It's official: EU probing bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365 The European Commission has officially launched a “formal investigation” into whether Microsoft flouted EU competition rules by bundling Teams with dominant productivity software suite Office 365 and Microsoft 365. It’s been a long time in the making: Teams was integrated into the Windows-maker's software line-up in 2017, and …
I think Apple certainly should be treated in just the same way for Safari – not least on its monotheistic mobile platform, wherein – as I understand it – there is technically no other browser but Safari. However, I have little knowledge of the workings of iDevices (and I try to avoid gaining any lest I be called upon to fix them), so I just don't tend to care as much.
You are right. All browsers on iOS are effectively Safari or a craper version of Safari. Safari is designed to take direct advantage of the hardware on iPhones. All other browsers must use API's which Apple controls and the core of all of the brwosers on iOS is still the same as Safari.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/google/id284815942?ppid=b58478b2-681c-4d43-9601-7b54463a4adf
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/firefox-private-safe-browser/id989804926
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/opera-browser-private-vpn/id1411869974
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-edge-web-browser/id1288723196
…. Etc.
My phone is errr, primarily a phone.
I don't have my whole life on my phone for what I think is a good reason, security. Get the phone nicked/lost and your whole identity can be up for grabs.
Searching/using the browser? Once or twice a month at most. As long as it works, I really don't care.
As noted above, I'm afraid it does – even if you don't know it.
In the same way that you don't care about Safari because you don't use IOS, I don't care about this because I don't tend to use Windows search as a web search tool since I use a browser of my choice. Both of them probably qualify for someone to complain about the bundling, but in Microsoft's case, it's quite easy to use a different search system whereas in Apple's case (on mobile devices anyway), it is not possible to use alternatives. I have more worrying ones I'd prefer them to focus on, but if they're going to do one of them, Apple seems to fit the requirements better.
"The verdict is already clear and the outcome as well."
Sadly it looks that way, and I'll agree with you - this is only a money grab from the EU.
I'm terribly sorry, but Teams is not an industry standard nor is it even a requirement for business operations. There are options already out there, competitors with arguably more name recognition and longer histories. You don't have to use Teams, it is a choice, and therefore bundling with other office products is *not* monopolistic. Adobe bundles many programs that are not available outside the Suite, and since those applications also are not 'required' or 'industry standard' in terms of necessity they are fine to be bundled.
So what ?
Many business managers will look and take the view - we have Teams, turning it off won't save us a penny, using something else will cost us extra, so just use Teams. As we saw with Internet Exploder many years ago, it's hard as a smaller outfit to compete with free - especially when that free option is pre-installed, there by default, and needs the end user to take a positive action to not use it.
But as with IE, we can expect the outcome to be too little, too late - they'll probably impose some unbundling requirement and a token slap on teh wrist, and by the time all the appeals have been gone through, Teams will be entrenched as the de-facto standard and there won't be as much competition to choose from (less than there would have been without the deliberate bundling).
It's classic, textbook, anti-competitive behaviour by an outfit with a de-facto monopoly on the business computing market - use your dominance in one sector to force out competition in another sector and thus grow your dominance.
I have to use Teams at work, I'd be well happy if it (and those who think it's good) to be condemned to the fires of hell. Take Skype (which works reasonably well), add in a dollop of Sharepoint (seems designed to use resources like you've shares in hardware manufacturers), stick on a lousy new UI, and add a good dose of lipstick.
Teams might not have previously been an ‘industry standard’ but Office was. MSFT know what they are doing when they bundle stuff to eliminate competition. I would imagine the compensation plans for their Account Managers may be subject to some scrutiny. I heard on the grapevine that they were VERY heavily incentivised to sell O/M365. Which is kinda odd really as pretty much every corporate desktop already runs Office.
"I'm terribly sorry, but Teams is not an industry standard nor is it even a requirement for business operations. There are options already out there, competitors with arguably more name recognition and longer histories. You don't have to use Teams, it is a choice, and therefore bundling with other office products is *not* monopolistic. Adobe bundles many programs that are not available outside the Suite, and since those applications also are not 'required' or 'industry standard' in terms of necessity they are fine to be bundled."
Replace 'Teams' with 'Internet Explorer' and change the context from office to Windows in your comment and you've pretty much got 1990s Microsoft tactics against Netscape where they pretty much deliberatly put them out of business. It isn't that Teams is industry standard that is the point here, just as IE wasn't industry standard at the time.Its that Office is industry standard and pretty much is a monopoly, with 89.2% market share in 2020 according to Gartner. The point is that they are using this near monoply to unfairly give Teams an advantage over competing products and by doing so hurting competition. Like in the 90's browser wars, why would companies bother with Slack etc when they are essentially getting the same thing for free and deeply integrated with something they already pay for?
I don't know too much about Adobe stuff anymore, the last version I used was CS6, but there are definitly other companies that should be investigated.
"Like in the 90's browser wars, why would companies bother with Slack etc when they are essentially getting the same thing for free and deeply integrated with something they already pay for?"
Slack might have to actually develop features that are better than the alternative. I get the idea why it has the look of something anticompetitive, but on that logic, Microsoft should be forbidden from adding any feature at all to Office, because theoretically someone might have a business that could get hurt. I also don't know what level they'd have had to go to to have prevented this. Had they not bundled it, but allowed someone to use their existing licenses for it, would the not-automatically-installed factor have gotten them out of this, or are they required to have it be a completely separate product which you have to pay for in order not to restrict competition with the alternatives, all of which have a free version of their own? At some point, it becomes a stick to allow the other competitors, who didn't exactly have a tiny slice of the business communication market, to prevent themselves having to compete with larger companies.
I've used Teams before, and I use Slack now. Teams wasn't very good. I have many complaints about it. Slack has problems as well, just different ones. They're both basically fine depending on how their used, but both could be substantially improved. Maybe if Slack wants to improve its market share, it might look at areas where people want different features and start adding those.
" adding any feature at all to Office, "
*Any*? Teams is no way part of of the Office and even less "a feature" of Office. Absolute BS. Totally unrelated piece of bad software forced to Office users.
Bundling exists solely to kill competitors, mostly Slack. Anyone who isn't a moron can see that: IE vs. Netscape again. And same abuse of monopoly, again.
"Adding features" is the most stupid way to improve a software in the first place and it only leads to pieces of shit like Teams: It does a lot of stuff but *none* of that well.
Rip everything that doesn't work and fix the remains so it works and it migh actually be a usable software. As it is, it's POS.
It does something that the old version could not. That's a feature. It might not be a particularly needed feature, but it is one. Not to mention that it has integration with other Office parts, for example working with Outlook to have meetings integrated with the calendar that people already use. I won't argue with you about the quality, though as I've said I can't name a single thing that makes me glad I'm using Slack instead now.
"Bundling exists solely to kill competitors, mostly Slack. Anyone who isn't a moron can see that: IE vs. Netscape again. And same abuse of monopoly, again."
Before they had Teams, they weren't really competing with Slack. Skype didn't really share features with Slack. Now they are, of course. When Teams started being a product, Slack had a much stronger position in the business chat market than Microsoft did, and they've lost market share not only to Teams but to many others, especially with more video meeting capability. For example, see how Zoom's market has ballooned over the past years. We had a pandemic to help that along, and I give that a lot of credit for Teams's success. You are free to disagree with that.
"You don't have to use Teams, it is a choice, and therefore bundling with other office products is *not* monopolistic. "
BS. You can't even remove Teams from Windows, so it *is* an abuse of monopoly: No MBA is going to *buy* anything else when Teams is already installed, so you *do have to* use it. Not your choice either: Corporate drones have decided it for you.
Another paid MS shill claiming expaning monopoly is a good thing. It's a crime of course, but shills don't care.
"You can't even remove Teams from Windows, so it *is* an abuse of monopoly"
You can. Sure, they install it for you which is pretty annoying, but it can be removed and it's not too hard. You're posting here; I'm sure you know how.
"No MBA is going to *buy* anything else when Teams is already installed, so you *do have to* use it. Not your choice either: Corporate drones have decided it for you."
That's not how businesses work. If they went straight for the free, they wouldn't be buying Office in the first place. And since we're on the topic, the Teams that businesses that use it are using isn't free because it's included in the Office subscriptions they pay for. The included free Teams thing does basically none of the stuff they need. If they were all going for the cheapest version, we'd have LibreOffice and Thunderbird, probably still on Windows, and we'd have to deal with that. They don't do that. Many businesses use something else, most commonly Zoom in my experience but there are quite a few options, for whatever reason. Not to mention that if a company decides something, that's their choice. You were never going to get a choice about what systems they choose to employ, but they have the freedom to choose something else and you have the freedom to do so on your own computers.
That doesn't necessarily make bundling not monopolistic, but it does make your arguments for why it is incorrect.
While I don't disagree with the decision to potentially slap MS around a bit for getting up to some of its old Gates and Ballmer era monopolistic habits, I just always have to wonder about the decision making process of regulators. I mean, there are so many other similar, but far worse, examples out there, but regulators always seem to just go for these stupid little things. How long has Apple had a stranglehold over the iOS platform? For a long time they refused to allow anyone to make any competitors to their built-in apps, and they still force everyone to use the Safari rendering engine. Not to mention they've been pretty consistently anti-consumer repair. How has none of this ever attracted the attention of regulators, while something as trivial (by comparison) as Teams does?
" I mean, there are so many other similar, but far worse,"
Really? How large market share Microsoft has again? >95%? You see, you need to *have* a monopoly to abuse a monopoly. MS in any practical sense has a monopoly on desktop.
Apple in that context is absolutely irrelevant.
As shady as MS, but with their market share people actually need to *choose* to buy Apple products. Can't abuse a monopoly you don't have.
While I totally understand antipathy to MS, I hate to admit it but Teams/Outlook/Office integration is useful rather than having to register for a dozen different video calling services.
There's nothing stopping use of the others; but that one that is there on the task bar gets used first.
Presumably the sucking is the point.
Another problem with Teams is it's not very platform agnostic. Zoom, for all its faults, works well enough on MacOS, Windows, Linux, Android and IOS phones, probably others I've never seen.
Whereas it has been years, I believe, since I was able to successfully join a Teams meeting with Linux.
A cynical and/or suspicious person might wonder if that's intentional....
Best I ever had Teams working was on a cheap Huawei phone after getting pissed off with it crashing, refusing to log me in, needing random reboots on a Windows machine. I run Zoom, Ring Central and google Meet on a number of laptops with no problem. Teams running on windows - I can heat my house with the hammering the processor gets.
Serious query - does anyone else get this or do most people run it in conjunction with MS Office ? And no, before the shills respond - I don't need MS Office, I run Libre Office and Thunderbird as that does all I need, I spend thousands per year on CAD software, specialist structural and thermal programs and a few other bits so don't feel the need to give MS any more money for things I don't need over and above their shite bloated OS.
I've used Teams, Slack, WebEx, even the old Linq and Skype for Business... I'm even old enough to have used their inspiration: IRC. Teams definitely has its oddities and quirks, but so does everything else. Teams makes it a lot easier to share files with people as it doubles as something of a FTP server where you can put up large collections of files. Slack does a better job of providing the IRC experience.
The thing I hate most about Teams is that they got rid of Heidi the squirrel from Linq and Skype for Business! That is just simply unforgiveable! There was just something zen about an animated squirrel eating a nut.
"Teams had amassed 280 million daily active users by February, according to Microsoft"
... and none of them *have chosen* to use it. Teams is always forced on people by MBAs in the management who have been bribed by Microsoft 'sales' people and actually believe they got Teams "for free".
See: Internet Explorer, Edge. Same shit again.
If unbundling O365, why is Teams special over, say, Excel and Word? Is it purely that it's new software and the others are long-standing?
I can see the argument that it's ostensibly "Office productivity software" so if others can be bundled, why specifically not Teams?
Not saying I like it-just don't get the difference as someone with a personal requirement for only Word outside of work and having to subscribe to the whole suite.
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