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?
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.
It’s an action started by Teams competitors. They have no interest in chasing YouTube. OTOH, the EC is definitely chasing more than one company, it’s all over the news. Google is scrutinised regularly.
What is actually happening is that the American government is dysfunctional and can’t be arsed to do its job.
For me the US has largely got it right and EU wrong. You can see this in the number of EU based tech giants. Would the EU be bringing these laws if Apple / google were European?
Not only the customer will pay the price 10 fold down the line, the entire industry/ecosystem will suffer after Microsoft effectively kill every alternative product.
They're not doing the customers a favor. It's a business 101 tactic to dominate the market. In the end, the customer will be abused and strangled with no other option to turn to.
The availability of APIs for third-party developers to create a similar competing experience.
Do you draw the line at APIs? Should Apple be forced to sell H1 chips and let other headphone makers create the same experience as AirPods?
Teams is integrated into M365 and taking Outlook as an example you can register another calling/status app just like others do so your online status and calling functionality is not Teams (used to be Skype).
It's not even just an icon either, its similar to OneDrive where removing it is non-trivial.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Intune/comments/10whv8c/hows_everyo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/q4elim/can_we_ta...
When will Slack get this same level of access? They won't ever.
Strictly speaking, the ability for a third-party application to leverage Teams' features without bundling with the OS like Teams.
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.
I just don’t get the EU’s overzealous regulations. Who is being hurt by Teams? Slack/Discord/Zoom? I doubt any major companies are using Teams just because it’s installed. They may be using it because it’s part of the Office Suite, but shouldn’t they be allowed to bundle that? Should Adobe not be able to bundle everything in Creative Cloud? It just seems so arbitrary.
These are questions for the democratically controlled regulatory process to decide, which is what's happening with Teams.
If you feel that Paint should be considered a harmful bundling practise under current laws, you can organise and push for that investigation to happen.
Will it be difficult? Yes. These institutions are slow moving as society is vast and complex. Is it worth it? Yes. Democratic institutions and regulations are the best way we've discovered to conduct human affairs at scale.
Which is hilarious considering that zoom took off without bundling with anything - while slack STILL is unable to offer a proper video conferencing.
Now companies get a "free" (initially) software in addition to what they actually want.
Microsoft can only afford that because they already get Money from their Monopoly product and can finance it that way without the customers having the ability to object (because Office has a market domineering position).
Business chat competitors can not compete against that because no matter how good their product, they cannot force companies to buy it as Microsoft can.
Result: Teams wins because Office won.
That is what they EU is having issues with.
No one I work with uses Office. I work for a business.
Let's say most office based businesses with at least a handful of employees do absolutely need Office or Windows.
So how much market share does Office have to lose to GSuite before Microsoft can implement features that their competitor has?
Put another way, does a dominant market player have to stagnate in order to avoid breaking antitrust law, rather than anticipating the needs of their customers to make their product more useful?
As far as I know they can innovate on the actual product as much as they want.
Teams itself may be the best software product ever. The issue lies in Microsoft using it's ownership of Office and Windows to "force"/"sell" it to customers.
The details of what that means exactly will be decided by a court.