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Microsoft EU

Microsoft To Unbundle Teams From Office, Seeks To Avert EU Antitrust Fine (reuters.com) 21

Microsoft will unbundle its chat and video app Teams from its Office suite and make it easier for rival products to work with its software, the U.S. company said on Thursday in a move aimed at staving off a possible EU antitrust fine. From a report: The proposed changes came a month after the European Commission launched an investigation into Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams following a complaint by Salesforce-owned workspace messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft's preliminary concessions failed to address concerns. The EU competition enforcer on Thursday said it took note of the company's announcement and declined further comment.

Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free. It eventually replaced Skype for Business and gained in popularity during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing. "Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission's investigation continues and we cooperate with it," [...] The changes, effective from Oct. 1, will apply in Europe and Switzerland.

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Microsoft To Unbundle Teams From Office, Seeks To Avert EU Antitrust Fine

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  • by xarragon ( 944172 ) on Thursday August 31, 2023 @01:40PM (#63812682)

    Having used Teams for years in an enterprise environment, I despise it. It is absolutely useless as a text chat client, especially for sharing code snippets. It took years to stabilize even basic features. Video conferencing works ok but is unpleasant overall. Searching through conversations and organizing content is a nightmare.

    But the worst thing is that almost every single enterprise here in Sweden has gone all-in on Microsoft. The selection process is no longer based on merit, but on "free as in sunk cost", so the "free beer" argument for FOSS software is no longer working.

    And the general Windows experience is just deteriorating on top of that. So I welcome anything to make alternatives more viable. At this point, Microsoft is "old iron" and the reason it is chosen often seems to be "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".

    Today I was told to completely power off my laptop before putting it in my backpack. Because apparently sleep does not work on Windows 10. It has worked on every other laptop I had, from my X41 Thinkpad running Linux back in 2005 to my HP ZBook running Windows 7 at my last workplace.

    Linus Tech Tips made a video about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    Apparently it is not a bug, but a feature!

    • Teams...

      Auto-start by default, unless you sign in to turn that off. And it continually pops up in front of the stuff you really want to load first.

      It needs ~500mb cache space to launch, often 1.5GB while running... which is ridiculous and causes a lot of issues if you're running a terminal server or Citrix farm.

      Speaking of farms, Teams insists on installing in the individual user profiles. The Teams "machine-wide installer" just adds a central repository to build those individual sessions from, and breaks

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Teams...

        Auto-start by default, unless you sign in to turn that off. And it continually pops up in front of the stuff you really want to load first.

        Don't get me started on this... I had to put teams on one of my personal laptops for job interviews and I won't sign in because I don't want a personal account associated with teams. Since I'm not doing interviews any more I've removed it, rather than having to disable it every time I use teams (yep, if you use Teams it will set itself to auto-start on login even if you've disabled it).

    • They're not going to force Teams on you if you run Office? Stand by while I dance a jig of despair.
    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Having used Teams for years in an enterprise environment, I despise it. It is absolutely useless as a text chat client, especially for sharing code snippets. It took years to stabilize even basic features. Video conferencing works ok but is unpleasant overall. Searching through conversations and organizing content is a nightmare.

      But the worst thing is that almost every single enterprise here in Sweden has gone all-in on Microsoft. The selection process is no longer based on merit, but on "free as in sunk cost", so the "free beer" argument for FOSS software is no longer working.

      Same here,

      For years companies have been flocking to teams because Microsoft gave it out for free, now this looks to be the prelude of MS starting to charge for it.

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