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Comment by farhadhf | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

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.

However, this is an interesting problem. By nature of competition, every customer a competitor takes is a customer missed. So when is competition anti-competive?

In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?

> In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?

Well, they should at very least make Teams interoperable like every other goddamn service should be - or be forced to do so.

Market concentration is really the underlying problem. Microsoft should never have been allowed to buy GitHub. Microsoft Windows should have long been split into a separate company to Microsoft Office etc. If there wasn't this one gigantic business, then whichever smaller business made Teams would have a much more equal footing with other competitors, as they would not be at an unfair advantage for integration into other currently-Microsoft-owned products as well as the aggressive bundling Microsoft does with Teams.

The number of anti-Microsoft people that still use Github is astounding to me, and then just blame Microsoft for buying it.

At some point, if people want an alternative to Github, perhaps it starts with people not using Github and switching to alternatives.

Honestly, it would seem people like market concentration. I don't think people like having to use multiple repository management websites. However, I do wish it was centralization in experience over a federated system, rather than what we have noe. e.g. a "source control browser" that normalizes github, bitbucket, sourceforce, sourcehut, etc. into a single seamless interface.

But even that doesn't seem to be high on anyone's list.

Network effect. Especially for open source. The thinking is basically that GitHub is where developers find your project so if you don’t use GitHub you won’t find developers.

I think this ignores just how much better GitHub is compared to its competitors — at least from my experience of using bitbucket at work. GitHub rightfully should have more market share.

> "The number of anti-Microsoft people that still use Github is astounding to me, and then just blame Microsoft for buying it."

Voting with your wallet (or with your attention & time for free things) makes sense if there's an alternative you can choose that's as good as the one from the company you dislike, or if you consider the impact on you of any deficits in the alternative to be less important than sending a message by voting with your wallet/time.

But it's completely understandable, and very common, for people to be in a situation that while they want to boycott a company/product because of how they act in some way (from software UI decisions to using child labour in sweatshops to...) but are faced with the choice between using/buying one of their products or suffering from what they consider to be a significantly worse and/or more expensive product.

And if you wish that one or both of Microsoft selling / giving away Github, or MS changing how they run Github, would happen, then why not publicly express blame in the hope that enough similar complaints build pressure, regardless of whether you're avoiding it or feeling you need to use it?

(Personally I don't feel I use Github enough to be a useful voice on how MS have handled it since the acquisition, but I feel like many people have expressed being pleasantly surprised that they've broadly let Github be Github, at least compared to worst-case fears of how much they might try to make it more Microsofty.)

> The number of anti-Microsoft people that still use Github is astounding to me

This is silly, they will just buy up all the competition, what choose will you have

I'm not sure that's so obvious these days at least. The era of tech mega corps just being able to buy up all the competition seems to be mostly over(ish) for now (.e.g Figma, ARM, Broadcom/Qualcomm, Visa/Plaid)

Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams. That's actively harming customers, because they didn't get the choice to pay less and only buy what they wanted (which is just Office).

Once customers bought Office+Teams the cost of using Teams is 0, because they paid for it. How can competitors make a cheaper product then? You can't get cheaper than that! Even if someone wanted to use your product they most likely would still have to pay for Teams by buying Office.

> Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams

True, but that also applies to every other single app and service that they are bundling with the subscription. I only want Excel but I'm also forced to pay for PowerPoint. And how deep should we go? Should they be forced to turn Edge into a paid product you have to buy separately? They crippled if not outright killed the consumer anti-virus industry by starting to bundle Windows Defender/(whatever it's called)? That certainly wasn't fair to McAfee/Norton/Kaspersky/(any other shovel ware provider) but did it hurt consumers? One might argue this would also apply to [File] Explorer and every other basic app.

How is the situation with Teams at all different and where exactly do we draw the line?

When it's a separate application I think the line has already been drawn.

I don't think you should have to turn Edge into a paid product similar to how I don't think grocery stores should be forced to charge you if you use a shopping cart. If Microsoft wants to include Windows Defender for free but if they're increasing the cost of a Windows License to accommodate that development effort then it's not ok.

Microsoft can offer you a volume discount for buying say Excel + Word + X but bundling is anti-competitve (see every complaint about TV bundles ever).

But bundling exists everywhere. Why is Microsoft the only offender?

Like you pointed out with cable, if I want just Disney Kids on cable, I need to buy all of Disney's channels, including ABC, etc. This is because that's how the cable provider has to buy it from the networks.

Why aren't they being told they have to unbundled channels from each other? I can't pay per view sports games - they offer subscriptions that bundle the entire season. The NFL is the worst on this. Why can't I just pay a few bucks to watch one game?

It seems like if bundling Teams with Office is that big of a deal, then customers should stop using Office, and use a competitor, just like I avoid cable.

> Why can't I just pay a few bucks to watch one game?

You could argue that preventing this is a positive bundling. e.g. the Cup final game doesn't exist without the first round games and quarter-finals, and the other league matches that you don't want to pay for. They need to be subsidised or the whole thing might not work or won't be as good.

But "you can't buy x without y" where x and y are in different markets is (ahem) a different ballgame.

> But bundling exists everywhere. Why is Microsoft the only offender?

You can't regulate every offender at the exact same time. Who you go after and when is always a political decision. This is basically the claim everybody was making when Android was in anti-trust trouble and everybody was like "How can you go after Android when Apple has a walled garden" and now Apple is in a hot seat.

Look how long it took for TicketMaster/LiveNation to get into the hot seat. Yes, it's not really fair that people get to cause problems for so long before being punished but that's life and it doesn't mean you should give people a free pass since you can't go after them all at once.

> Why aren't they being told they have to unbundled channels from each other? I can't pay per view sports games - they offer subscriptions that bundle the entire season. The NFL is the worst on this. Why can't I just pay a few bucks to watch one game?

I wouldn't argue that Panthers v Patriots is a different application than Broncos v Buccaneers.

Although I think I was fairly clear in my other post that I think the cable bundling is anti-competitive.

> Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless,

Hard to see how.

MS could devote resources to making MS Teams more useful, but they don't have to, so they don't.

It's not competing with Slack on features and usability or fun. It's competing with Slack on "you get a chat app and hey, it's free (with office)" and that makes the board happy.

I dont disagree with that. Honestly, I think chat should just go away in favor of emails and meetings (and meeting minutes). I've had too much business knowledge disappear into the Slack or Teams void that I can never get back.

> In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem?

If Microsoft start providing kickbacks and bribes to CTOs for choosing Microsoft, many competitors won’t be able to keep up. Is that Microsoft’s problem?

No, it’s our problem. We get to decide what they are allowed to do, whats fair and what isn’t.

Is hurting competitors not the same as hurting consumers?

Companies intentionally trying not to hurt their competitors can't really be described as anything else than a cartel (even if it's not explicit) that's almost invariably horrible for consumers (.e.g. telecom companies, banks, etc. in many countries).

Ideally you always want to see companies trying to run their competitors out of business by undercutting them and offering better products at lower prices. The issue when the playing field isn't level e.g. what MS is doing here is basically predatory pricing. But even then it's not exactly clear cut, e.g. did Uber running out many taxi companies out of business (or destroying their profit margins) was a net-negative or a net positive to consumers?

Net negative. Long term it's gonna be net negative due to lower competition, as now there are usually only 2 players in town. Inevitably they are going to raide prices for customers and reduce earnings for drivers

> Net negative

Compared to taxis? Well I guess it depends on where you live, but I wouldn't' generally agree.

It's also a highly commoditized market with little real barriers to entry (at least on the local level) and drivers/users can pretty much instantly switch to a different app so I think it will be reasonable hard for Uber/etc. to do that without someone undercutting them.

> due to lower competition

Still better than no competition and prices being set by a legal cartel (i.e. how taxis worked/work in many places)

> 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... )

> 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)

Yet Bell wasn't broken up until 1982 so I'm not sure if it was a such a turning point. IMHO allowing AT&T's monopoly to exist for that long was much more detrimental to consumers than whatever MS, Apple and other tech companies are doing these days.

But yeah I certainly overall agree that competition has generally been the driving force behind most of human progress and economic growth at least over the last few hundred years. It's just not entirely clear what measures should governments use to maximize the competitiveness of markets without introducing inefficiencies and costs that slow down economic growth and technological progress (while not providing that many benefits to consumers either).

I fully believe we lost more than we gained from the breakup of AT&T - local access prices went up significantly, and while long distance rates declined, it did so roughly linearly with the decreasing cost of bandwidth.

In the end we pay about as much as we ever have in aggregate - but at a loss of all of the benefits the AT&T monopoly - subsidized general science research from the labs, a plethora of union jobs, and an overall loss of US manufacturing capacity.

My belief having working in the sector, anything that looks like a utility is better off as a tightly regulated monopoly than being open to the winds of competition.

I fully believe we lost more than we gained from the breakup of AT&T - local access prices went up significantly

Interesting. Out of curiosity, may I ask how old you are?

Early 40's - about the same age as the divestiture.

I was a teenager at the time, and what I remember, above and beyond pricing alone, was just how firm a grip Ma Bell had on our entire civil communications infrastructure. The Carterfone decision was still a relatively-recent thing with radical implications -- you mean I can plug stuff besides phones into the wall socket?! -- and it was definitely time for things to open up further.

Intra-LATA calling between neighboring towns got a bit more expensive for a while, yes, but long distance almost immediately became much cheaper. It was like the move from film photography to digital -- suddenly everybody was taking photos freely, because the marginal cost was almost gone.

Post-breakup long distance calling became something people weren't inherently reluctant to use, and that was a big deal. Especially with the concurrent rise of BBSes. There's no way I'd ever agree that we were better off with the status quo.

What makes this so difficult is that it would be hard to fix even if there was agreement on the problem.

If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines, it would effectively stop all investment in disruptive technologies because any real disruption most likely infringes on some of these laws.

If you stop large companies from expanding into neighbouring industries, e.g by bundling new stuff with their existing offering, you stop them from becoming bigger but at the same time you are reducing competition. The risk is that you might end up with smaller companies but even less competition.

I'm not ideologically opposed to government intervention. I just don't know how to do it. All discussions on how to break up some tech giant quickly reveal how devilishly complex the problem is. And it's different for each of them and for each industry.

What would be a general rule to prevent growing concentration without damaging innovation, ossifying existing market structures and make impossible demands on the political system in terms of keeping all those detailed rules up-to-date and fit for purpose?

>If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines

There is absolutely no need to do this until you become Microsoft's size and no government has or likely ever will.

There was a lot more innovation enabled by the antitrust action against Microsoft in the early 2000s.

>> If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines

>There is absolutely no need to do this until you become Microsoft's size and no government has or will.

I'm not so sure. Debates about how to break up the tech giants often revolve around which particular activities shouldn't be under the same roof because there is an intrinsic conflict of interest.

For instance, some of the accusations against Amazon appear to be pointing to a potential solution where Amazon would no longer be allowed to compete with Amazon Marketplace traders or with publishers. Not sure if Lina Khan has anything like this in mind or not.

We also had many debates about whether media companies should be allowed to be internet access providers or operate internet backbones. Net neutrality is supposed to stop any misuse of power, but net neutrality itself is under constant fire from deregulators.

The thing is, it doesn't make much sense to break up a specific company because doing both A and B causes a conflict of interest but then let other companies do A and B. That's why in my view any such breakup implies a need for defining boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed.

> boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed.

This only applies to dominant companies/ monopolies.

But there is merit to the idea - like should investment banks be allowed to profit from taking a position against the position of their customer, even if that was done on their advise?

> defining boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed

So basically entrenched companies in specific markets would be extremely hard to challenge unless you have very large amounts of capital just laying around doing nothing? Even start-ups would struggle a lot more to get funding because no established company outside of that specific market would be allowed to purchase them. I'm not sure overall that would benefit consumers that much (IMHO the complete opposite but it's debatable).

Of course it depends on how the boundaries are defined, but just in tech:

Apple (being a computer company) would have never been allowed to develop the iPod/Phone/Pad without spinning them off into independent companies?

Google (being an OS provider) wouldn't have been able to sell Pixel phones themselves, but that wouldn't be an issue since Android probably wouldn't have been a thing in the first place.

So we'd be permanently stuck with Symbian and Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Blackberry/etc.

Same applies to MS, which is a great counterexample, despite all their resources and power they completely failed to leverage that in the mobile market. Then you have Intel vs ARM, Google and social media, even Kodak to an extent.

Having a lot of money, resources and great engineering is not necessarily such a huge competitive advantage when trying to enter an adjacent market. You must also be capable of developing competitive/innovative products while not being afraid to cannibalize your current revenue streams. Especially if we're talking about major public companies. Pouring billions into some (potential) boondoggle without any immediate return is hard to pull off without generating a severe backlash from your investors.

Having a seemingly "perfectly" competitive market (i.e. margins are close to the "risk-free" rate of return) doesn't necessarily lead to a lot of innovation because companies in such markets can't afford to make risky investments and tend to just focus on maximizing efficiency of current technologies. e.g. yes Google being able to fund Waymo with their Search/Ad revenue/etc. is not exactly fair to their potential competitors but IMHO preventing that would have significantly slowed down any real progress in the field.

That's exactly what worries me. So if something is done to prevent growing market concentration it better be something that doesn't rely on this sort of fine grained market segmentaion.

One alternative that could work is to mandate open APIs and a requirement for large platforms to carry all legal traffic and content. I know this is incredibly tricky as well. Who pays for the infrastructure? What about security and privacy issues? It raises many questions but it seems more promising as a direction of travel.

Yeah I don't know how you would break up Microsoft Office or regulate that. There are competitors but it's so pervasive, most companies use it. You'd have to create a public API that other competitors could use, and the HR lady is going to be pissed!

> 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.

Agreed. No company settles on MSTeams because it's good.

They use it because it's effectively free (1), and Slack is not.

It doesn't have to be good. And so it isn't.

1) Free with existing MS Office licences.

It's hard to argue that Slack is significantly better; it got increasingly messy over time. It's not that teams are better; the alternative isn't.

As someone who uses both I still contend that Slack is superior. The messiness seems to come from too many channels being made and needs to be actively pruned by management and company practices around Slack need to be communicated to employees.

When I changed from a Slack-using employer to a MS Teams-using employer around 2 years ago, I found it impossible to argue that the usability of MS Teams was even close to the usability of Slack. Slack was significantly better in this regard.

MS Teams had better integration with some other MS services such as OneDrive. That's obviously going to be so, that's what it's for.

We use Slack for text comms and Teams for video meetings. Seems like a decent balance, Slack video calls seems very unpolished compared to the Teams video experience.

Good point, teams video calls seems better; Slack video was a late addition.

The Slack-using employer also used Zoom. MS is the all-in-one in this regard too.

It's extremely easy to argue that Slack is much better than MSTeams, but now the market does not exist for anyone who wanted to make something better than Slack.

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? : - )

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

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

Wouldn't this apply to any company that sells more than one product or service? Amazon uses Aws margins to subsidize a bunch, including r&d. A lot of biotech companies use profits from one drug to subsidize bad sales in another trying to break into the market.

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

This is a solid business strategy, but it also falls prey to entrants back into the market when the large player raises its prices.

> 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

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.

"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing."

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).

Yes, they broke this somewhat recently. Video &c. doesn't work in Chromium either.

So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.

Everyone I work with is constantly badmouthing Teams. It's buggy and flakey and they killed Linux support which my company actually made use of. Either way, it doesn't matter since it's bundled. Literally killed any chance of competition getting a fair shake at our usage.

Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.

The customers I'm thinking of are in the public sector and quite non-technical, from us they learn that there are better options and realise that the tooling they have are causing them pain. Together with GDPR cases tightening things up on what software you can use I expect this to make a difference.

Yup. My company was seriously considering slack, but then teams came in the o365 bundle they were already paying for, so we went with teams.

It's better than where we were (Cisco jabber) but also worse than what's out there.

The company I work for used Slack, we were happy, but higher ups were looking to cut costs and they noticed they had Teams for free, so guess what... bye bye Slack.

Absolutely a monopoly maneuver.

> which they're deprecating

and didn't really maintain for at least the last 2 years either

(it basically ran a often very outdated version of the web app + some AFIK unnecessary and buggy custom audio handling)

there's two kinds of teams calls. the kind attached to a meeting is hosted on an actual server and the one where you call someone directly is some p2p mess that is a lot less reliable (and doesn't work on those browsers).

I do too and I'm not sure what happens in your case but they do block Firefox _for calls_ arbitrarily (it's not that it doesn't work but that the moment it thinks you are on Firefox it refuses to try to work.

Do you maybe only do calls through Chrome? Or maybe you have a user agent spoofing extension (or similar) installed in Firefox?

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

MSTeams only uses chromium as a base, it's degrees of poorly written extends far past the scope of chromium and even beyond the stars.

I can share a link to guests just fine

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

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

Please share how you make it work on FF then.

Random errors during calls, tab freezes etc..

"Supported."

I mean, on Windows with the official Teams, I see "Person is visibly talking, but there's no audio (and did not mute themselves accidentally)" multiple times a week. So, yeah, going from that baseline, that's surely "supported".

Try sharing a window on linux and see how that goes.

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've used Firefox on Linux to regularly attend multi-hour meetings for the last at least 5 years without issues from multiple devices and it has always worked smoothly for me. The only issue I have had is that in the last year sometimes the joining screen says that I have no camera and mic for a while (maybe 20s) before letting me join.

I regularly use Meet, Zoom and Jitsi on Firefox and Meet has been the only one that always just worked for me and my guests.

I haven't had that experience, but then when it comes to audio there can be so many e.g. device (hardware+various OS parts) specific issues that only some of the browsers might have workarounds for that it's quite viable (but AFIK not the norm, and not limited to works on Chrom but not Firefox, the other way around is possible too).

Either way it doesn't matter much because:

- jitsi meet even when they still was a small startup managed to provide high quality video calling on all browsers/platforms

- MS Teams has more then enough resource to make things work, they just don't want to (same for properly maintaining their Linux app, which given that it can be a local deploy of the web-app a very little other code could be a 1.5 person job (the +.5 person in case the first is sick)) and have a good reason not to (they have been pushing edge hard, including using inappropriate means like deceiving windows users into using it when they clearly signaled they want to use another browser)

You're right that when it comes to audio, there can be hardware + OS specific issues. But we're talking systems as different as aarch64 MacBook Pro running macOS with built-in mic and speakers on one hand a amd64 desktop running Ubuntu with a USB headset on the other hand both consistently exhibiting the exact same issue, but only in Firefox (not Chrome, not Discord, not TeamSpeak). My money's on that being a Firefox issue.

And the issue in Firefox across both those wildly different systems is present in Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and (I believe) Slack's Huddle.

Microsoft has the resources to make it work, sure, but I'm betting "making it work" here means fixing the issue in Firefox.

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).

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

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.

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".

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!

Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp.

Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense.

Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets).

Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.

Nah.

My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true.

The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce.

But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub).

The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office.

Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.

Are you open to opportunities?

Zoom became a major business because of Covid and Slack benfited majorly. Neither were powerhouses like Microsoft before then.

Whether a small European startup would have won out locally without Microsofts market position + price advantage idk. But without details I'm not sure the financial decision making of a Fortune 20 matters in this conversation which was part of my point.

Once your sales team is competing on price vs Microsoft it's basically over for young companies. Your value prop has to be much more than that until you're a mature business.

In Enterprise settings, I have never seen anything than MS bundling over 20 years for that many clients. To my European eyes, Slack and Zoom have been always an US centric or Linux first small companies centric tools.

Netscape would probably disagree. :-)

Technically Netspace wasnt a startup, they IPOd early and were bought by AOL for 4 billion in 98. They were real large scale contenders where such a dynamic could really be do or die.

There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.

I have first hand seen Teams eat a whole bunch of better product's lunches. Overnight Meet Slack Zoom all got poopoo'd by finance because the company was already paying for MS Office

Yeah, Symphony chat lost to Team also. Why didn't Symphony add voice and video chat? I never understood that.

How many of those entrepreneurs are explicitly agreed with by antitrust regulators of major jurisdictions...?

You are just assuming OP is telling the truth. Look at his product: https://taskulu.com/ it wasn't killed by Teams, but by Jira.

It's why we need the full context before believing everything these "serial entrepreneurs" say whenever they cry "wah-wah #BIG_CORP killed my product", so we can be the judges if indeed big corp killed it, or if it was just a DOA product coasting on the pandemic IT spending boom fueled by zero interest rates, like the other thousands of unprofitable startups of the time that are now under.

Since the OP refused to provide any further details or answer any questions people sent towards him, I tend to believe it's the latter.

I think it's way more necessary to note Microsoft's aggressive use of market leader to stifle competition in previously unrelated industries, than to theoretically award anything to this founder in our court of opinion.

Why should I care what a protectionist government agency thinks? As a customer, I am very satisfied with the deal Microsoft offered.

For now you are.

Enshitification ramps up after the competition has been destroyed.

I was going to say...as long as you're happy with, say, the current state of Windows, you should have no problem with whatever user-hostile changes their cloud offerings make over time.

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

I don't think it's end users asking for it though. I haven't met anyone who likes it. Seems to me that it is more of a "good enough for the cattle" decision by the IT department.

Oh absolutely, its not a good product for end-users. Doesn't change the fact that Teams has adoption that Skype For Business can only dream of however

for anyone that has been spared, teams is the kind of product where you have to make an appointment for an ad-hoc meeting, or you'll be stuck in some unreliable p2p skype call that doesn't work on anything but chrome or edge.

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.

That seems to be the reason for a lot of services. Amazon/YouTube/Apple/etc. Music don't need to be better than Spotify, but just good enough that someone won't pay for a competitor. This limits the competitors potential revenue and helps keep them from growing into stronger competition.

Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings).

>>> need to be better than Spotify

I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify.

The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...

Hi. I use Spotify in a web browser (at the office), on Linux (at home), and Android (mobile). To me, the Spotify UI has barely changed in 3 years.

You wrote:

    > The product has gone to hell

Can you provide some specifics? To be clear, I am not defending Spotify. One big thing that is lacking: They need a plug-in system like modern web browsers. This will allow them to offload a lot of the UI innovation to tech savvy users. At the moment, only Spotify can make changes to the UI.

Right

Open a random play list, start playing a track.

Close the client, try to get back to the track you paying right now... Pick a big list will it get you back to the track. There used to be a few ways to do this, now there is one (and it's ugly).

Is there a rhyme or reason to show or not show the tracks of an artist that I have liked/followed? Is that display consistent?

Why are we mixing liked artists and liked playlists now. Why is "like" some global list. Albums, songs, Artists are not the same thing. Globing these preferences together is like telling the waiter you like ice cream when he asks for your drink order, at breakfast on a Tuesday.

Why do I have to click into an album to find the publish date of a track? They have this whole right panel now with half assed track info and nothing useful.

The UI needs burned to the ground and an adult, who likes music needs to tell them what they need to show...

Oh, Apple is way more forceful than that. I keep finding myself in the situation where I pause YouTube on my headphones, speak for a while with someone, click to unpause and instead of resuming on YouTube that starts Apple Music playing the same U2 album. I'm still refusing to set that damn thing up, much less have it be the default recipient of the play button.

To be fair, this is mostly due to Youtube and their very strict "no video playback when the app isn't open" policies. If you were using any other app, anything from Spotify to really niche audiobook apps, you wouldn't have that problem.

I’m paying for this and use YouTube almost exclusively when the app isn’t open.

macOS I assume? I use a little app called noTunes (it's on github) to prevent that from happening.

edit: should be this one: https://github.com/tombonez/noTunes

iPhone

Also you can just wear your customers down over time apparently. I wish I could make Apple Music's subscription nag screen go away for example, I have local music I sync to it iPod-style for when I'm travelling through areas with poor data reception and every single time I open the app it whinges at me that I'm not subscribed.

What will it take to make these companies realise I'm perfectly happy with my current music streaming service and I don't want theirs regardless of the price it's offered at? I find it very disrespectful as a user when software can't take 'no' for an answer; my 'no' isn't 'maybe if you wear me down with enough nag screens' it means 'no I'm not interested please go away'.

Unfortunately because you're not a customer, they'll never stop.

Often times they won't stop even if you are a customer as in the case of Microsoft insisting that I backup all my files to their OneDrive that came bundled with Office. I get constant nag notifications to "finish setting up backup" even though I have alternative backup solutions and only want to use OneDrive as an offsite storage, not as a sync system.

I would love to tell the software to "never bug me again", but instead we only have options of "Yes!" and "Not now, please bother me again".

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.

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.

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

> Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

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

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

I know that a lot of companies (I’ve worked for and colleagues worked for) were asking Microsoft for an all-in-one solution like slack that would integrate with their office and share point systems. They didn’t like that Microsoft had similar products but as different apps.

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'

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.

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.

Haven't we been trying fines? Revoke their corporate charter, the survivors will take notice and behave. Or else.

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...

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.

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.

You can choose to also use slack, or the OP app, if you think the beneffit you get by using the app is greater than the value of paying for it. Nobody is preventing you. Since MS included it for free, is not like you can not pay for the other app because you used the money to pay for teams. I personally don't see the value on slack, but like I said before, I have worked at companies where we had both, office/slack or gw/slack.

it's not a great market for consumers if we allow big business to undercut pricing and kill competition

government should help us coordinate to prevent this Nash equilibria

> undercut pricing and kill competition

Yeah but nobody minded not having to pay for web browsers, file manager, antivirus software and bunch of other stuff.

Companies have been bundling their different software products together since almost forever and while there are some disadvantages arguable this has benefited consumers overall. At least I wouldn't be too glad about having to buy separate licenses (or pay separate subscriptions) for Excel, Word and PowerPoint (or any other product bundle like Jetbrains IDEs for every language etc. etc.).

Most people would also not rather get a non-functional barebones OS whenever they get a new PC and have to chose and install all the basic apps themselves.

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.

So they couldn't make a good case for the value of paying for that product vs using the free one. You know how many products die because people don't see the value?

I don't want it to look like I'm picking on you here (see my other comment above) but that's a naieve take on things.

Not sure you realise but in the corporate world it's about politics and money. People (above entry-level staff) do things to look good to their boss. That's it! And saving money is a great way of getting promoted: "Look boss, I just saved us $500k a year in license fees!".

Saving $X per year using a "free" tool from Microsoft will always trump anything you pay for especially if you are all in on Azure, O365 already. It's a no-brainer.

Not only that, once the decision is made, it will likely never be changed until the higher-up that made the decision moves on, quits, or is fired, no matter how wrong or bad the decision was (well, within reason, of course!)

I'd love it to be as simple as making a good case for the competition, and I've had to make that case many times over the years, but the reality is that a bundled product from Microsoft will win in a place that uses other Microsoft stuff, vs a paid product thats 100x better, faster, stronger, whatever.

It's like the old adage of why Enterprise software sucks so badly to use.

It's because it's being sold to managers and executives who don't actually end up using it, and never have to deal with the consequences of buying it.

Exactly. If you want a great example of this, look no further than Jira!

Maybe an unpopular statement but I don't think Jira is that bad by itself. It's just a very flexible and configurable system which ultimately ends up reflecting structure and complexity of the host organisation.

is it actually free? or are we collectively paying for it by allowing the big business to gain control of an otherwise competitive market and jack up prices

individuals are not pricing that in. coordination is needed. that's why we regulate the market

> 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

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.

I mean, if someone is physically harmed it is also too late, but still the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.

> the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.

As long as the law already existed

Either a law is inherently useful, or it is not. No need to cry about abuses in the 1800 regarding laws being passed today. The proposal is to fix a situational problem, not a physical one.

> 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.

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

Gee, I wonder...

For the reader: https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...

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...

> 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?

> Should bundling any apps/sofware/services together be illegal?

Yes, it's an abuse of dominant position in the market.

> Should that only apply to specific companies?

It should apply to any market segment where one vendor can abuse its position.

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.

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

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.

Split them into 4 then ?

2 amazons, 2 Aws

These are not monopolies.

> 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?

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.

That doesn't look like a failed startup to me since it's still active and the poster has several startups under his belt seemingly being a "serial founder" so I was curious to know which of his startups was the one that he claims got killed by Teams to see if it holds water.

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?

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