EU Opens Antitrust Probe Into Microsoft Over Teams Bundling (cnbc.com) 54
European Union regulators on Thursday opened an antitrust investigation into Microsoft's
bundling of its video and chat app Teams with other Office products. From a report: The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said that these practices may constitute anti-competitive behavior. It is the first antitrust investigation by the EU into Microsoft in over a decade. "The Commission is concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings," the EU regulators said on Thursday in a press release. In other words, the EU is concerned Microsoft is not giving customers the choice to not buy Teams when they subscribe to the company's Office 365 product. In doing so, Microsoft might be stopping other companies from competing in the workplace messaging and video app space.
Re:Of course... (Score:4, Funny)
MS should pull out of the EU, invalidate all licenses
Oh man, you have a way of describing heaven.
Imagine if 448 million people suddenly had to get a taste of Linux in a hurry, realized it's just as usable was what they were used to and switching wasn't that bad after all...
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Re: Of course... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Of course... (Score:4)
Re: Of course... (Score:2)
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which by most people, who have tried both, is totally crap compared to AWS.
Citation Required. Actually two citations. Firstly where's your source for "most people". And secondly in what way do you consider Azure crap compared to AWS?
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Imagine if 448 million people suddenly had to get a taste of Linux in a hurry
Do you want 448million idiots flooding message boards with questions? Because that's what you'll get, and you'll get a reaction too in the form of distributions dumbing down your favourite thing for the new lowest common denominator.
Be careful what you wish for.
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Imagine 448 million people trying to use vi to edit makefiles so they can compile drivers to make their wi-fi adapters work.
Re: Of course... (Score:2)
Eighties called to let you know that they are gone.
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You're totally right, we now have vim and Emacs.
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Imagine 448 million people trying to use vi to edit makefiles
I personally use wordpad under WINE :)
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MS should pull out of the EU, invalidate all licenses, and see how folks like it.
This would make it ok to pirate Microsoft products across the EU. Malware wouldn’t be an issue because you can pirate right off Microsofts CDN these days. Also there would be a to. of Linux adoption.
Oh no pathetic humans I guess you’ve caught me. Please please whatever you do don’t lock Ttarmek the Greater Troll in the orphanage. The pathetic cries of delicious orphans oh whatever would I do!?
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Then these who really need it will just pirate it, as Russia is doing right now, under sanctions. These who don't really need it... will rejoice.
Nonsense.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would like to disagree, on all points. It's far from nonsense, as they are the market leader in desktop OS's. Market leaders are subject to anti-trust scrutiny. Microsoft was sued by the US government back in the '90's for exactly this behavior, but that time it was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, thereby knocking out the other browser vendors. They almost got broken up over that one, but some judge reversed that part of the decision at the last minute. Regardless, they had government overlo
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It should not matter if you're a leader in OS. It's basic necessities these days for almost any OS user. Where do you draw the line? Hee why is notepad supplied? If Microsoft isn't allowed to supply a standard application, so should no other OS manufacturer, not Apple, not Google and none of the Linux distro's. During installation EVERY single application should be asked then, even a settingsscreen.
back in the day a browser wasn't really needed YET, but these days you can't do anything without a browser, yo
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The line is drawn in legislation - you can look there for all the juicy details. Your other comments should be debated by politicians, but I'm old enough to remember life before browsers, and I can assure you it's possible, even today, to live comfortably via other means. With that said, I'll also admit it would be exceedingly difficult to spew personal views on justice in front of a bunch of strangers without one.
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You can live as a third class citizen without a browser, but that's about it. There's now tons of products and services even in most people's local areas that you cannot access in any other way.
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The future's not here yet, though. Services like that are severely in the minority. Most chatbots are 100% canned, to avoid them turning into Tay
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You draw the line when other companies can't enter the market. If there's a big market for notepads on other platforms, then yes, Microsoft would (potentially) need to stop bundling Notepad with their OS - specifically to let rivals enter the market. It's a burden placed on any organisation that has a de-facto monopoly. That needn't be 100% market share by the way, it only needs to be a dominant position. Apple has a decent amount of market share, but it's small compared to Microsoft, so it seems doubtful t
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Still big nonsense. Teams in this regard isn't free, because you pay for it through the Office365 / Microsoft 365 subsciption. On my home computer I don't have it as I don't have Office 365. As I said an application like Teams is an integral part of remote working with the office, and therefore it is perfectly logical as a standard part of Office.
I don't care what the EU commission will say as they sit there mostly to just grab their extra cash for sitting on the commision, so more commissions they sit on,
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> Where do you draw the line? He why is notepad supplied?
Technically speaking, the line should be drawn in 2 places : .The application you provide can interact only with itself. Meaning bundled Word that can save only .docx files. Meaning bundled Teams which doesn't allow alternative clients to be developed and connected to the network. This is avoiding data lock-in. And yes, in communications this does prevent tight integration between client and server, at least without publishing the protocol. And ev
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It should not matter if you're a leader in OS. It's basic necessities these days for almost any OS user. Where do you draw the line? Hee why is notepad supplied? [...]
Almost any time you try to make a slippery slope argument, you have probably already lost. You don't draw a line, you judge each situation by its own merits. First off just look at the size of the market for similar applications at the time it becomes bundled with another application suite. Notepad is provided as a very basic tool that doesn't even try to compete with paid software. It doesn't even try to compete with open source competitors like Notepad++. It is very easy to see why bundling Notepad isn't
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It should not matter if you're a leader in OS.
It matters because as a market leader, they hold a position of public trust. Name recognition / market share = reputation = public trust. (Tech nerds may make fun of Microsoft, but they are a well known and respected provider.) By law, this means that they have an obligation to act in the best interests of customers and the market, putting those interests above the business goal of making profit.
The defense to these kind of accusations is simply that their actions are in the best interests of customers a
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Many million people have a Windows PC and have never once used Teams.
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Hee why is notepad supplied?
There is no issue with Notepad because they purposely kept it extremely basic, so different competitors can supply a more complete product (I've heard Windows users typically install Notepad++). There would be no problem if they bundled a basic webRTC client so Joe Random can connect with his grandma and it does not kill the point for large corporate to select an integrated conferencing or collaborative solution like Teams / Zoom / Slack / BlackBoard / BigBlueButton. But they're not, they supply their (appa
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It's complete nonsense, as these days an application like Teams is a necessity in working with other people in the office, so it makes perfectly sense that it's part of the standard office suite. Just like a webbrowser, or a mediaplayer or a antivirusservice is a basic component for a modern OS. Times change. And why isn't Apple or Google targeted with provding standard apps with their popular OSses..
It does make perfect sense to bundle these applications with operating systems or office suites, but something making sense doesn't preclude a company from potential antitrust violations. It also makes sense why the bundling of applications can reduce competition in the marketplace. The more applications bundled into Windows or Office, the more expensive those bundles will become. Consumers end up paying more for software they don't want, and there is less competition for those applications because the mono
Being a necessary app isn't the problem (Score:2)
The problem is bundling. Slack does not have an office suite to bundle with its app, so it is at a competitive disadvantage to Teams. If we want market competition, we need to block monopolistic behavior.
My company is discontinuing the paid Slack tier in two weeks because they got a sweetheart deal from MS with the Office suite. Teams is absolutely worse for our use case than Slack, and we have to spend the next two weeks moving alerts, finding replacements for integrations, and backing up pinned posts and
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Just like a webbrowser, or a mediaplayer or a antivirusservice is a basic component
As is a space bar
Here's my prediction (Score:3)
They'll be fined a few hundred million euros, which is to Microsoft what a dime is to you and me, they'll be made to pinky-swear never to do it again, then business will go on as usual.
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They'll be fined a few hundred million euros, which is to Microsoft what a dime is to you and me, they'll be made to pinky-swear never to do it again, then business will go on as usual.
If a few hundred million euros to Microsoft is equal to a dime to you, you must make about $20 per year in salary. Microsoft doesn't make enough revenue for a few hundred million to be that negligible.
It would be more like a $500 fine for someone with median US household income. Still not very painful but definitely not comparable to a dime.
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They'll be fined a few hundred million euros, which is to Microsoft what a dime is to you and me, they'll be made to pinky-swear never to do it again, then business will go on as usual.
Every EU based anti-trust action against Microsoft has forced material changes to the products they distribute. I know you think the entire world is America but that's just not the case.
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What's the difference? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about bundling OneDrive with Windows? Or Teams? Or Edge? Or Cortana? Or a useless store and apps?
All included by default, and it's nearly impossible to get rid of any of them. A waste of space, time, and computing power.
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Or Edge?
No thankyou. I do not want this unbundled. Without Edge you'll not have the ability to visit the website of the browser of your choice you wish to download.
A waste of space, time, and computing power.
Space yes. But no one requires you to use these useless apps and they don't actually use any computing power by simply existing.
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Or Edge?
No thankyou. I do not want this unbundled. Without Edge you'll not have the ability to visit the website of the browser of your choice you wish to download.
Well there is the windows store were Edge could be installed from, and possibly other browsers. Or you could just use wget or curl or a similar utility to first download Firefox.
At least, there should be a trivial option to remove Edge completely, once you no longer need it.
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Well there is the windows store
NO THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!! I'd rather have Edge on my PC than be forced into a walled garden, even a nice walled garden, not like the dilapidated drug den full of criminals that Microsoft built their wall around.
Or you could just use wget or curl
I'd love to. What's the URL again, and you lose all points for having to ... look it up on the internet. No wget or curl wouldn't even remotely be a viable solution even for nerdy people let alone the general masses. The windows store is a better option, despite the fact that I reserve that recommenda
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Space yes. But no one requires you to use these useless apps and they don't actually use any computing power by simply existing.
Unfortunately, they do. On several systems that I watch, Onedrive, Edge and a bunch of Store apps are starting periodically or running permanently, without the end user touching them. And no, these systems aren't malware-ridden. Unless you count Windows 10 as malware, which, in my personal opinion, is not entirely unwarranted these days.
Oh, come on! (Score:2)
Oh, come on! It's ridiculous for an "Office" suite to not contain a video app when most of our "offices" are online anyway! I don't use Teams myself, so don't have any skin in the game, but come on...
Similarly I thought it was absurd that the MS had to unbundle the Windows Media Player in Europe. It was a very crappy player, so one of the first things I replaced when I set up someone's system, but still a modern OS should be able to play audio/video without installing anything!
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The competition at the time was Real Media Player, and it was a lot better than that POS.
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The bigger issue for me is that there is no choice involved. Installing Office used to give you a screen where you could choose which software and components you want or don't want to install. Now that's gone and you get every Office program and Teams. My IT department was powerless to stop this from getting onto our computers and now we're switching to this from a competing voip suite. While our current voip suite sucks and Teams is better, that bar is pretty low. It's unfair of Microsoft to pretty much st
6-year-old product already "monopoly"? (Score:2)
Usually, antitrust actions take longer to move through governments, to avoid unnecessarily pursuing products that come and go quickly. Apparently, the EU believes that Teams is so critical, after only 6 years of existence, that it must be singled out for regulation.
What about Office, or OneDrive, or Edge, or Windows (being bundled on PCs)? These products have been around a lot longer, and have been just as dominant as Teams.
I agree that we need to control monopolies, but it seems the EU may have their prior
It's free, what does it matter (Score:1)
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Slack for a start..
We were using slack, and got forcibly moved to teams because it was bundled with the office365 subscription the company was already paying for.
Slack was a much better app, and it was working well before teams was even available.