundled with some chromebooks.

I’m afraid this won’t convince my enterprise that now they do not have to scrap that annoying Slack line item.

More importantly, could the EU get Microsoft to actually fix Teams so that it isn't a giant pile of shit.

IMO, Teams is a logical extension of the Office tool suite and had every right to be bundled. I suspect there is a whole bevvy of bureaucrats in the EU whos sole job has been to bring anti trust legislation against Microsoft for the last 30 years - somehow funding itself, not preventing a Monopoly, and failing to create a more competitive marketplace.

This was confusing to read. Are you pro-monopoly? That's the only way I can read this...

And I guess the next one will be OpenAI trash (aka Bing chat enterprise or something) bundled in O365

The Copilot meeting summary features in Teams are actually pretty good. It's far more likely that someone will quickly skim the meeting summary than sit through an hour long meeting recording. Costs extra, though.

Ask forgiveness.

Did Microsoft already wipe out Slack during these four years of bundling since the complaint of 2020?

Effectively yes. They sold to Salesforce for $30B, but they easily could have won the market if not for this move on Microsoft’s part.

hopefully this time, the DOJ is not merciful and breaks Microsoft into 3-4 different entities.

Why is it okay for Office to include Word, Excel, or PowerPoint but not a chat application? Does the EU get to decide what is reasonably considered part of a productivity suite? Or is the only requirement that a competitor complains?

This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it.

A friend told me about how his workplace have switched from Zoom to Teams for video calls because they use Office and Teams is now bundled with Office so they don't have to pay extra for Zoom.

> This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it.

It's not bundling itself that's the issue. The use of one market to encroach on another is what's considered unfair competition. The fact that a competitor exists that just does one part of it is what makes the case that the two markets are separate.

Don’t know what’s hard to understand there? Microsoft didn’t have a chat product (worth anything, Skype was a mountain of crap). Slack comes along and builds a great product, Microsoft goes “oh, the office suite now includes teams!” So everyone gets it “for free” if they have the office suite, murdering slack in the market. And of cause everyone will have to pay for Teams as the price of the office package rises to I cover the costs, no free lunch and all that.

It had been a different story if Teams had always been a part of office, and slack came along and tried to compete. But come on this is a 100% clear cut abuse of a monopoly on windows office programs by Microsoft abused to outcompete a competitor that they couldn’t fight honestly.

Law is not working like that. We are talking about antitrust laws which have specific criterias to evaluate if a company is dominant on a market and is abusing this position or not. All these criterias must be evaluated for each case.

There are many steps involved: - identifying the relevant markets, probably something like office applications market and chat applications market. - whether the company has a dominant position on one (likely MS being dominant on the office apps market) - checking if a specific action could be considered as a abuse of dominant position, restricting the competition. Here it would be MS bundling the app, giving them an unfair advantage on the chat apps market.

They would likely be to assess the real damages to the market, whether or not competitors were able to do business or not, etc.

It's not all black or white, like any legal subject.

Teams is deeply integrated with Office (including OneDrive for file storage/sharing, Outlook for meetings), more than any other Chat App... I guess it's a good thing in general but it's also an unfair competitive advantage (using "priviledged API" I think)

Legality is not science, most of the time, the definition of what's wrong is blurry and humans have to debate about it.

Wait, so then is it ALSO illegal to tie FaceTime to iOS?

And whatever the Google thing is called with Gmail?

No shit. The only real surprise is that it took years for gov officials to recognize this. On the other hand, Teams is the worst thing that could have happened to work communication efficiency.

Needed Word on Mac – you can’t imagine how surprised I was to see Skype starting too.

Google’s inability to create a chat app allowed them to dodge this bullet.

Official EU commission release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

If the EU is working on a time machine, Lotus Notes might be their next target!

Mcdonalds breached antitrust by bundling fries and coke.

now get them for the local account thing, onedrive integration, privacy and all the other shit.

Just wait till they find out about how the enterprise deals work. Free windows licenses with Office 365, with retroactive blowup clauses that charge the back-dated windows licensing fees if you ever stop using Office 365

To me these type of cases has always been BS, especially since not every company gets the same treatment. Next, they should ask Tesla to give its customers the choice of the autopilot software its car runs...

The zombie corpse of slack welcomes this ruling

Awesome, now do Adobe and Autodesk next. How is Creative Cloud not an anti-competitive bundle under the same description? Why do we ignore the particularly egregious exploiters of customers? Should Apple computers not have messenger built in? Should Google Workspace remove Meet? What are the actual rules because they seem to just apply to whomever the EU wants to shake down any given year.

I thought this was going to be about bundling Teams in O365 and other biz deals.

It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack.

Sadly I know of many, many more companies where the offer is indeed too good to refuse, much to the disappointment of their workforce.

I was helping out at a place where two employees needed Word and Excel licenses, and somehow they got a massive, free Teams license out of it.

it's because teams is not really free

It's free per user, but it's quite expensive if you start adding meeting rooms, voip, webinar, ...

Zoom+slack are literally cheaper in total, but the startup cost is very visible and teams startup cost is 0.

> It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack.

I don't agree.

For many years now I use Linux. I pay for Slack because some of my clients use it and it is convenient. For some other clients I need to use Teams.

I like Teams better. I never had issues with them. Slack I reinstall every 2-3 months because it breaks in some weird way; last time yesterday when I uploaded a 'big file' (csv of a few mb), not only did it crash but restarting it didn't help. Teams work good for chating, for the calendar, and for video calls. I have a lot better experience with Teams for video calls than Google Meet.

Adjacent point, but I recently bought a Windows laptop (after 10 years on Mac). I've been blown away by the sheer amount of advertising & upsells at OS level. Some of it you can turn off, but others you can't seem to (for me at least). I don't ever remember Windows feeling like you're borrowing it from MS.

Seriously. I thought Mac was getting bad but upgraded to win 11 on my gaming pc. How is that acceptable for business environments? One wrong click and you’ve got a new subscription it seems.

> feeling like you're borrowing it from MS.

Thank you!!

That describes the feeling i've had with so much software in recent years, i just wasn't sure how to say until reading it from you.

My standard suggestion is to use Windows Server - which has none of that bloatware and advertising. The free OS you get from a vendor is free for a reason.

I left windows for Linux back in the middle of the XP days. I came back to this for contracting work and setting up a shared VR gaming computer in the living room. The absolute shit level of treatment windows users tolerate is mindboggling.

On the corporate laptops I am lent the advertising is generally minimal, but non-zero, and that surprised me. If I search I don't want whatever you are selling I want files on this computer or maybe documents on the corporate network. That struck me as inappropriate, but the constant bombard of noise on the personal computer is outrageous. Ads in the start menu, news going to sites with ads, popups, and that is before software, steam has its own too, but at least it moderates to one ad each launch.

Installing Gentoo is easier than avoiding ads on windows.

EU keeps on delivering today!

Defaults and bundling are inherently unfair.

Chrome shouldn't be bundled with Android. Google search shouldn't be the default. Google Wallet / Google Pay shouldn't be the default.

Same for Apple and Microsoft.

Apple Cash shouldn't be the default in Messages, ... the list goes on and on.

Platform providers can easily attack businesses outside of their core business by setting defaults. They use these synergies to wield unfair power over hundreds of markets.

Don't even get me started on how you now have to pay to protect your brand name in search across these platforms. The fact that you might appear fourth in search for your own brand name in the App Store or on Google is absurd.

This isn't going to stop anything. It is just going to result in bribes to the countries and some small to Microsoft fine.

More countries should exit

Exit what?

The EU exists to subsidise EU businesses by taxing (fining) American ones.

Why is it okay to sell a bundle that has spreadsheets and emails but not messaging and conferencing?

I believe the general category of antitrust is "tying agreements" where you tie a weaker market share product to a stronger one.

Also, I'm not arguing why it's okay, just that it's a normal part of antitrust law and not specific to the EU. The US FTC has an example on this page: https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

How do EU fines subsidise EU businesses?

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/index/fines_en :

> Fines imposed on undertakings found in breach of EU antitrust rules are paid into the general EU budget. This money is not earmarked for particular expenses, but Member States' contributions to the EU budget for the following year are reduced accordingly. The fines therefore help to finance the EU and reduce the burden for taxpayers.

Nobody would use Teams over Slack (especially from 2019-2022) if it wasn't part of O365.

My company switched us off of it and it sucked. But it was included in our E5 licenses :)

Hate teams! I have heard many friends quit companies as they could not stand using teams after companies abandoned slack to jump on the free teams bandwagon. They had to hire Microsoft experts to manage the IT infrastructure which was just auto-managed before Microsoft sold them the stack.

I have heard many friends quit companies as they could not stand using teams

I could believe that one might have a friend that is privileged enough (and petty enough) to quit over such trivialities. But “many”? Color me…skeptical.

Writing the messages on sandpaper and transporting them via my back passage would be more pleasant than using teams.

What market are they monopolizing by having Teams auto start?

Collaboration tooling. It's particularly egregious as - particularly once you get past 250 members of staff - it's a plainly inferior product.

https://www.statista.com/chart/20028/daily-active-users-of-s...

Where do they allege monopoly?

You could make this argument about any bundling.

All of the 365 products as well as similar from Adobe etc have been bundled in ways to lock out competition. Even Spotify is planning to.

At some point EU needs to bring clarity to their competition laws and decide what they want the landscape to look like. Because right now they are just making up the rules as they go.

What do you mean by "making up the rules as they go"? Microsoft was found in breach of the Article 102 of the Treaty on the functioning of european union, which was last modified in 2007, and the article it infringed on abuse of dominant position was ratified in 2003. Furthermore, two other companies (one of which is american) complained to the european commission about Teams and only then an investigation was started

I will be the last person to ever say Adobe is above criticism, but until Adobe creates an entire AdobeOS, I’m not sure they’re in the same league as MS here

It's legal to bundle products. It's not legal to use a monopoly in one area to leverage your way into another market.

Bundling is illegal in the EU if it used to abuse a dominant market position in one market to gain a competitive advantage in another.

So what Adobe does, or what Spotify wants to do by bundling their own products within the same market, is far from the level of bundling Teams with Office, which is bundling across markets and where Office is extremely dominant.

I don't think the EU is just making up the rules here, there are rules and this case is far more egregious and more clearly in violation than the examples you gave.

Perhaps, but Adobe and Spotify aren't offering a operating system where this crap is bundled. Neither do those examples have a 72% market share of PCs.

Microsoft basically gave Teams away to corporate customers. Now, couple this fact with how many manufactures include a pre-installed copy Office 365 on consumer devices, add in this automatically included Teams since 2019, and you have a nasty combination. Bonus: Microsoft gets to inflate its numbers on adoption.

Finally, Adobe Creative Cloud has roughly 30 million subscribers. Spotify has about 213 million subscribers. Windows, in general, has about 1.3 billion users.

Soon the EU will charge parents for giving their children undue advantages as well.

In all seriousness - giving yourself an advantage is obviously what all companies want to do.

Why doesn’t the EU just, for each company, say exactly what they want? I honestly don’t understand the EU - they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?

Seems like an exercise in mediocrity. I guess par for the course given all of the EUs top companies were all started last century. Clearly out of touch.

Edit: wow the top 15 EU companies by revenue are utilities or auto.

So what's the alternative you're proposing? That we let companies abuse their position and do whatever they want?

> they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?

Let's imagine the answer to this question is yes. Let's assume the EU doesn't want any company to do anything to have an advantage and that they believe a company should gain or lose market only based on the quality of their output. Would that be a bad thing?

> they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?

You could just have a better product

It's quite the simple thought experiment, if teams is a better product than the alternatives no harm will come of it from being unbundled from unrelated products

If on the other hand its usage will fall then that means that there were better (for some users) products whose creators were being harmed not because of any fault of their product but because their product wasn't owned by an established company which could exploit its own position

> Soon the EU will charge parents for giving their children undue advantages as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

> In the year 2081, the Constitution dictates that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, earpiece radios for the intelligent that broadcast loud noises meant to disrupt thoughts, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.

https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...

Teams is "an exercise in mediocrity".

The problem is that big companies are distorting competition simply due to their size. Smaller companies cannot compete. Startups are mostly doomed. How can they compete when a bigger player can copy their innovation, bundle it, or sell it at a loss, or for free? You can’t afford to sue them. You may note ven prevail given their ownership of numerous patents. There is no fair competition if these companies are not broken up. Or in the least, they need to be taxed differently.

All EU countries indeed have systems in place to limit undue advantages that any child can have (it's called a public education system and social security and later in life just "the law").

As for anti-trust issues, you clearly don't understand them.

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