Microsoft Offers To Charge for Teams To Address EU Antitrust Concerns

Microsoft has offered to charge different prices for its Office product with and without its Teams app to stave off a possible EU antitrust investigation and fine, two people familiar with the matter said. From a report: Microsoft has been seeking to address the EU competition enforcer's concerns since last year after Salesforce-owned workspace messaging app Slack complained to the European Commission, other people familiar with the matter told Reuters in December. Slack in 2020 alleged that Microsoft has unfairly integrated its workplace chat and video app Teams into its Office product. The U.S. tech giant introduced Teams in 2017 targeting the fast-growing and lucrative workplace collaboration market. The European Commission on Thursday said there were other complainants besides Slack.

That seems unfair

[drinkypoo]

Teams is bad enough you can only really give it away, so forcing them to charge for it is arguably anticompetitive :D

Re:That seems unfair

[Joce640k]

“There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.”

  Robert A. Heinlein

Re:

[drinkypoo]

He also wrote a bunch of books about how if you couldn't pay for your air on the moon, you deserved to choke. I don't take anything Heinlein said too seriously.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Moreover it doesn't seem any worse than Slack, and it's Slack who's running around complaining right now to anyone who'll listen that Microsoft is being anti-competitive.

Yeah, to be fair, Slack is also hot garbage. It's got some of the worst UI that I've ever experienced. Just trying to figure out where "I" was mentioned (turns out to have been the whole group, not just me) is a nightmare.

Reintroduce a software choice screen.

[xack]

Like the browser choice screen, but for all your main software like office, media player, app store, etc. Microsoft already asks lots of questions on Windows installation, so adding more will be simple.

We can charge for it...

[moonracer]

but we're going to install it on every fucking windows machine on the planet.

Re:

[thegarbz]

This is the true WTF moment. Teams is woeful but at least it makes sense as part of the enterprise office bundles integrated with literally every other product in the bundle. But what in Gods name is that damn thing doing on a Home Windows 11 install? It's not that no one asked for this, it's that people explicitly want something else, a simple functional video chat app, not "all the worst parts of Skype made even worse".

make them like IBM

[jmccue]

Time to make Microsoft sell like IBM had (have) to. For decades IBM was fighting anti-trust charges in the US. The end result was IBM settled after promising to end all bundling with their mainframes.

Time to force the same on Microsoft, maybe the EU can do this, but we know the US Gov is bought and sold, they only bring charges when bribes start falling. Once the bribes reach a certain level, charges are dropped with a slap on the wrist.

Re:

[tomkost]

ya, I doubt this is how it turns out in the modern world. Look at what Google did when facing similar complaints from the EU in 2018. They started charging Android device makers a royalty for devices sold in the EU where they were bundling their chrome and android apps. MS will do the same. In the end, MS will get more money from EU buyers and who still want to put windows on their machines. I'll bet you a dogecoin or three...

Re:

[thegarbz]

It's hard to do this. It's one thing to decouple hardware and software, but it's quite another to unbundle interlinked software. And this was a core result of the Microsoft Anti-trust regulations, and why neither the USA nor the EU actually stopped IE from being bundled with Windows.

Open Source and Open License Office!

[Murdoch5]

If Microsoft wants to prove it's not being anticompetitive, then it just needs to open source and open license it's office ecosystem. At this point, the only thing keeping MS Office alive is that people are lazy and refuse to change, because MS Office offers nothing to make it a preferred choice.

The only time I use MS Office Online, is once a month I have to open a XLSX file that a desktop version of Excel corrupts, so I can send that file to my boss. Literally the only thing the MS Office ecosystem gi

Change of tune

[MidSpeck]

And it was only 6.5 years ago that Slack was welcoming some competition.
https://slack.com/blog/news/de... [slack.com]

Charging more for less?

[registrations_suck]

So, I assume they are going to charge you more for NOT being stuck with Teams?

As they should, just like many other products.

[DutchDopey]

The uncompetitive advantage of MS must stop. Active Directory, Office & Windows are the major drivers of crushing competitive solutions.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

AD can be replaced, there are even turnkey offerings to do it on Linux, or you can do it free with just good old samba and krb5. Replacing Office, on the other hand, is painful no matter what replacement you try to use. LibreOffice has finally gotten relatively smoothed out, though pain points remain (compare the pivot table functionality) but it's still a bit of a mystery what you'll get when you open any nontrivial Office document. Granted it's not their fault, but then that's the problem.