Microsoft To Unbundle Office and Teams Following Years-long Criticism (techcrunch.com) 58
Microsoft will introduce a new version of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that excludes Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack. From a report: The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year. The company introduced Teams as a complimentary offering to the Office 365 suite in 2017. Microsoft has enjoyed an unfair advantage by coupling the two offerings, many businesses have argued. Slack, owned by Salesforce, termed the move "illegal" alleging that Microsoft forced installation of Teams to customers through its market-dominant productivity suite and hid the true cost of the chat and video service.
Symbolic only (Score:3)
The big benefit of Office as a groupware application is the all in one integration. It's not a word processor. If that's all you wanted there are free ones. It's a word processor that can in real time edit documents stored on Sharepoint site in parallel with your colleagues with whom you are currently chatting on Teams having just sent them a file stored within one of those Teams.
Companies who buy Office 365 aren't going to turn to Slack when they have a choice, it'll literally devalue their Microsoft/Office 365 licenses.
Now if only they'd remove the abomination that is Teams from Windows 11.
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It's a word processor that can in real time edit documents stored on Sharepoint site in parallel with your colleagues with whom you are currently chatting on Teams having just sent them a file stored within one of those Teams.
Things I have never needed or used in my professional or personal life
Re:Symbolic only (Score:5, Informative)
You aren't missing anything. We use this at work and it's a clusterfuck.
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April Fools....?
Darn, I really miss the days of the April Fools stories...OMG Ponies and the whole lot...
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Or are you so egotistical, that you think you should inject your pointless opinions into everything?
Your response shows some severe psychological trauma, projecting your own actions onto others. Get yourself some help man.
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> Things I have never needed or used in my professional or personal life
Anything is better than attaching an edit document and group emailing it.
Here are example of productivity:
- Then someone edits an old version and send it out.
- Or two people make concurrent edits and send those out.
- Or someone grabs an old copy from their email.
Sharepoint and Teams both suck. The technical concepts for meeting and collaborative work are useful.
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Didn't Google Docs pioneer collaborative online editing of documents? Why didn't that ever catch on?
I assume it's because Microsoft played quick enough catch-up to keep their Office monopoly strong enough to prevent any other document system from catching on. That - and not the damage to Slack - is why bundling of Teams with Office should have been illegal from day 1. And why 'unbundling' them 10 years down the road is a meaningless bit of theater. I assume the cost savings in buying the unbundled versi
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These simultaneous edits are good for quick and dirty work. For serious things where people need to take the time and think, exchanging static versions is still best. If you send me a link, ask to read it through and make suggestions, and the damn thing changes form one day to the other, it is annoying.
You indeed don't group emails with the same document to edit everywhere. It's bad practice anyway because there isn't a clear decision path. You first separate the contents that you delegate to different peop
Re: Symbolic only (Score:2)
Sending static versions is horrific and quickly falls down when more than two people are involved. You end up in version hell, not quite knowing which is the latest (or worse, you have parallel divergent edits) and no easy way to merge the changes.
The online version of Word is also shit, even after years of Microsoft working on it: edits are laggy and itâ(TM)s trivial to fuck up the formatting that then takes hours to fix in the desktop version.
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Yes. Because it's all about you.
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Things I have never needed or used in my professional or personal life
Congrats? For many people working at any of 1000s of companies around the world it's not their choice to make. Teams is a bucket of shit, and I use it daily because the way not only my company, but the several others whose servers I also need to log into have built their work practices around it.
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Re: Symbolic only (Score:1)
Re:Symbolic only (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we remove the abomination that is Windows 11? That would really help.
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Now if only they'd remove the abomination that is Teams from Windows 11./ Can we remove the abomination that is Windows 11? That would really help.
If you don't know how to remove Windows from a PC to install a different OS, you probably should be running Windows 11 anyway as you obviously need the training wheels.
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Windows 7 was pretty great in many ways, as far as a workstation OS goes. Security wasn't what it ought to be, obviously, but the UI was excellent.
Windows 11, by contrast, is just a bad attempt to rip off Mac OS.
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Can we remove the abomination that is Windows 11? That would really help.
That's easy to do. But frankly I don't care much. Windows 11 works. It does its job of starting the programs I actually use just fine, and aside from the quarterly feature update producing some nag screen to set edge as a default the OS is irrelevant.
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Now if only they'd remove the abomination that is Teams from Windows 11.
I just can't believe Microsoft still hasn't learned it's lesson about confusing product naming. After "Skype" and "Skype for Business" I figured they'd learned that was dumb. Now they have "Teams" and "Teams (for work or school)".
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Now they have "Teams" and "Teams (for work or school)".
It's worse than that. They actually have "Teams" and "Teams (for work or school)" and "New Teams" (this latter being for work or school but without the name to go with it).
Re: Symbolic only (Score:2)
I have more hate for SharePoint than any other Microsoft product, and that is saying something because I have a lot of hate for Word. Everything it does -- and SharePoint does EVERYTHING -- it does poorly.
Excel is probably the only Microsoft product that I hold in high regard, even with its braindead date handling.
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I suppose in it's defence, date handling is in and of itself, a pretty complicated a lot of the time.
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My business unit picked slack over teams but I actually have to use BOTH due to different departments not using Teams, or not using Slack.. Super efficient I know...
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If your business departments are picking their own platforms within your organisation I suspect the efficiency problems of one department using Teams while another using Slack is the least of your concerns. That sounds like a nightmare.
Monopoly - Teams added to Office everyone switched (Score:5, Interesting)
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Me: "Why must we use Teams as our collaboration standard?"
Bean Counters: "Because we got a great bundled MS deal on it."
Me: "But Teams suuucks!"
Bean Counters: "Not my department's problem, we just make low-bean deals. Go talk to the Quality Assurance Department. Oh, wait, we closed them to save beans."
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This was use of an almost monopoly like control over the Office suite software sector by adding Teams into Office/365. Once this was done, every single IT department budget pretty much demanded they use Teams and kill 3rd party video conferencing despite how horrible is Teams.
Yes and no. Yes in principle you're right, but no Teams wasn't it. Skype for business did that, and was already bundled with Office prior to Teams coming out.
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Many of those businesses switched from Skype...which Microsoft also owns.
was waiting for the Teams integration in Notepad (Score:2)
bummer!
Well.. (Score:2)
For one, I see they are offering an unbundled variant, but don't see confirmation that the bundled variant won't coexist. The announced 'no Teams' price range isn't any cheaper than the current "with Teams" price range.
Further, by limiting it to EU, they still get to drag big multinationals. Sure, if no bundling in Europe, then a purely European concern could more fairly compare, say, Slack and Teams. However, if everywhere else in the world they bundle with impunity, then the savings outside of Europe w
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That link confirms that enterprise SKUs with Teams are going away and won't be available to net-new customers (existing customers won't lose them and can renew/add new seats as needed). Prices on the new E SKUs are $2.25 cheaper than the old ones*. The new Teams Enterprise license is $5.25, so a net increase of $3 if you buy the new E SKU and the Teams add-on.
Companies with Business and Frontline SKU users will have a choice between the old SKUs
Not to defend MS, but... (Score:3)
However, I have to admit that it was a pain, when one meeting was Teams, the next Zoom, then WebEx, then Skype, then Discord, then maybe something else.
Re: Not to defend MS, but... (Score:2)
Was a pain? Past tense? I still suffer from this daily.
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What's the suffering? You just click on a link. All of them have similar features and Just Work.
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I surely don't want to defend Microsoft.
However, I have to admit that it was a pain, when one meeting was Teams, the next Zoom, then WebEx, then Skype, then Discord, then maybe something else.
That's not a defence of Microsoft, it's just a complaint about your workplace not standardizing on a single product. It could be solved by declaring Zoom to be your company's solution (I'm not a fan of Zoom; I just think it's the least-sucky option right now).
Although if they really are including Discord in the mix where you work - or Skype for that matter - that does seem like an even bigger cluster**** than most of us have to deal with.
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Right. Because my company has the ability to dictate the meeting software requirements to every vendor its employees have meetings with.
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Admittedly, if you have to regularly deal with external vendors you certainly are SOL - in many ways.
Re: Not to defend MS, but... (Score:2)
It's not my employer. It was all the different companies we deal with. And no, they don't all "just work", nor are they all trustworthy or secure.
For better or for worse, it's all Teams now.
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I surely don't want to defend Microsoft.
However, I have to admit that it was a pain, when one meeting was Teams, the next Zoom, then WebEx, then Skype, then Discord, then maybe something else.
I actually disagree about several of them. One of the great things about these apps is they all have a webapp. You literally don't have to care. Just receive your invite link and if it's not your platform of choice, open it and select the option to continue in your browser. I only have Teams installed on my work machine, but that doesn't stop me joining Zoom or WebEx calls.
April 1 (Score:2)
n/t
Why do people use MS Office? (Score:4, Insightful)
Take Microsoft Project, what is it? It's not a project management tool, it's not a requirement management tool, it's not a task management tool, so seriously, what is it?
Look at Power BI, it's analytics for people who don't understand analytics, and stripped of all useful data inspection tools.
Should we talk about Visio? The flow chart / diagram / drawing tool that isn't compatible with anything, and isn't a good at any of those tasks!
Should I start listing the tools that are terrible? (Apart from those listed above): Forms, Calendar, Engage, Sway, Steam, ToDo, Whiteboard, Bookings, I'll stop.
Great, Microsoft is going to partially unbundle Teams, which oddly enough is a bad communication platform. Office use have some respect, in that when you needed an Office suite, you generally would pick it, but now? I can't think of a single reason other than compatibility, and pre-installed, to run Office. It's amazing, we've gone from different tools for different jobs, to collected tools for different jobs, jumped to single platforms for all your jobs, and now we're back to different tools for different jobs.
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Microsoft Office isn't a decent platform, none of its tools stand out for quality, and most are just gimmicks.
Well this is just ridiculous. It is an oft-repeated meme that "The world runs on Excel" because it's true. Ya, huge, well-planned things actually run in databases, but for everything else, it's Excel. Same with Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Those three programs are the basis for most major enterprises and anyone who attempts to say otherwise with a straight face is ignorant of the real world or has an axe to grind.
Look at Power BI, it's analytics for people who don't understand analytics, and stripped of all useful data inspection tools.
It's analytics for people who know how to use Excel and need to show the results of the analy
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1. The Excel file is 20+ years ago.
2. Started as an Excel file, quick and dirty by one guy, as a placeholder.
3. Everyone is too lazy, stupid, or unable to port it to a DB.
4. Rare, Excel is the right fi
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Do you complain about screwdrivers because they can cam out (slip)?
Do you complain about hammers because they allow the user to miss the nail?
You seem to agree that the tools are widely (almost universally) used and accomplish goals at a price people are willing to pay, but since the tools don't ascend to the perfection of your imagination, you brand them as "gimmicks". That's simply unreasonable.
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You listed the 3 true pieces of shit in the entire package. I don't know anyone who uses Project or Visio. PowerBI ... well we do have managers. Office doesn't have value in those tools, and in fact they are optional extras by default in any Office 365 subscription.
The value in Office is the collaboration. If you need a document editor, don't get Word, get Writer. If you need the ability to create a word document, then send it for a restricted review to a 3rd party while enforcing a no-print no-download no-
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EU: Out mission is customer inconvenience (Score:3)
Seems like the EU is just HELLBENT On making the use of electronics as inconvenient and miserable as possible. Why does it had consumers so much?
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I guess your handle means I shouldn't try to explain why regulation of corporate interests can sometimes benefit consumers :]
Personally I like EU regulations that provide trustworthy food, water, employment protections, safer roads, safer medications, safer cars and also protection from companies that exploit their dominant market position to the detriment of the consumer.
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Sometimes it can. But all this electronics shit the EU in involving itself in is just anti-consumer and fucking things up.
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Surely it can't be all bad?
A lot of the electronics regulations are specifically created to protect the consumer. To say it's "all" bad is a very narrow view I feel.
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I narrowed it to electronics stuff.
Unbundle from webmail too like Outlook.com. (Score:2)
It used to have Skype! Bring it back please.