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Comment by gabeio | Hacker News Reader

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).

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I don't understand how bundling Teams has pushed competitors out of the market. If anything it should make competitors more appealing, as they don't require the bundled MS software?

Everybody needs Office. There really is no practical way around it for businesses

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.

Are we really going to consider the provision of free software to be bad for consumers?

I think the best argument I've heard against this is that it kills innovation. If products win in one category by default because a company already won in a different category then we lack the healthy an competitive environment for innovation to thrive in.

> There really is no practical way around it for businesses

No one I work with uses Office. I work for a business.

Fair.

Let's say most office based businesses with at least a handful of employees do absolutely need Office or Windows.

I'd argue that Office has competition in the form of GSuite, which has collaborative features

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?

I cannot speak about when office (and Windows) would be considerd "small" enough to not fall under these law. For now not even Microsoft makes this argument.

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.

I think it's more a case of "well we already have Teams why do you need Slack?"

I thought the issue was that it comes installed by default. Like the old “Microsoft installed a browser to kill netscape” brawl in America.

Where does that end? Is Paint ok to have installed by default? You can generate images in it now using some sort of credit system, so it’s not totally free. Should Adobe sue?

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.

> Where does that end? Is Paint ok to have installed by default?

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.

Technically paint and notepad and photo viewer are automatically installed from the windows store now on first login.

no, the issue is not with the installation but basically it is about slack (and some other not-used app) complaining that Teams being a part of an office suite prevented slack from competition.

Which is hilarious considering that zoom took off without bundling with anything - while slack STILL is unable to offer a proper video conferencing.

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