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Microsoft Seeks To Settle EU Antitrust Concerns Over Teams (reuters.com) 12

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Microsoft is seeking to address European Union antitrust concerns about its business practices prompted by a complaint from Salesforce.com's workspace messaging app Slack, people familiar with the matter said. The move, which may head off the opening of a formal EU antitrust investigation, underscores once again Microsoft's new preference for working out issues with regulators rather than jousting with them as it did in the previous decade. Microsoft found itself in the European Commission's crosshairs again last year after Slack alleged the U.S. software giant has unfairly integrated its workplace chat and video app Teams into its Office product.

Microsoft introduced Teams in 2017, aiming for a slice of the fast-growing and lucrative workplace collaboration market. It has made a preliminary offer of concessions to try to allay the EU competition enforcer's concerns, one of the people said. The company has previously said it created Teams to combine the ability to collaborate with the ability to connect via video and that it gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic while Slack suffered from its absence of video-conferencing. The EU antitrust watchdog sent questionnaires, its second batch, to rivals in October, asking for more details on Microsoft's interoperability and bundling practices, suggesting it may be preparing the ground for a formal probe, other people familiar with the matter told Reuters last month.
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Microsoft Seeks To Settle EU Antitrust Concerns Over Teams More

Microsoft Seeks To Settle EU Antitrust Concerns Over Teams

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  • If teams has video and slack doesn't, shouldn't slack have got with the program and added video? It's not like teams was the only video product out there.

    Hate to say it, but it sounds like "if you can't compete, litigate."

    Doesn't change that teams is crappy, but still ...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by toddz ( 697874 )
      Slack has had video calling single/group since 2016 if the feature wasn't being used either the marketing wasn't there or nobody liked it.

      Just because Microsoft did it better years later doesn't mean they did anything nefarious.
    • How can you compete against a product who is literally either preinstalled/given away. MS should have been split up years ago. Now it is too late with the whole azure/O365 dominance.

      • How can you compete against a product who is literally either preinstalled/given away.

        Slack had a big first mover advantage. Your point stands, MS had an incredible amount of power here to push their product, but even if it didn't and even if it cost the same as Slack, Slack just is not compelling as an option to any company given the feature set of Teams itself.

      • How can you compete against a product who is literally either preinstalled/given away.

        Definitely not by having fewer major features

        MS should have been split up years ago.

        True, but Slack still sucks.

        Now it is too late with the whole azure/O365 dominance.

        Why would it be too late for technical reasons? They've literally already split themselves up logically, all that remains is to force them to spin divisions off as corporations. It's only impossible because Microsoft is a key underpinning of the surveillance apparatus.

      • Slack is simply too expensive for a stand-alone chat and meeting app. There are things Slack does better than Teams, but they need to get real on their pricing.

        When the pandemic hit, the company I worked for had a free tier Slack environment and an Office 365 subscription. We could have upgraded Slack to a business class account to get the features we needed, but that would have cost us $15 per month per user. So nearly 20 grand per year for 110 employees to get a chat program. That was more than what w

  • I can see the anti-trust problem with everybody having to use the same application. On the other hand, getting an online meeting to work right is already so iffy that having a patchwork of a half-dozen applications trying to play together sounds like a total nightmare. Basic videoconferencing could hopefully work... but then try to attach a file to the session, or schedule a follow-on meeting using everybody's Outlook availability, or get everybody assigned to a breakout session and then bring them back t
    • You're probably right, it wouldn't work, but not because open standards are not the best way to do this sort of thing, but because the big players like to keep competition at bay by circumventing open standards.
      Computing as we know it wouldn't be the same without open standards.

  • Our company literally scrambled to accommodate any 3rd party that "required" we use their meeting software of choice.

    Teams won because it sucked less in the long term and got on top of fixing massive issues like it wanted the business.

    Under the worst-case-scenario (I was charged with a degree of support and testing) two competitors:
    1) Leaked my personal phone number to a massive number of 'paid for it' marketers. Some startup company, I forget the name, sounded like 'frugal' . . .
    2) Turned out to have a ma

  • I remember that Slack made an advertisement welcoming Teams to the arena when it launched.
    https://slack.com/blog/news/de... [slack.com]

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