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Microsoft EU

EU Questions Microsoft Rivals Over Teams Integration in Office (reuters.com) 29

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
EU antitrust regulators are following up on a complaint by Slack by asking Microsoft's rivals if its Teams app integrated with its Office product gives it greater clout, in a sign that they could open an investigation. From a report: In a questionnaire sent to rivals and seen by Reuters, the European Commission is focusing on the period 2016 to 2021. Microsoft introduced Teams in early 2017 to compete with Slack and others in the fast-growing workplace collaboration market. Slack, bought by business software maker Salesforce.com in July, took its grievance over Microsoft's Teams software to the Commission last year. Microsoft, which has been handed 2.2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) in EU fines for cases involving so-called tying and other practices in previous decade, declined to comment.
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EU Questions Microsoft Rivals Over Teams Integration in Office More

EU Questions Microsoft Rivals Over Teams Integration in Office

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  • I understand antitrust, but this seems more like anti competition. Messaging isn't new, vid calls aren't new, all have been freely available in many incarnations for years.
    This sounds more like some butthurt competitors levelled up their eu lobby game.

    • God, if I was to go back in time and tell 1990s me I'd be defending microsft on an antii trust matter , I'd never believe me.

      But this seems kinda pointless. I cant honestly say I've ever worked anywhere that used Teams, and thanks to covid messing with the economy , I've cycled through a fair few jobs the last 2 years. I mean I know there are people that use it, but I doubt they are biggest , let alone a monopoly. Some places use Slack. I used to see Hipchat around, not so much now. Even worked at a place t

      • Right, but now if Teams comes free and pre-installed with every Microsoft Office, this will harm the competitive ability for other video chat and teams services to get their product into the enterprise. This would not be the case of Office was just another office suite; but because Office is extremely dominant in the market, essentially a monopoly, this harms competition. How do you break into that market, even if you have a better product?

        The issue is not that Teams is s monopoly. Far from it. However

    • Anti competition rules apply differently depending upon who you are. Because Microsoft has a distinct and clear dominance in some market areas, it is not allowed to use that dominance to leverage better outcomes for other market areas. Thus, because the enterprise office suite is essentially amonopoly, including a video calling app as part of theat suite severely harms the ability to compete.

      This is no different at all from when Microsoft bundled a browser with their monopoly OS.

    • When Windows 98 was released, it had an integrated web browser (IE) in the operating system. Microsoft was fighting its rival Netscape for the Web Browsing market. While IE 3 was good competition to Netscape 4, being that it wasn't integrated in with the OS, just allowed people to pick their favorite browser. Where for Some Netscape Communicator where Web Browsing, FTP, Newsgroups, Email and a WYSIWYG HTML editor, was preferred over a just a web browser.

      However integrating it with Windows, meant that web

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by nuntius ( 92696 )

      Be glad you haven't had the sequence of Office -> Exchange -> Teams forced on you. Each step of the way, MS uses their previous position to gain leverage and squeeze out the upstart competition. Doesn't matter what individuals prefer when MS can sell corporate licenses for tools that require proprietary interfaces.

      This is not just some fringe phenomena. They are using Office 365 for Government to own the US market. Glad the Europeans have some fight in them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pimpy ( 143938 )

      It's more about anti unfair competitive advantage through tight vertical integration. As a standalone product, Teams would see nowhere near the adoption numbers as it has being forced on everyone through Office 365 (and now Windows 11) integration. The question for an investigation is to determine whether the extent of vertical integration is something that gives an unreasonable advantage that no other messaging app can replicate, which itself would be an anti-competitive position. If you think back to the

  • New Microsoft is the same as Old Microsoft (Score:3)

    by Teckla ( 630646 ) on Friday October 08, 2021 @01:11PM (#61872957)

    New Microsoft is the same as Old Microsoft.

    Where possible, they will "bundle" their way to market domination.

    I always have a nice chuckle when people claim Microsoft is different now.

    • I'd pay for teams, it saved our business's ass during the recent troubles, moreover the integration with office is actually pretty useful.

      Is the desired outcome for Microsoft to make less useful software?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        The question is keeping their business practices in check and whether we needlessly end up with a monoculture on the momentum of their office monopoly.

        For example, at least at our company the week that office365 added Teams, we were told that the corproate slack access would be closed out at the end of the month. To this day and especially back then, Teams is worse than Slack from an end user perspective, and from an automation perspective... Teams really can be supremely frustrating. The rationale is sim

    • Speaking as someone who uses Teams daily - what do you expect Microsoft to do? They're certainly not going to win based on the "quality" of their software...

    • They are different. They're not the young and vibrant monopolist anymore, instead they're the balding grey monopolist with creaky knees who takes too long when urinating.

    • The new Microsoft is only doing new when the old ways don't work.

      Microsoft has a near monopoly in Business Desktop use. So the old ways are working. So you might as well stick to them.

    • I always have a nice chuckle when people claim Microsoft is different now.

      No one has claimed Microsoft is different now for not bundling. They've only ever claimed a situation where Edge is bundled in Windows is different now as we expect every OS to have an internet browser integrated by default.

      MS is different in many other ways, but not in bundling. Interestingly the EU is not different... completely late to the game questioning Teams integration with Office while ignoring that Teams is integrated in Windows 11 by default... *facepalm*

    • New Microsoft is the same as Old Microsoft.

      Where possible, they will "bundle" their way to market domination.

      I always have a nice chuckle when people claim Microsoft is different now.

      My bigger issue is that this crap is only an issue when Microsoft does it.

      You can't install a different browser on iOS. At all. There are apps that put different window dressing around Safari, sure, but you are literally, actively prevented from installing another browser on iOS. But it's Apple, so it's okay when they do it.

      Android isn't to that extreme, as they *have* allowed third party browsers on Android for quite some time. However, Chrome has been bundled with it for quite some time, and while Samsung

  • via bundling, otherwise nobody would pay for that P.O.S. directly. It's a potpourri of confusion: a hundred walled gardens arbitrarily glued together by somebody on LSD. The simplest of things take hours of trial and error, googling, bing'ing, and youtubing.

    We were trying to replace a regular hierarchical file "menu" of how-to PDF documents with Teams, but we still can't get the permissions right (authors in author-group "write", everyone else "read"). Bicycle science became rocket science, or spaghetti sc

    • It isn't really free as such, it still costs half a gig of RAM to just open it. For a VM, that's quite expensive. On the other hand, irssi needs 20MB and seems a lot faster and clearer as a chat program.

  • Remember that "Slack" isn't some plucky "sticking it to the man" startup anymore... .. .it is a wholly owned by Salesforce. So what is the difference between Microsoft integrating messaging into its ecosystem vs. Salesforce doing so with theirs? It is so frustrating that so many organizations use their considerable wealth to try to litigate in order to stifle innovation, rather than use those funds to develop a better solution. This is no different that Bezos suing SpaceX and Microsoft because they lost gov
  • Now they are asserting that not implementing that feature is Microsoft's fault and puts them at a competitive disadvantage? I can read and edit Office docs in lots of places, but Slack is not one of them. Whose fault is that?

  • My company partially moved from Slack to Teams a year ago. By "partially," I mean Teams is horrible and interferes with work and client communication far more than it helps. So we still use Slack, and have an internal channel where we just gripe about Teams.

    Bundling Teams to tightly integrate it with your company's workflow? Good luck to you!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      have an internal [Teams] channel where we just gripe about Teams.

      Finally you found a good use for it!

  • I'd like there to be more effective integration within Office and other products let alone with other vendors, as there is a lot I would like to do and you think you would be able to which doesn't yet quite work.

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