Microsoft Set To Face EU Antitrust Probe Over Video Calls (politico.eu) 26
European Union antitrust enforcers are planning to open an antitrust probe into Microsoft over its video and messaging service Teams, POLITICO reported Wednesday. From the report: An investigation based on a 2020 complaint from Slack would see Microsoft face formal EU scrutiny again, more than a decade after it ended a long-running antitrust dispute over how it misused its position as a powerful software supplier to push new products and services. Officials are focusing on allegations that Microsoft unfairly ties Microsoft Teams and other software with its widely-used Office suite. The European Commission plans to escalate the probe quickly and is preparing a statement of objections laying out competition problems with the company's behavior, two people said. In recent weeks it sent requests to rivals and customers over what evidence it plans to use, they said. Such 'access to file' requests are often a prelude to sending objections after a formal investigation has been launched.
Forget antitrust (Score:2)
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I've heard that Microsoft Teams is made with Node.js. If it's true then it means it can't be fixed and it's always going to be shit.
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Maybe This Explains Google? (Score:2)
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Teams sux but WTF EU! (Score:1)
Really! A developer integrates their suite of apps to allow all the apps to be functional with each other and the EU has a problem with that! Does M$ offer deals for their integrated shit of products that require major infrastructure buy in? Sure, but why is that a problem. It's all an attempt by 3rd parties to capture a market by regulation. M$ has done it so it's just part of the f-n game. The answer it to build better products not try to get your government to hamstring your opponents. Governments could
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I've used PDFs on my Mac since 2008 and I've never used anything from Adobe to do it.
Slack could try to compete (Score:3)
Where is the Slack Office suite? Where is the Slack version of Sharepoint?
Rather than whining that you cannot keep up, you could try to compete. The world will welcome a good competitor to the MS Office products.
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To be fair, Teams was a complete mess in 2020, complete garbage.
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Where is the Slack Office suite? Where is the Slack version of Sharepoint?
If you're really asking about Office competitors: there are several based on the LibreOffice codebase, check Collabora and OnlyOffice.
If you're just trying to downplay their complaint: Their complain does not depend on having an Office suite. They don't have one, and this even one of the arguments they can use to complain, it's proof that these are separate markets (Slack and Teams both have competitors in the videoconferencing/messaging market). Microsoft should not use a dominant position with their Offic
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Microsoft had Skype before Slack was a thing. Microsoft bought and integrated Yammer the same year that Slack was released. Mashing it all together and calling it Teams is suddenly market abuse?
Have you ever used Teams with any regularity? Teams is a poor Slack competitor, it sucks badly. However, Teams offers corporate features that Slack does not.
Maybe Slack just needs more features. I can understand that they might not want to be email, but Calendars/Meetings would make a lot of sense - I mean native in
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Mashing it all together and calling it Teams is suddenly market abuse?
TFS says regulator agreed and will start an anti trust probe so my best guess is yes it can be seen as market abuse. Microsoft uses a dominant position in Office (defined by a market share threshold which I think is 20-30%) to wipe away possibilities of Slack to compete in messaging. I have colleagues who have been using Slack for years. They gave up because Teams now comes by default with our subscription and is deeply integrated with the other MS tools that we already had. Slack lost customers not because
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Why did you overlook the part where Teams has features that Slack does not, a Calendar in particular? The ability to create meetings, invite anyone with an email, and have the meeting invite done in the same app I'm going to have the meeting in is really great. Slack does not do that, it is not competing with Teams in terms of features - this have nothing to do with market dominance, Slack is perfectly capable of adding a Calendar if they want. Does Slack even know what people want?
I used Slack a lot a f
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Why did you overlook the part where Teams has features that Slack does not,
According to a quick search, Slack integrates with different external calendar solutions. This is the game.
it had its share of outages and problems. Slack is not a perfect tool either.
It's not Teams or Slack being good or bad. It's about Microsoft pushing Teams in a package with Office when users could be subscribing to competing options.
These things have nothing to do with Microsoft Office.
It's like the Apple App store problem I'm getting also downvoted on in a different /. thread. There seem to be widely different opinion in US ans EU about what market abuse is, and /. readers downvote on the basis of not agreeing with EU law or poin
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> According to a quick search, Slack integrates with different external calendar solutions. This is the game.
Right, while Teams has a Calendar built right in, I don't need another service and I don't need a plugin. Slack is not bringing everything the market needs, and it has nothing to do with MS Office.
The technology in Teams was owned by Microsoft as long as Slack has been around. Teams is not a response to Slack, it is a response to user needs. I think Microsoft understands its customers better than
Friction (Score:2)
The best analysis of monopolistic behavior has to include friction. That is, how hard it is to use something else.
How hard is it to use Slack if Teams is installed? No harder than if Teams is not installed. Can you completely disable Teams? Yep. Does Teams prevent you from using Slack? Nope.
Contrast that with DRM enabled inkjet cartridges. The only reason to include DRM on an inkjet cartridge is to lock out 3rd party vendors of ink. You can't legally get around it. You can't easily use anything else.
Includi
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How hard is it to use Slack if Teams is installed? No harder than if Teams is not installed. Can you completely disable Teams? Yep. Does Teams prevent you from using Slack?
From my personal experience, any time you try schedule something with Office, it automatically creates a Teams link, even if the invite already contains a Slack or Zoom link.
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What happens when a product is so bad that is causes the friction by itself? Microsoft Teams is even worse than the crap Adobe produces.
Can slack integrate with Office? (Score:2)
This is an honest question. Is it possible for slack to integrate with Office in the same way? as in providing the ability to share office documents and collaborate in editing them? basically, I am asking if slack has access to the same API that Team uses to integrate with Office.
As far as I can see, Office offers WOPI [mckennaconsultants.com] to do that kind of integration. So from my naive perspective, there is nothing that prevents slack from implementing the same functionality. If that is the case, then slack is simply
Did somebody say bundling? (Score:2)
Officials are focusing on allegations that Microsoft unfairly ties Microsoft Teams and other software with its widely-used Office suite.
I guess Microsoft's takeaway from the IE bundling debacle a couple of decades ago is that when you're fined for bundling your product with the OS, it must be ok to bundle it with another software suite instead.
Microsoft is 100% nefarious (Score:2)
Take for example how Office refuses to save file backups to non-OneDrive remote drives...
If you try to use a non-MS cloud storage provider such as Google Drive or DropBox, Office behaves differently, and that's done entirely on purpose to push you to use OneDrive.
This is just one example out of many sneaky and nefarious anti-competitive measures they employ, and because users are basically held hostage through their crappy OS, Microsoft happily abuses that position of power.