It think that one of the issues in this case. Teams rather terrible, but so is everything else.
I worked for a company that used Google Chat internally and we'd use Teams with some clients. People kept telling me how much better Slack is, but now that I work for a company that does have Slack, I can't say that it's any better. In fact I'd probably rank Google Chat highest of those three options.
Microsoft is giving people free replacement that is in some ways better (but with a worse interface). There's no point in NOT using Teams, when it's at least no much worse. In the same way where people are using Google Chat, or whatever it's called now, because they use GSuite / Google Workplace and the integration is really good. Teams just needs to be cheaper than Slack, unless Slack massively overhauls everything.
If Microsoft unbundles Teams, they can still make it available for free and nothing will have been resolved.
I do agree with the EU that Teams should be unbundled, but unless you have a cheaper and/or better alternative I don't see it being all that effective. Teams also integrate into Active Directory and the whole Microsoft ecosystem in a way most other systems just doesn't do (not that they can't).
Funny thing is the last I checked RCS still doesn't have any APIs/third party access and if you use a rooted device Google Messages will fail to send RCS even to the carrier's Jibe instance?
Why is it okay for Office to include Word, Excel, or PowerPoint but not a chat application? Does the EU get to decide what is reasonably considered part of a productivity suite? Or is the only requirement that a competitor complains?
This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it.
Laws shouldn't be written without clear lines - how can a person who wants to avoid breaking the law do that if we have an ever growing list of laws full of gray area and blurry lines?
This is a really strange way to attempt to silence my opinion.
Yes I do have issues with blurry laws. My current country is not in the EU, though until recently I was a resident of an EU country also with blurry laws. Am I allowed to have an opinion now?
Again, most laws are blurry in a mathematical sense. This is the case since laws existed. And so and to a surprise for some HN people, we usually don't break them all day.
DMA is actually precise and rooted in competitions challenges all known. (E.g. the slack case was discussed very often)
Complaining about the DMA is very strange. Also DMA targets big corpos, so needing a lawyer to understand all implications is again a none - issue.
The GP comment I was referring to asked where I live with no other context. The implication there is that my having an opinion, or at least sharing it, is somehow gated by whether I'm currently living in the EU.
We may have different interpretations of the law, or different opinions on what we think the laws should be, but that doesn't mean I am bizarrely posturing with no understanding of the law.
That just depends on how you look at it and what your opinion is with regards to what the role of governments should be.
I'd argue that its terrible from the angle of government overreach, this still seems well within the realm of a free market problem.
I'd also argue its terrible that corporate law is almost entirely boiled down to fines with no person really having to live with the consequences of their actions. That effectively makes it an accounting game, you're totally fine breaking the law as long as (a) its just a corporate expense and (b) you believe that you'll make more money breaking the law than you will lose in court.
If you're a big company and the penalty is only a fine... there is not much need to be absolutely sure you don't break the law. It is just another risk, like the risk of a data center catching on fire, that is to be managed, not avoided at all costs. Law for you and me means someone might go to jail and that's worth avoiding all costs, but for a company it just means spending more money or receiving less.
Cases are also more unique. People get murdered "routinely" so everyone has figured out the clear lines. Antitrust doesn't happen as often and each case is unique.
Are you hoping for a world where corporations can find loopholes and it's impossible to punish them for exploiting the loopholes because we can only execute the law strictly like a computer program? Even ethereum smart contracts can be overturned - it happened once.
No I'd actually rather see the opposite. If we really think its imperative that the government defines corporate laws then I'd want to see companies and those making decisions held legally liable.
Corporate law as it stands today is more of a game of accounting, trying to figure out what laws you break and how you make more profit from it then you may lose in court. Is it really so important that our governments define these laws only to chase companies for legal cases that either amount to nothing or a fraction of the profits gained? Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law?
> Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law?
Yes to this part though. We shouldn't be writing laws enforcible in perpetuity when we can't even define what the law covers. How are citizens meant to stay on the right side of the law when the laws are purposely gray get still punishable after clarifying the details later?
Don’t know what’s hard to understand there? Microsoft didn’t have a chat product (worth anything, Skype was a mountain of crap). Slack comes along and builds a great product, Microsoft goes “oh, the office suite now includes teams!” So everyone gets it “for free” if they have the office suite, murdering slack in the market. And of cause everyone will have to pay for Teams as the price of the office package rises to I cover the costs, no free lunch and all that.
It had been a different story if Teams had always been a part of office, and slack came along and tried to compete. But come on this is a 100% clear cut abuse of a monopoly on windows office programs by Microsoft abused to outcompete a competitor that they couldn’t fight honestly.
So the legal line is that once a company is successful in bundling and selling products the bundle is locked and can never be added to? That seems unreasonable to me, and I generally am pretty hard on monopolistic issues.
Edit: wouldn't this mean that Apple could never have added a preinstalled app to the iPhone after the phones became successful?
No, it's just that you can't use dominance in one market to privilege yourself in another. Basically cross promotion and bundling are looked at very sceptically once you get large enough.
slack murdered itself from the market by not delivering good video conferencing solution. Zoom succeeded immensely and it was not bundled with any office suite.
And the hilarious part is that Slack is still crap in regards of video calls.
A friend told me about how his workplace have switched from Zoom to Teams for video calls because they use Office and Teams is now bundled with Office so they don't have to pay extra for Zoom.
> This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it.
It's not bundling itself that's the issue. The use of one market to encroach on another is what's considered unfair competition. The fact that a competitor exists that just does one part of it is what makes the case that the two markets are separate.
Once car manufacturers started including bluetooth support they were incroaching on the aftermarket headunit market in a similar way. Was that actually illegal?
Sure, I'm well aware of antitrust laws, the Sherman Act, etc. If you want to look at it from that angle, what are the consumer concerns being violates by Teams being bundled and potentially replacing Zoom that was previously used? Teams isn't forced on Office users and Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose.
"""
The company doing this bundling may have a significantly large market share so that it may impose the tie on consumers, despite the forces of market competition. The tie may also harm other companies in the market for the tied good, or who sell only single components.
One effect of tying can be that low quality products achieve a higher market share than would otherwise be the case.
"""
> ...Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose.
Only until Zoom fails because consumers who would have otherwise used Zoom were forced to pay for Teams instead because the price for Teams was bundled into the price for Office. At least, that's the argument.
To be clear, I'm not myself arguing either way. But the reason for the case is clear and it is disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't exist.
Until everyone ends up getting a free Teams add-on, Zoom is driven out of business, and then Teams becomes a $19.99 a month per user service.
If a new competitor appears, the price drops again until they are driven away, then goes back up.
So initially it might be great for consumers because there is competition and there are choices. But it’s heading in the direction where consumers will be harmed.
In the realm of enterprise software, users aren't the "consumer" anyway. It's whatever executive has buying power to mandate what software is used by the org.
Some gas stations give you a free car wash with a fill-up (using their market to encroach on another). That doesn't mean the standalone car wash down the street has a case.
This isn't about consumer protection. This is about petty people still trying to "get" Microsoft after 30 years, it's all so tiresome.
Law is not working like that. We are talking about antitrust laws which have specific criterias to evaluate if a company is dominant on a market and is abusing this position or not. All these criterias must be evaluated for each case.
There are many steps involved:
- identifying the relevant markets, probably something like office applications market and chat applications market.
- whether the company has a dominant position on one (likely MS being dominant on the office apps market)
- checking if a specific action could be considered as a abuse of dominant position, restricting the competition. Here it would be MS bundling the app, giving them an unfair advantage on the chat apps market.
They would likely be to assess the real damages to the market, whether or not competitors were able to do business or not, etc.
It's not all black or white, like any legal subject.
Teams is deeply integrated with Office (including OneDrive for file storage/sharing, Outlook for meetings), more than any other Chat App... I guess it's a good thing in general but it's also an unfair competitive advantage (using "priviledged API" I think)
Chrome shouldn't be bundled with Android. Google search shouldn't be the default. Google Wallet / Google Pay shouldn't be the default.
Same for Apple and Microsoft.
Apple Cash shouldn't be the default in Messages, ... the list goes on and on.
Platform providers can easily attack businesses outside of their core business by setting defaults. They use these synergies to wield unfair power over hundreds of markets.
Don't even get me started on how you now have to pay to protect your brand name in search across these platforms. The fact that you might appear fourth in search for your own brand name in the App Store or on Google is absurd.
That's exactly what Microsoft would say about Teams though, so it's probably better that we err on the side of caution and ban curl bundling. At least until curl can prove that it's not anti-competitive.
Kidding aside, where exactly does it end? How do you consider when you’ve hit “too much” and how many pieces must be split out when you do? Should every product in the Office suite be offered only individually?
Indeed, a lot of people don't remember but back when spell checking was a new thing, there was genuine concern over whether bundling it with word processors was anticompetitive.
Or if Word and WordPerfect should be sold without spell checkers, and they'd need to interoperate with third party ones.
I find these kinds of rhetorical "where exactly does it end" comments really limp. Life is full of choices where there are grey areas. Lay out a bunch of desirable criteria - like not allowing a single entity to monopolise a market -then pick a starting point and iterate until you get a decent balance between the criteria. Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing after throwing your hands up into the air and whinging about the fact that it's complicated.
I understand your frustration, but it's genuinely not that easy.
You're right that there are a lot of gray areas in the law, where the two sides are clear but there's a blurry line. One famous example being, should Pringles be taxed as potato chips or as other chips? Because they're not fried slices of potatoes, they're a fried and shaped mixture of dried potatoes, corn flour, and rice flour. People think of them as potato chips, but they're not really. But it's still relatively straightforward to just draw a line somewhere.
The problem with antitrust is that we don't really know how to define it at all. It's not just a single dimension like "is it a potato chip?" where there's just a single line. It's more like a blob with lots of dimensions where different reasonable completely just completely disagree on what the basic most important elements even are.
> Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing
That's where you're wrong. Badly applied antitrust law can actually be much worse than doing nothing.
I'm not saying to give up. I'm just saying, it's not nearly as easy as you're making it sound. There are really smart people who research antitrust and try to come up with recommendations, and they have profound disagreements with each other. The problem is actually a lot harder than you seem to think it is.
Browsers are particularly tricky because they are also a software development platform which needs to be reliable as the OS is. In some browsers like ChromeOS they are even the primary one.
Chrome on Android is a completely different issue. It isn't that Android comes with Chrome or any other browser by default. It is that Googles PlayStore licensing outright allows Google to retroactively brick any phone by a manufacturer that fails to make the official Google Chrome binary the default browser on all of its Android phones. It is the reason Amazon had a hard time getting its Kindle productline of the ground since any manufacturer operating in the west was already bound by this shitshow of a license.
On another hand, Android respects the user choice of browser. I have not seen it forcefully start Chrome on me once I set Firefox as default.
I cannot say the same for Windows and Edge. Teams open links by default in Edge regardless of OS settings as far as I know (but it can be adjusted in Teams settings). Searching from the start menu also opens Edge and Bing rather than my choice of browser and search engine.
The DSA and the DMA doing what they are designed to do (in Europe)
It's unfortunate that the regulators and legislators will have to fight over every one of those services individually for a while until mega corps get tired of their games and retreat to making train- instead of boat loads of money.
All of the 365 products as well as similar from Adobe etc have been bundled in ways to lock out competition. Even Spotify is planning to.
At some point EU needs to bring clarity to their competition laws and decide what they want the landscape to look like. Because right now they are just making up the rules as they go.
I will be the last person to ever say Adobe is above criticism, but until Adobe creates an entire AdobeOS, I’m not sure they’re in the same league as MS here
Bundling is illegal in the EU if it used to abuse a dominant market position in one market to gain a competitive advantage in another.
So what Adobe does, or what Spotify wants to do by bundling their own products within the same market, is far from the level of bundling Teams with Office, which is bundling across markets and where Office is extremely dominant.
I don't think the EU is just making up the rules here, there are rules and this case is far more egregious and more clearly in violation than the examples you gave.
What do you mean by "making up the rules as they go"? Microsoft was found in breach of the Article 102 of the Treaty on the functioning of european union, which was last modified in 2007, and the article it infringed on abuse of dominant position was ratified in 2003. Furthermore, two other companies (one of which is american) complained to the european commission about Teams and only then an investigation was started
Perhaps, but Adobe and Spotify aren't offering a operating system where this crap is bundled. Neither do those examples have a 72% market share of PCs.
Microsoft basically gave Teams away to corporate customers. Now, couple this fact with how many manufactures include a pre-installed copy Office 365 on consumer devices, add in this automatically included Teams since 2019, and you have a nasty combination. Bonus: Microsoft gets to inflate its numbers on adoption.
Finally, Adobe Creative Cloud has roughly 30 million subscribers. Spotify has about 213 million subscribers. Windows, in general, has about 1.3 billion users.
I administer a Windows domain at my job that I do 40 hours a week so your assessment of me is just wrong and also offensive.
I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task manager and Teams is still disabled after the restart. It hasn't appeared in the task manager either. This is Windows 10 Pro, so the behavior might be different on different versions/editions of Windows. Also this behavior might be affected by updates. These machines automatically install updates every Saturday, so they're running the latest Windows 10. Even if the setting is reset on a future update, I can create a GPO to disable it or even a scheduled task if I'm not allowed to manage this computer at the domain level.
This is the thing: Windows admins praise Windows when they are running a completely different edition of Windows with different configurable behaviors. It looks a lot different for home users who almost certainly do not even know what a GPO is. And this also raises the suspicion of which exact Windows edition those admins are running on their home computer(s) and how they obtained the license for that...
You haven't re-created the described problem - Teams sets itself to auto-start again after you start it yourself. After all, it's very reasonable that you might want to join the occasional Teams meeting but not want it running after every boot.
I'm not sure if it's a particular version or environment that does this, but at the very least I can't replicate it on my home PC with Teams (personal). If I disable it in the task manager's autostart, it remains disabled if I start Teams. It won't even let me enable "Auto-start" in the Teams settings if it's disabled in the task manager.
not to mention that gp editor is disabled on non pro windows. i think there is some kind of a funky command line or registry hack to enable it. So yeah, I moved on from windows largely because of this force fed software.
Windows licensing is the hardest part of my job. Like if I want to have thin clients running Windows 11 VMs hosted on Windows Server 2022, how do I pay Microsoft so they will let me use the software in this way? I have no idea. I think you need to contact some kind of client services representative at Microsoft in order to figure out the whole licensing thing. By the way if it wasn't clear, I hate all of this. The only good thing about it is that I can make a living by dealing with it so other people don't have to.
Task Scheduler is available on Windows 10 Home. I think of it as "cron for Windows" even though despite being able to schedule the execution of specific tasks, it is really nothing like cron aside from that.
Not sure about other people here but I really liked how autostart used to work in 7 and before - just drop a shortcut in the Start menu folder and you're done. In 10 at some point, in order to have 3rd party software launched at login I had to use task scheduler.
I tried that path back then but it still didn't work for me - no program I tried to put there incl Windows ones was able to launch at the login. I had just entries in the task manager's startup page. Maybe something changed in 11 - dunno
I can guarantee you that the startup folder still works fine, but in some cases you must create the folder.
Microsoft does not screw around with backwards compatibility. There are multiple ways to start applications on launch now, including the user or public user startup folder, registry entries, and via scheduled tasks.
Apart from the fact that most people don't have a clue, and it shouldn't even have started to begin with... how then? I can see e.g. Widgets in the task manager. How do I disable the service permanently from the task manager?
When I look at the task manager, I literally have a tab called startup. It has an entry for Microsoft Teams. I set it to disabled. Teams doesn't start at startup for me.
Why do Windows users try so hard to keep defending their OS's shitty behaviors? It's always "you can disable it" (but it might come back automatically after an update), and when you can't disable it (one drive), it's "just don't use it".
I think it's a bit overblown. I don't have OneDrive enabled or Teams on my personal device and it was easy and mostly forgettable. I haven't any issues with it coming back after an update or anything. Edge isn't my default browser either.
I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. They really need a strong hand to rein in all these departments with their own metrics and agendas.
I think the general principle people are operating out of is that: The USER should be the one deciding 1. what gets installed onto their computer, 2. what gets run on the computer and when, and 3. the configuration of their own system. The OS vendor should not be deciding these things, nor the manufacturer of the computer.
It's not enough that we can just ignore or correct these things that are just happening on our own computers without our consent. These things should not be happening to begin with.
> people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
This, is it exactly.
Microsoft makes some very bad decisions, do not get me wrong. I agree with you and I think this is the core of why people complain so vehemently about Microsoft.
> I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
This goes to explain a lot of reactions that Very Online people tend to have to things. There must be a villain and that villain must be irredeemable. Even when, as the Brits would say, "cock-up" is a more likely explanation than "conspiracy."
Indeed, they've been playing shenanigans with OneDrive, but you can
actually uninstall it now easily. That didn't used to be the case. Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.
I'm pretty sure I solved definitively the Teams autostart problem long ago,
easily enough I can't recall what I did. It's not a problem for me, even on 'Home'
machines.
> Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.
Long, long ago we had names for software that auto-installs and auto enables even after you have removed it: malware, or spyware if it's not very destructive.
Why are you so upset that people derive a lot of value from Windows? Enough that they want to keep using it, and defend it because they don't agree with the "everything is broken" meme.
Because even if you don't touch Windows (or whatever mediocre malware Microsoft presently peddles) those folks come to you and say stuff like "skype won't start" and lo! it does not start, though after much clicking around and rebooting and trying the obvious things you discover that if you right-click and try "open with skype" on the skype icon then skype will start. That problem at some point disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared. Eh, who knows, it's Windows, and there's more science to reading tea leaves or goose entrails.
Then after za'o decades of stories like the above (it is merely the most recent of many) one might wonder how does Microsoft with so many programmers and so much money produce such kusogeware? That continues to waste my time?
You can have your own view. Nobody is taking it away or forcing you to believe otherwise. My point is why are people so upset when someone has a different view or doesn't agree with your personal view on Microsoft?
What? You shouldn't defend bad behaviour regardless of if you derive a lot of value from the same source. A good organization wants to be called out on shitty practices so they improve.
You can make an argument to convince people of your personal point of view, but there is no reason to be all upset if someone has a different viewpoint. Thankfully we are all at liberty to have our own view on this topic.
Because like industrial waste, Windows exports problems to other systems.
1. Windows has an absurdly short maximum path length of 260 characters.
2. On Windows, moving files to a temporary directory can fail, if the temporary directory has a longer prefix than the original path.
3. When uninstalling, the python utility "pip" first collects files into a temporary directory, then deletes that temporary directory.
4. To avoid running into MAX_PATH limits, pip doesn't use a normal temp directory. Instead, it makes a temporary directory adjacent to the directory it is removing. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/6029)
5. If pip is interrupted while uninstalling, the adjacent temp directory is never deleted.
So, in order to work around a Windows-only problem, pip stopped using standard file locations, creating a new problem that only existed due to the workaround. And then I'm left trying to figure out why I'm running out of disk space.
The MAX_PATH limit is annoying legacy backwards compatible stuff, but can be avoided by prefixing paths with \\?\ before passing them into the Windows API.
This is something that languages/runtimes with more effort put into portability already handle for you:
IMO, the thing that went wrong with Lync->SFB transition was they bought Skype based on the idea that they could do something to merge the code with Lync, but over a year or two found out that that the only value was in the Skype branding, and the code and architecture of it was a dumpster fire. While the whole org was distracted by that, Teams came along and showed them what a rewrite from the ground up could do.
In my cynical frame of mind I imagine those execs then golden-parachuted off to Google and were responsible for the Google Pay, GPay, and Google Wallet debacle.
Communicator -> Lync (after the computer system of a dystopian videogame?) -> Skype for Business (because everybody knew Skype, so let's make this completely unrelated thing) -> Teams.
The same goes for other office products too. For example, there is a business version of Outlook and a personal (?) version of it. They have the same name, the interface is similar enough to not be sure what you have, and the only reliable way to know is to check where you downloaded the installer from. Some business accounts apparently do not work with the personal version. Colleagues were just standing clueless as to why their company office accounts could not sync when they had to reinstall stuff on a computer.
I don't understand why they keep doing this. I guess because the names are recognisable enough that they want them advertised as such for both use-cases, but it is confusing.
The "Teams (new)" is absurd. Have we not learned not to name things this way by now? I say this as someone as guilty as anyone of having created an iterative series of files with "Final_1.txt", "Final_2.txt", "Final_1-new.txt" suffixes in times of mental sketch-padding. I would never release a product into the wild with any of those in the title, though.
Tbh, I prefer the Teams (new) and Teams (classic) naming. It's infinitely better than the naming they were doing before, which is they were named the exact same in the menu, but were entirely different versions.
I have the same problem on my Mac since installing Teams. Now Microsoft Update Manager starts every time I boot, even though it's not listed in the boot items. And it always shows that I have an update available ... to Microsoft Update Manager. It's a software ouroboros.
from the command line and it was an ultra-fast search using the index that Spotlight search uses. It's great to find pesky files when trying to rid yourself of an app and can't figure out what's left.
I usually pipe it into a text editor (mdfind 1password | subl), use my editor to put rm or so rm at the beginning of each one, then paste it into terminal to run. That lets me audit the files first as opposed to xargs but I'm sure there's a million ways—the point is mdfind can be useful.
Regardless of the software vendor, it's best to avoid Mac software for end users if the installer requires administrator privileges to run.
If you can't drag and drop an end user application into the Applications folder and have it work, just find another option in the same software category.
The exception would be system utilities that modify the OS.
It's perfectly normal for those to require administrative permission to install.
It fucking autoruns by default on my Linux machine and eventually the only way to prevent it from not auto-running is to remove it. I avoid teams now whenever possible and use a browser session if forced to use teams.
For some bizarre reason, Microsoft Teams is the registered file association handler for *HTML* files on my (Linux) machine. I have no idea how on earth that happened, but I do not think I did it.
Rant on: I use it in-browser on Linux also: Microsoft's security system is horrendous. I have to log into Teams-based client meetings using incognito browser windows because Teams keeps getting into mystery login loops with regular windows. It was working for a while, but I needed to log into Intel for Altera FPGA information. Well Intel uses Microsoft Azure for identity management (I had to log into Microsoft to log into Intel). After I did this, I couldn't attend client meetings anymore. I'm pretty sure the root of the issue is that I have multiple Microsoft identities, and their security model does not handle this case well, or at least it's incomprehensible to me and I don't want to waste any more time on it. Now Microsoft also knows me via github which is screwing it up further. It tries to tie your identity to your phone number, but it will not allow multiple account on a single number. It's a nightmare. Oh yeah, Microsoft also insists on having me install a phone app for identity management, but it doesn't solve any issues (I can't log in) other than wasting my time. This is the only thing I have to use Microsoft for, and the experience sucks. F* Microsoft.
Say what you will about Google, at least I never had these issues.
The state of louisiana has a similar issue with their domain servers - if you have an errant client somewhere, anywhere, that has the wrong password (or whatever their IDS thought was 'fishy',) you get locked out of your desktop in the office. for two years my wife had to call State I.T. every morning to get logged in. Her office locked so no need to log out until quittin time.
i was never able to track down what device it was, we reformatted a couple of laptops, wiped a couple phones.
Teams is a dumpster fire that no one would pay for. But, now that's it's been free and rolled out everywhere, it's a little late for the government to step in.
> Internet Explorer is a dumpster fire that no one would pay for. But, [because] it's free and rolled out everywhere, it's a little late for the government to step in.
Microsoft could easily avoid a lot of legal hassle and earn a lot of goodwill if they just offered a version of Windows with nothing but the most basic stuff pre-installed. Hell, just go the typical/custom install that a most other programs have during the initial start up, most people will just select the option that installs Office and the other crap anyway. The people that don't want it will never use it and current resent that you attempt to force them.
How does one decide what constitutes "basic"? Is a password-manager a "basic" feature? If so, then is "Passwords.app" bundled by Microsoft into Windows an unfair advantage because of distribution when compared to "1Password.app"? Ok, then, can Microsoft make a button called "Passwords" in their "Settings.app" and that qualifies as a non-competitive "basic" "Settings" feature?
Everything that came installed on vanilla Windows XP would pretty much work.
By that standard I'm also including Internet Explore 8 since that should be just sufficient enough to download a modern browser of the users choice. /s (but also a little bit serious)
Unfortunately, this doesn't feel true anymore, I have an enterprise version and it's still pushy with its news feed, bing, and other pre-installed stuff.
Installed plenty of Windows 10/11 Pro recently, comes with a whole bunch of stuff that in no way benefits business clients and in many ways will hamper them.
Why should they care about goodwill? Treating customers as they have has made them one of the most profitable companies in the world. People whine and complain about them all the time, but continue to throw barrels of money at them. Goodwill isn't going to improve their profitability.
that's what this is about, the EU warned MS to unbundle, and they are not impressed with how they have implemented it.
Yes you can buy teams separate from office now, but MS is still clearly abusing their market dominance to force teams upon you (same about onedrive to be fair)
The article is not clear to me. Is the complaint that Microsoft’s changes were not sufficient? Or is the complain that Microsoft’s behavior prior to the change is punishable now?
The article states
> The software giant unbundled Teams from Office in Europe last year in an attempt to address regulator concerns
Which is a pretty generic statement that makes it hard to follow why they would be accused of bundling still
How so? I installed office on a computer the other day, and I had to jump through hoops to only install Excel (which is the only one I needed). By default it was installed and set to automatically start for all users.
I don't understand how Microsoft gets under fire so easily, but Google bundles everything in Android, and you can't even uninstall most of them (maps, gmail etc.). Same with iphones. This is regulatory tipping the balance.
You'd expect them to have learnt the lesson with Internet Explorer but, as someone said, there is no way a man will understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it!
There was no framework for fining them, each case would have to be handled separately, now there is such a framework in the DMA and DSA, which greatly simplifies the regulators jobs.
I suspect that many other players are about to see such charges against them.
> In 2009 Microsoft was also forced to implement a browser ballot box in its Windows operating system to ensure users were presented with a choice of web browsers, after years of Microsoft bunding Internet Explorer with Windows. Microsoft was then fined $730 million in 2013 for failing to include the browser ballot in Windows 7 SP1.
That is 15 years at most, and 11 years for the most recent incident.
It's true that the US lawsuit was in 2001, but the EU antitrust fine (the discussion subject here) for failing to comply with offering a browsers ballot screen was in 2013[1], merely 11 years ago.
Roughly the same crew still running the show, it didn't slip through their mind, just the $732 million fine wasn't enough to deter them from doing it again
Modern productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are something very different than just invading another market and killing the market leader there. The Teams use case as shown a high degree of integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 platform which was not comparable to IE.
Soon the EU will charge parents for giving their children undue advantages as well.
In all seriousness - giving yourself an advantage is obviously what all companies want to do.
Why doesn’t the EU just, for each company, say exactly what they want? I honestly don’t understand the EU - they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?
Seems like an exercise in mediocrity. I guess par for the course given all of the EUs top companies were all started last century. Clearly out of touch.
Edit: wow the top 15 EU companies by revenue are utilities or auto.
All EU countries indeed have systems in place to limit undue advantages that any child can have (it's called a public education system and social security and later in life just "the law").
As for anti-trust issues, you clearly don't understand them.
You’re correct. I am not an expert on anti trust, but I do see that the EU has missed the boat on every new industry in the 21st century compared to the USA.
We will see in 100 years if regulation was the right move or not.
As for education - I doubt all public education in the EU is equivalent, or tutoring is banned, or additional resources, etc.
> I do see that the EU has missed the boat on every new industry in the 21st century compared to the USA.
Perhaps. But for completely different reasons, certainly not regulation.
And furthermore, while this _may_ hurt the EU in the long-run, they are still very good at the kind of industries that employ a large number of people across all skillsets.
> We will see in 100 years if regulation was the right move or not.
No need to wait, we can see this right now. The internet and app economy is completely enshittified. Only regulation can fix this, the market had 20 years and it only got worse.
Acorn was a British company, not European, and had significant help from Apple since 1980s. Nokia never really had any significant share of smartphone market once it took of. Nokia and Ericsson telecom infrastructure is inferior to Huawei's. I will give you Bluetooth and Spotify, but that's just a drop in a bucket.
Olivetti (an Italian company) took over Acorn in 1985. This was around the time the ARM processor was being developed. Acorn was in danger of going under at this time when one of their creditors bounced.
Last I've checked UK was firmly in Europe. I assume you meant something different, because literal interpretation makes no sense to me. Can you clarify?
Sorry, I meant it more like UK is in many regards more similar to the US, than to the rest of Europe. I mean stuff like common law vs civil law, the way you start/grow your business, access to financing, etc.
> Internet and social media, streaming services, etc.
The very WWW originated at CERN in Europe.
> Cryptocurrencies
For all we know Satoshi could've been an European. Same goes for Nicolas van Saberhagen. Vitalik is neither European nor from the US. I'm not an expert, but most of the US cryptocurrency startups I see are cheap pyramid schemes, and no real innovation anymore.
> AI
DeepMind was a British company. It had several successes, and was acquired by Google later, which raises a question what does it mean "innovation happens in the US". In this case innovation happens in UK, but it's owned by a American company.
There's certainly a lot more, but (similarly to you) I don't keep track of nationality of every company I interact with. And the question is pretty fuzzy in case of very international companies.
So what's the alternative you're proposing? That we let companies abuse their position and do whatever they want?
> they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?
Let's imagine the answer to this question is yes. Let's assume the EU doesn't want any company to do anything to have an advantage and that they believe a company should gain or lose market only based on the quality of their output. Would that be a bad thing?
Presumably having a better product itself is inherently advantageous and thus disadvantageous to competitors. Seems bad to me.
The alternative is if they don’t like the company they should just ban wholesale.
I honestly don’t see the point of banning bundling. There are plenty of bundled things that are ignored. Great example of this ironically is iMessage in the EU. Bundled but dwarfed by WhatsApp.
> In the year 2081, the Constitution dictates that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, earpiece radios for the intelligent that broadcast loud noises meant to disrupt thoughts, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
> they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?
You could just have a better product
It's quite the simple thought experiment, if teams is a better product than the alternatives no harm will come of it from being unbundled from unrelated products
If on the other hand its usage will fall then that means that there were better (for some users) products whose creators were being harmed not because of any fault of their product but because their product wasn't owned by an established company which could exploit its own position
The problem is that big companies are distorting competition simply due to their size. Smaller companies cannot compete. Startups are mostly doomed. How can they compete when a bigger player can copy their innovation, bundle it, or sell it at a loss, or for free? You can’t afford to sue them. You may note ven prevail given their ownership of numerous patents. There is no fair competition if these companies are not broken up. Or in the least, they need to be taxed differently.
I don't think Meet is bundled with Android by Google, it's not there if you use LineageOS. It's probably an individual choice by phone makers (although maybe not a completely free choice).
I do agree it shouldn't be bundled of course. But even Chrome isn't bundled for example, so I don't think Google is actually pushing many apps.
I've never ever had Meet bundled with any of my phones in my years of using android. On my latest S22, obviously the play store is there but the only other core Google apps that were installed were calendar, chrome, fit, Gmail, Google (the main "app" that probably bundles in the assistant and stuff like that), play music, maps and a couple of others. There was no meet and I can still uninstall calendar
The issue is not that "Microsoft bundled Teams" but rather that Microsoft came to companies like mine at the time and essentially said "We are deprecating Skype and we are offering this resource-hungry, bug-ridden program called Teams as only replacement. You don't have to use it, but we'll bill you for it anyway".
They knew full well that the average IT department would not approve paying for a second tool and offered no "discount" if you didn't want to use it. It was take it or take it.
My only complaint is that this didn't happen sooner, but I'll cut them some slack for not taking swift action during the notably-unremarkable year 2020.
Why don't they apply the laws universally and effectively make this kind of bundling illegal for mega corporations?
For endusers, it feels like they are playing with different rules for Microsoft Apple Adobe and Google. Since EU waits until the damage is done and milks them, it barely helps the situation for consumers. For corps they just assume the penalty as cost of doing business.
Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.
How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"?
Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.
Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom.
Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging this position to capture the colab software one. Google is not a market leader and in addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace, though this is less significant than the market dominance.
I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the US not targeting Adobe with antitrust for bundling together tools for typesetters, marketers, video editors, animators, etc, etc?
The only reason is that law enforcement is reactive. And usually requires the tactic to be effective before it does (yes, too late by then).
Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.
Two questions: do Adobe uses their dominant position in one of those markets to influence the clients in another market to use their product? Second, does Adobe's competition wishes to complain? The second part will prioritize the case, I think.
But where do you draw the line? In college, I used Word a lot and barely used Excel. At work I use Excel way more than Word (and often times I could easily just use a simple markdown editor instead of Word so I arguably wouldn't use that either). So they seem to be two different markets. I probably use the integrations between Excel and Teams more than I use the integrations between Word and Excel so bundling Teams makes more sense to me.
You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had. More importantly, installing Word doesn’t also automatically install Excel, and vice versa.
Microsoft wouldn’t have a problem if they provided a choice of Office with Teams and Office without Teams.
> You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had.
By this logic I can buy Excel + Word + Powerpoint and avoid Teams. They offer each office product individually or all their office products as a subscription. Why would it be different if they also offered a special subscription that just excluded teams?
Do you have stats that show this? "Market share" sites never feel very trustworthy to me, but they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience.
> addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace
This doesn't make sense to me as an argument. It sounds like you're saying that because Google hasn't bothered providing an offline version of their product they get a pass on bundling collaboration software, whereas because Microsoft provides an offline version that makes their bundling more egregious. Why exactly would that be?
> they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience.
I 100% believe that is your experience as 'HN-commenting SWE/tech bro/STEM worker', but just as strongly doubt that that is correct in the broader market.
I see that too on Statists for example, which doesn't state a methodology that I can see but I suspect it's users (every Gmail account?) or 'I have used Docs/Word365'.
This site claims Office365 absolutely dwarfs Google Workspace in # business customers/licences , which is more in line with my expectation: https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/
That sounds about right. I routinely dig through cybersecurity data from around 100k companies, and Microsoft has no real competition. Occasionally I see Google at a little 500-person up-and-comer, but almost never in the enterprise, and they show up less and less as the companies get bigger. I don't think I've ever seen them in the Fortune 100, for example, other than at Google itself. The world runs on Exchange and Office.
a tcp/ip stack was not part of windows in 1993. You'd buy it from a 3rd party company. Was Microsoft adding it "bundling"? Same for mouse drivers. media players. cd writing software. Unzip functionality, and on and on. Ms got in trouble for IE but every os now bundles a browser.
team communication seems like a core feature of an office suite in 2024 just like those other features feel like core parts of an OS in 2024
For antitrust to work, all we have to do is break up the biggest players. There's no point in focusing on (in that market) smaller players. They'll get to them because recursion.
Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.
Because word and excel go together in the needs of a business and those who usually buy one use the other as well. All competition of MS in this space offer similar products bundled in a similar way.
Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.
I disagree. Excel is probably far more used than Word, and word could be dropped from many people’s computers and no one would notice.
Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software?
My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.
Wouldn’t it be that we have a fairly widely spread defecto definition of “office suite” as word processor, spread sheet, presentation, email as it’s been that way for decades? Not sure about “communications”however I think it is a serious argument to consider that a separate product, but not the others, they’re kind of like peanut butter and jelly or Bonnie & Clyde or the three stooges.
I think that is a very un-serious argument with no consistency.
Microsoft has always sold a cheaper "office suite" without outlook. What businesses have historically bundled and not bundled is irrelevant to what is best for society going forward.
Surely there were many features that many software businesses add that weren't there before. What if Microsoft relabeled Teams to be part of Outlook? Like they made Calendars part of Outlook. It all feels like starting at the result and working backwards towards a justification.
Being around for a long time is a quality of its own. It strongly implies familiarity and good enough fit for everybody. (Traditions compete in a sense, some do not survive)
Yeah, I’m all for monopoly busting, but I don’t understand what kind of criteria are in use here. I’ve yet to see a definition that would allow me to apply rules in a coherent way.
My own company uses office 365, and of all the included programs, I basically only use excel, outlook, and teams. I haven’t even opened word in years, all documents are shared as PDFs. As such, word has no more inherent need for “bundling” than teams.
It just seems arbitrary. I’d be more comfortable just stating that companies over a certain size can’t bundle at all.
It's not that simple. Imagine you build the next great thing, you open up a new product line for everyone. Your business starts doing well, but then Microsoft or Apple come along, throw money at it and include it in their bundles (Office or OS) by default.
Suddenly, you are the loser, while they are selling below investment cost to simply push you out of the market.
So that's the issue.
Similarly, it should probably be made illegal for VC-backed startups to undercut incumbents just to shut them down: that's very similar to me.
> Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams?
It's not.
The argument you're replying to is remarkably similar to the ones in the EU+Apple threads: Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such. Why isn't Xbox or Switch a "general purpose" computer? Because people don't consider it as such. The whole thing boils down to circular logic of "it is a general purpose computer because it is".
The same thing is happening here: Why is it ok to bundle Word and Excel, but not Word and Teams? Because people consider the first one ok, but not the second. Ok, but WHY?!?
It's like arguing with a religious fanatic. You are wrong to assume there is any logic behind it.
If you really dig into why Microsoft and Apple, and why not Spotify and SAP, the only real answer is: because the EC defined the boundaries of the DMA to include the types of businesses that are run from America and exclude the types of businesses that are run from European. When you finally back them into a corner, the defenders of the DMA fall back to "well $AMERICAN_COMPANY is a gatekeeper, but $EURO_COMPANY is not a gatekeeper".
Spotify and SAP easily meet the quantitative thresholds that catch MS, Facebook and Apple, but the EC carefully defined that a "gatekeeper" belongs to certain categories of businesses (operating system, social media, etc.) and does not belong to certain other categories (music streaming, business software) so that it does not catch them. And as we saw with iPadOS, the quantitative thresholds don't even matter if the EC feels like ignoring them.
I like the Australian approach to these types of laws. Rather than making some complicated definition that carefully selects the desired targets it's usually just a list that the government maintains. Makes it obvious to everyone how it works.
Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.
The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1.
By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s.
If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!
Word and Excel aren't really that related either. The only reason we think of them as part of an office suite is because they have been bundled for a long time. As far as I can tell most people don't really use both, they mostly using one or the other.
Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software?
Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup.
This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together?
Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more.
How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?
Should they have to un-bundle Windows Explorer, Notepad, Photo Viewer, Control Panel, and all the other utilities as well, under the same logic? If not, why?
1) technically? yes, absolutely- apps like explorer or photo viewer should only use public APIs so other companies can make comparable apps on the OS with 90% market share
2) these are all OS utilities, not workplace apps - there's a big difference between Adobe/Microsoft Office/Google bundling their apps where there's a very clear, very powerful disincentive to compete vs something like explorer.
I think part of the problem is "what is an OS utility" and "what is an app". All your OS configuration could be done via a REST API, text files or some other well defined protocol. So you could have competing configuration apps that all help you manage your config in their own way and unbundle the control panel. Realistically looking at your average sparse linux distro shows just how "minimal" an OS can be, and even they bundle applications. Yet, I realistically don't thing consumers or the tech market at large would be assisted by a law mandating that all operating systems be as minimal as the linux kernel (no GNU/Linux, that's bundling!). And even if you did go that far, now we get into arguments over monolithic kernels and micro kernels.
sorry, no, that shouldn't be allowed either. as someone who's working on a cloud task scheduler, OS's should be forced to unbundle thread management. Linux needs to be banned in the EU until it doesn't come with a default thread manager.
Bundling is not illegal as long as the bundling is not forced. When Microsoft got into trouble by bundling Media Player with Windows, the fix was to offer Windows with or and without Media Player (“Windows N”). The bundled offer became legal by also offering the unbundled version.
and the hilarious part is that just like with IE it addressed completely non-existent problem as the future showed that the users went after subscription services and browsing on mobile.
Part of me almost feels the EU owes Microsoft an apology for the amount of private time, people and money Windows N and the browser ballot stuff took up in the XP days, given how much they were forced to invest in certain efforts that so utterly failed to change anything about the status quo.
Chrome didn't need a browser ballot to defeat IE. Almost no one bought or shipped the N versions of Windows. Spotify, iTunes et al still managed to come around just fine despite that pesky default install of Windows Media Player!
If you ask me they should also be forced to sell Windows Media Player separately.
Although I may be ok with no requiring them to port it to OSes other than Windows. But you should at least be able to gaze at the bytes without buying Windows.
Endusers should have a total control over what is getting installed on their machines - just like we used to not so long ago or how some Linux distros allows you to select additional software. Each operating system coming from the biggest corporations should offer two paths: express/recommended setup and a fully customizable one for advanced users.
The probability that they are actually a EU resident and move to the US because of app bundling is close to zero. And yes, that would be completely ridiculous.
"They used to sell exclusively hot-dogs, and now they sell hot-dogs and hamburgers. That's the last straw, I'm going back to the US where they only sell hot-dogs!"
You have to admit it sounds slightly ridiculous, right?
Yeah it does, not sure why are we talking about that though. It's a complete misrepresentation of the situation.
Let's take Google services as an example. I'm no fan of Google but their integrated search/Maps/PoI/hotels/directions/flight tickets experience was perfect, my workflow depends on it a lot. Now I can't use it without a US VPN, the only thing I get without it are some useless web search results and a small picture of a map that doesn't show anything interesting and doesn't do anything on click.
Not going "back" BTW, I was born in EU. And of course, it's really not just about the online services. Land costs absurd money, wages are absurdly low, energy strategy is completely idiotic and thus energy prices are absurd, business administration is unnecessarily hard, regulations are hard to understand and navigate, and so on. I don't want to live in an environment where a bunch of ideologists chosen by people out of my own state fight my life at every step. Wanna bet when they try to pass Chat Control again? Why am I required to own a Google/Apple controlled device to do basically anything, like register a car or pay taxes?
Each operating system coming from the biggest corporations should offer two paths: express/recommended setup and a fully customizable one for advanced users.
Making bundles is always ok as long as it's not commercially unsound way to push other competitors out. Antitrust rules mostly concern dominant players in a market because they are usually the only ones able to do that (though VC-backed companies that have been in the red for decade or more are similar).
In general, MacBooks have always been bundled with MacOS, and Apple did not hold a dominant position in laptops when they started bundling OS (and everyone else usually does too: computer is largely useless without an OS).
If you price bundles commercially (eg. price of Word itself should not equal price of the entire Office suite), and not at a loss, that is generally ok.
So if Apple is forced to unbundle the OS but decides to sell at $10 or $20 (usually the price of Windows on laptops you can get without an OS), do you think it changes anything for customers who like MacOS?
It only ensures Apple has to support those who don't want MacOS.
Well the logical conclusion of that is to break up the businesses. No other remedy or it's just going to happen again and again, in subtle and not so subtle ways (bundling Teams for free was so absurdly obviously anti-competitive no one has even doubted that in this thread so far..)
It's weird how many people misunderstands the intent behind anti-trust laws. In a nutshell, it's about abusing a dominant position in one market (which is ok) to enter and conquer another market by undercutting competition by providing your product in the new market with the existing dominant product at basically no cost to consumer (there are a lot more nuances).
Having non-interoperable features (like charging ports or iMessage green bubbles) has nothing to do with it, and those are ok (at least for anti-trust laws).
Given that banana countries were a thing, I think it wouldn't be completely out of character for the US to enforce it's (it's own companies) interests. But I don't think it will be war, but rather soft-power.
War? The EU didn't start a war when the US blew up nordstream 2. In fact they spent a lot of time nervously pointing at everyone except the US (who said they would blow it up).
It's a totally abusive and subservient relationship.
But then again the US doesn't allow the EU to have software companies, so they might not care that the data that would go to Teams is being hovered by a different US company instead.
> War? The EU didn't start a war when the US blew up nordstream 2.
As people, who most likely are outside of the intelligence community, we don't know who blew up NS2. Current lead suspect is Ukraine, although speculation ranges from the US to the Russians doing it themselves. Of course, if there's some substancial evidence aside from "Biden said something one time", I'm sure people would be interested. But before such evidence is presented, this conspiracy theory doesn't really hold water.
But let's entertain the idea some. Assuming that CIA or whatever did do it (again, need more evidence), why would they a) do it again, and b) do it for the sake of Microsoft of all things? At least NS2 can easily be seen as a strategic liability. Meanwhile, it'd be pretty nearsighted to do this kind of an op just because Microsoft is being held liable for bundling Teams and abusing its dominant market position with it.
True. Mr. Vladimirovich doesn't want for any regime change that could just go back to selling natgas. I personally don't think it was UA either, although unlike so many other Kremlin claims, this would at least be a bit believable because there would be a motive.
But given that the pipe was already closed when it blew up, it most likely was FSB trying to frame Western powers and/or UA. Wouldn't be the first time FSB blows up Russian stuff to blame others.
How long is the long run, because 20+ years later, they seem to be doing better than almost every other business in the world, or at least tied in the top 3.
If you look at the last 25 years Microsoft has ended up with more misses than hits. Azure and xBox are the big hits (both from the Balmer era), but they missed in so many other places (mobile notably). They spent most of the Balmer era looking over the shoulder at the DOJ and missed many opportunities as a result.
The Nadella era has seen a lot acquisitions and investments, and they are milking the Windows/Office cash cow until it falls over, but everything else seems to be moribund. Revenue in every segment of Microsoft apart from Azure has either been flat or in decline for the last decade based on the last chart I saw.
What happens when the Azure cash cow stops growing? I don't see anything in the pipeline that Microsoft has that others also don't have access to.
I think if Microsoft had been split up into 3 companies (OS, software, web properties) then it would have moved them beyond the DOJ era quicker and would have put those 3 companies in a much better position to reap more opportunities from the 2000-2020 boom across a wider space.
I already know how this will be solved: Microsoft will pay a (small) fine and file it under "the cost of doing business" while the damage is already done. Teams is one of the absolutely worst products ever programmed, it's hiliarious how bad it is. It only reached its market share because Microsoft gave it away "for free" with Office 365 or MS 365 or whatever it's called now.
Don’t these “actions”usually include separating the products out the way the EU wants them?aka don’t include Teams in EU installs of MS office or don’t even include office at all? Otherwise a fine is useless.
Yet we’d absolutely balk at a computer or phone not coming with a browser by default nowadays. I don’t really think that ruling was on the right side of history.
That's because the browser is a de-facto OS, which occurred only due to a sheer lack of actual OS market innovation - Debian had a package manager 20 years ago, Windows didn't until 2019. Browsers succeeded because apps ("websites") abstracted away the download/install process in a user friendly fashion.
That ruling's only fault was that it didn't go far enough in hammering Microsoft's anticompetitive "moat" practices.
Yeah, except the bundling wasn't the problem. It was that Microsoft was using their size to build a giant moat around IE. If you wanted modern features, it was all on IE and behind their proprietary scripting languages (vbscript, jscript, mshtml, activex controls)
This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls)
That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition
The end conclusion was "having a single superdominant proprietary browser is stupid." This probably extends to other communications software like productivity apps.
The only reason the Web exists as it does now is because of Firefox. Even with the ruling, Microsoft put IE into maintenance mode and disbanded the team once IE6 won. The only reason IE7 came about was because Netscape opened their source code, and eventually firefox started really gaining popularity. And that was only because it was a foundation and volunteers, not a proprietary business (otherwise it would have died like the others.)
So you can thank the Netscape and Mozilla folks that the modern web isn't still IE6 with the state of the art being the marquee tag, ActiveX, and VBSctipt/ancient JavaScript.
Bloomberg Terminal is a hardware/software dynamic duo!
Reuters and Dow Jones have competitive packages too.
Other software in finance:
kdb, for time-series analytics [0].
AmiBroker - amazing tech analysis package, and AmiBroker Formula Language (AFL - found this because I like J and APL), an array-based PL with debugger built-in to the AmiBroker platform. Fast [1].
I have been programming since 1978 starting on a Commodore PET 2001, but I saw computers and programming as tools. I was studying neural nets and genetic algorithms in the early 90s. I gravitated to lean, simple and easy software, but somehow every software I use just seems so bloated, in-your-face, inefficient, that I have chosen simple tools to use now. I keep a J interpreter open on my desktop along with Frink as more-than-desktop calculators. I use a Home edition of Mathematica, the orginal notebook interface, that has so much curated data and built-in functions that what was once complicated is now a great ecosystem to do math, analysis, reports, engineering, etc. And, yes, Excel, no matter how much it is disparaged by programmers. I gave up Inventor and other CAD programs for Alibre Design (yes, I have SolveSpace on my toolbar for fun!). I am so glad I steered clear of IT/SW engineering/etc. after speaking to many in all parts of the industry. The tool is their job, not the thing the tool does.
PS: I have run hundred-million-dollar construction jobs in SE Asia and MENA using WhatsApp in the field from my Samsung Note to annotate drawings, photos, etc. even though Slack and high-end PM programs were back in the office.
KDB is the epitome of finance software. Cool in theory, and a decade ago probably the right choice if you needed to separate compute/storage and just get crazy high performance, but god damn I hate actually having to deal with it. Would rather DuckDB or even just Polars every time these days.
If it is the only tool you use and you came from a world of Skype/Lync, then for you Teams is a significant improvement. But for example if you come from Slack, Teams provides an abysmal experience.
The thing I hate most about the new version of Teams is that it flashes the taskbar when a new message is received. You can disable the pop-up notifications, but that doesn't affect the flashing taskbar for some (??) reason. The old version of Teams didn't work like this, it was possible to turn off all notifications & alerts so that you only got notified when a meeting started or somebody @'d you.
You can go into do-not-disturb mode to stop the flashing, but then pings aren't delivered and you can't do 1-on-1 calls. So there's a pretty significant tradeoff. I wasn't able to find a way to disable them any other way (registry hacks I saw recommended online didn't work).
This sucks because if I see the taskbar flashing, I MUST go and check out Teams. It's too distracting to leave on. So there can't be a background group chat where I'm not taking part and doing other things -- I get dragged into checking every message which is extremely annoying. I suspect that 'immediately check out the app causing the taskbar to flash' is basically a conditioned response for most computer users so I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
----
I also strongly dislike the vibe of the Teams emoji set. The :) looks like it's playing dumb, and it adds that connotation to messages I see from people using it. (admittedly I've only seen it be used by my dumb coworkers)
Ive used Teams for years and its pretty darn good in my opinion. Sure it has its quirks and from time to time fails to work for the entire hemisphere of the planet - but I kinda like that feature!
Oh well. I guess it's time for Microsoft to discontinue Teams, destroy any related IP, purge any copies from GitHub/developer workstations/backups, forcibly uninstall it from end-user machines, update Windows to forcibly delete any copies installed in the future, and never, ever, ever under any circumstances try to compete in the chat/video conferencing market ever again. The world will survive, if just barely.
What would I ever do without my software engineering team collaboration tool that can't send a fucking code snippet without burning half the screen on whitespace and a 400px font size title lol
I've taken to sending code snippets as regular message text with the monospaced font, because the code snippets feature is so awkward and slow (and sometimes won't load for the recipient at all).
My favorite Teams bug and it took me a moment to understand the stupidity of what was happening: you copy a message you have received from someone and send it back to them. It is invisible on their screen. You have dark mode so what you copied was white text, which ends up being white on their light mode Teams.
Nowadays I just get irrationally angry at the utter imbecile that decided you want to copy an abbreviated date and the sender name whenever you copy a message.
Copy and paste retaining style is one of the most annoying things in normie computing. Just why? And on teams it basically infects any other text you right afterwards.
Haha I've faced this issue for years but it seems like they fixed it. You now can also set the code highlighting option directly from the editor without going into options. Took them years unfortunately.
I've often wondered about that. I feel like it says something about the development team behind Teams if either, (a) it doesn't bother them, or (b) they don't dog-food their own product this way.
Don’t forget compensation! Microsoft should be forced to pay compensation to anyone who has ever used Teams, scaled in proportion to the number of hours they’ve had to leave it running on their computer.
That actually would be amazing - I would be very much in favour of large companies (e.g. based on number of users / market cap) having to put significant sums of money in escrow ahead of any software release, which would then be distributed to its users as compensation in the case of a data breach or regulatory rulings.
I can't imagine any jurisdiction that tried this would see anything other than large companies prohibiting their software from being used in that jurisdiction. Any company that then grew large would quickly exit. Every iOS update requires 1B+ to sit in escrow?
Or just not install it on new windows versions? I mean it’s easy enough to leave old versions intact if they already exist and make IT install teams/office if they’re actually being used.
They should get rid of Edge and a few other stuffs too. Is there a tool to conveniently remove any feature I do not want? Googled around and looks like Powershell is my only reliable option -- and still I cannot remove Edge.
I thought this was going to be about bundling Teams in O365 and other biz deals.
It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack.
Sadly I know of many, many more companies where the offer is indeed too good to refuse, much to the disappointment of their workforce.
I was helping out at a place where two employees needed Word and Excel licenses, and somehow they got a massive, free Teams license out of it.
The moment the EU opened an investigation [1], they reacted [2] by getting it out of their bundle pack [3], and offering it on the side instead, with the new bundles being marked "[bundle name] EEA NO TEAMS", and teams being priced 5€/user/month.
At least I guess kudos to Microsoft for learning a trick Facebook/Meta/Apple keep ignoring, the moment they say it coming they switched gear because they know the EU won't buy their "good for the user" thing.
> 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. These changes will impact our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. They are designed to address two concerns that are central to the Commission’s investigation: (1) that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and (2) that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites.
They also made it extra annoying to switch from a regular package to that one, and somehow when you search on products in your admin (if you're already a customer) you need to know what to type for those no teams bundle to show up.
And often their core responsibility will be security, governance, vendor management, digital transformation etc. Not the actual operations of the business or the comfort and productivity of staff.
> It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack.
I don't agree.
For many years now I use Linux.
I pay for Slack because some of my clients use it and it is convenient.
For some other clients I need to use Teams.
I like Teams better. I never had issues with them. Slack I reinstall every 2-3 months because it breaks in some weird way; last time yesterday when I uploaded a 'big file' (csv of a few mb), not only did it crash but restarting it didn't help. Teams work good for chating, for the calendar, and for video calls. I have a lot better experience with Teams for video calls than Google Meet.
They must have improved something because last time I tried, it had the sound quality of a 90s phone box on Linux because they copied over the Skype code which never worked.
I want to avoid the ms ecosystem so much that I use teams vs other tools as a litmus test.
If I am not desperate for work I tell contracting firms "no teams meetings" in writing when we setting up new contracts. Often, this is isn't a problem and they setup a zoom, webex, or even a plain phone call. Frequently, they try to setup calls on teams and usually about 15m before I remind them that I won't do teams and either they tell me to install teams and send me a windows download link (which does me no good) or the frantically struggle to do anything else. When I explain that I won't install ms software and I will skip their offer for it their mind is blown and and I refer them back to the email they saw, responded to, and agreed to. Then I avoid working for someone who ignored me and would likely ignore me again over more serious matters.
I should probably have more filters like this but avoiding this and the C# work closet to me has saved me a lot of long term pain.
Avoiding C#? That's quite an unfortunate way of looking at the situation if it leads you to missing out on one of the best programming languages of today.
I strongly despise C#, and I say that with about 5 real years of experience with it. I have been on teams delivering real products with it.
It is like Java but married to microsoft while philanders as it pleases. And when I say that out loud some putz always responds "but Mono!" and then the thing I need is inevitably not supported on Mono. When it is working it is stuck on windows server and needing a reboot for some half-assed update microsoft is pushing. With Java I can have all that on a Linux but at least pick which major vendor bends me over! Maybe C# works in Unity, but that is its fan scattering mess.
In C, C++, or Rust I am not beholden to one company and can actually control the hardware to do my bidding. I can go into the compilers to find bugs and the creators are responsive when I make bug reports. Often these are more expressive and have tinier code as well. Isn't C# supposed to be faster to develop in these old crusty systems languages? Why that never the case on real teams I am on?
If performance isn't what I need but rather short development cycles there is Lua, Python, BASH, or my personal favorite Ruby. All of these allow hacking together stuff so much faster, and when I have needed they it offer more control of the garbage collector or other runtime features so I often get better performance out of them.
Then there are the shops using C#. I don't know why, and I see no obvious mechanism that causes this but the culture in C# shops are invariably terrible. I have done 16 contracts in the past 22 years and the least stressful most productive shops are always the nix using professionals or JavaScript slinging kids fresh from college.
The overly corporate C# shops always seem stuck in bad ways, pushing some non-agile scrum, lacking any critical thinking, and are often overtly hostile. These are the shops that buy whatever consultant are selling and force it on me without ever consulting me. I have seen one fist-fight break out in the office and it was in a C# shop. Somehow those backend Unix greybeard wizards are always able to talk through their differences with the 22 year blue haired kid who wants progressive typing on the TypeScript interface that is fed by that wizard's service, and they often do it while discussing technical merit instead of political posturing.
At last C# contract I started I left after 2 weeks (and I am not counting that towards my 16), because the lead developer was preposterously racist and felt comfortable opening up to me about that in that short a time period. I had a lot of self reflection about why he felt comfortable dumping his race war crap on me, and I have no clue why.
C# is not as fast as the slow languages but productive languages. C# is not productive as fast but low productivity languages. And every other thing I mentioned doesn't even have a wiff of vendor lock-in. I am good without C# and the cultures that somehow arise around it.
(and the pay sucks I easily get double doing anything* else)
Which decade did these events transpire in? 00s? It also sounds like the issues had little to do with the language and a lot with specific positions and market...
I fail to recognize the language you are talking about, but perhaps the fondness of Ruby is a subtle hint of warped perception of reality?
Ruby is just a bad technology - very slow, brittle, extremely messy the moment a codebase becomes larger than trivial, not ideal package management, unproductive. It was made work by many great engineers that would have either had more success with a different technology or would have spent less effort in achieving their goals with it. Pick C# or Kotlin with ASP.NET Core or Ktor and be faster at shipping both the initial prototype and then managing the product after years of growth, while enjoying 10x difference in server resources utilization.
But frankly your sentiment on C# is so unhinged that I don't even know where to start.
There are many companies that employ C# alongside other languages, or C# and F# exclusively, that have teams using Macs with VS Code or Rider. Whichever language/platform you had experience with has little to do with what .NET is for 8 years already, and its unproductive to insist on outdated perception.
Mono as a runtime hasn't been relevant in almost a decade now (since the advent of .NET Core). "I can go into the compilers to find bugs" -> yeah, that's what Roslyn is. C# lets you control GC, marshalling, safety, calling convention, inlining, etc. for very fast hand-rolled managed or unmanaged code if you need it.
Mono is alive and well in https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/tree/main/src/mono. It serves Android, iOS, WASM and s390x targets, maybe some other too. It is generally much slower than CoreCLR, but besides supporting more platforms, has features that CoreCLR lacks like IL interpreter (technically, CoreCLR has one too but it has been broken for years and is never used).
Ideally, iOS's Mono usage will be eventually replaced with NativeAOT, but for now it's still being worked on, not in the least in iOS-targeting GUI frameworks like MAUI to provide better NAOT compatibility. In addition, NativeAOT's linker/trimmer is based on Mono.Linker and Mono.Cecil, so the project became part of .NET as was intended.
But you are right in a way, because the above is often confused with a separate, outdated Mono distribution that some people incorrectly keep insisting on installing on their Linux systems.
Yes, I wanted to mention WASM but honestly even talking about it is doing more of a disservice to modern .NET than not given the preconceptions about Mono.
The Copilot meeting summary features in Teams are actually pretty good. It's far more likely that someone will quickly skim the meeting summary than sit through an hour long meeting recording. Costs extra, though.
This I do agree with. While AI feels like it has been shoved in many places it doesn't fit so well, it is amazing when it comes to quickly summarizing meetings.
I never understood how Microsoft giving you software you are not forced to use is bad, but apple limiting which software you can run on your device is not.
From anti user perspective MS does a lot worse than adding teams - mandatory online accounts to begin with.
> apple limiting which software you can run on your device is not
If you are talking about iOS and the app store, that is another ongoing battle between the European Commission and Apple. It has been reported here on HN a number of times recently.
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[ 246 ms ] story [ 3378 ms ] threadI worked for a company that used Google Chat internally and we'd use Teams with some clients. People kept telling me how much better Slack is, but now that I work for a company that does have Slack, I can't say that it's any better. In fact I'd probably rank Google Chat highest of those three options.
Microsoft is giving people free replacement that is in some ways better (but with a worse interface). There's no point in NOT using Teams, when it's at least no much worse. In the same way where people are using Google Chat, or whatever it's called now, because they use GSuite / Google Workplace and the integration is really good. Teams just needs to be cheaper than Slack, unless Slack massively overhauls everything.
It is hilarious that Slack still has not been able to introduce proper video calls while introducing relatively useless integrations.
I do agree with the EU that Teams should be unbundled, but unless you have a cheaper and/or better alternative I don't see it being all that effective. Teams also integrate into Active Directory and the whole Microsoft ecosystem in a way most other systems just doesn't do (not that they can't).
And that's thing - if slack was actually trying to add features and integrations that users actually wanted, it would not fail that much.
I mean, Zoom succeeded without having anything except team conferencing...
https://jibe.google.com/
Funny thing is the last I checked RCS still doesn't have any APIs/third party access and if you use a rooted device Google Messages will fail to send RCS even to the carrier's Jibe instance?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/1/24087418/google-messages-b...
This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it.
Yes I do have issues with blurry laws. My current country is not in the EU, though until recently I was a resident of an EU country also with blurry laws. Am I allowed to have an opinion now?
Again, most laws are blurry in a mathematical sense. This is the case since laws existed. And so and to a surprise for some HN people, we usually don't break them all day.
DMA is actually precise and rooted in competitions challenges all known. (E.g. the slack case was discussed very often) Complaining about the DMA is very strange. Also DMA targets big corpos, so needing a lawyer to understand all implications is again a none - issue.
It's that your replies in this thread show a complete lack of understanding and a refusal to take in multiple people patiently explaining to you.
Apart from your bizarre posture that calling out your low quality posting constitutes "silencing" you.
We may have different interpretations of the law, or different opinions on what we think the laws should be, but that doesn't mean I am bizarrely posturing with no understanding of the law.
I'd argue that its terrible from the angle of government overreach, this still seems well within the realm of a free market problem.
I'd also argue its terrible that corporate law is almost entirely boiled down to fines with no person really having to live with the consequences of their actions. That effectively makes it an accounting game, you're totally fine breaking the law as long as (a) its just a corporate expense and (b) you believe that you'll make more money breaking the law than you will lose in court.
Cases are also more unique. People get murdered "routinely" so everyone has figured out the clear lines. Antitrust doesn't happen as often and each case is unique.
Are you hoping for a world where corporations can find loopholes and it's impossible to punish them for exploiting the loopholes because we can only execute the law strictly like a computer program? Even ethereum smart contracts can be overturned - it happened once.
Corporate law as it stands today is more of a game of accounting, trying to figure out what laws you break and how you make more profit from it then you may lose in court. Is it really so important that our governments define these laws only to chase companies for legal cases that either amount to nothing or a fraction of the profits gained? Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law?
> Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law?
Yes to this part though. We shouldn't be writing laws enforcible in perpetuity when we can't even define what the law covers. How are citizens meant to stay on the right side of the law when the laws are purposely gray get still punishable after clarifying the details later?
It had been a different story if Teams had always been a part of office, and slack came along and tried to compete. But come on this is a 100% clear cut abuse of a monopoly on windows office programs by Microsoft abused to outcompete a competitor that they couldn’t fight honestly.
Edit: wouldn't this mean that Apple could never have added a preinstalled app to the iPhone after the phones became successful?
And the hilarious part is that Slack is still crap in regards of video calls.
> This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it.
It's not bundling itself that's the issue. The use of one market to encroach on another is what's considered unfair competition. The fact that a competitor exists that just does one part of it is what makes the case that the two markets are separate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
""" The company doing this bundling may have a significantly large market share so that it may impose the tie on consumers, despite the forces of market competition. The tie may also harm other companies in the market for the tied good, or who sell only single components.
One effect of tying can be that low quality products achieve a higher market share than would otherwise be the case. """
> ...Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose.
Only until Zoom fails because consumers who would have otherwise used Zoom were forced to pay for Teams instead because the price for Teams was bundled into the price for Office. At least, that's the argument.
To be clear, I'm not myself arguing either way. But the reason for the case is clear and it is disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't exist.
If a new competitor appears, the price drops again until they are driven away, then goes back up.
So initially it might be great for consumers because there is competition and there are choices. But it’s heading in the direction where consumers will be harmed.
This isn't about consumer protection. This is about petty people still trying to "get" Microsoft after 30 years, it's all so tiresome.
There are many steps involved: - identifying the relevant markets, probably something like office applications market and chat applications market. - whether the company has a dominant position on one (likely MS being dominant on the office apps market) - checking if a specific action could be considered as a abuse of dominant position, restricting the competition. Here it would be MS bundling the app, giving them an unfair advantage on the chat apps market.
They would likely be to assess the real damages to the market, whether or not competitors were able to do business or not, etc.
It's not all black or white, like any legal subject.
Chrome shouldn't be bundled with Android. Google search shouldn't be the default. Google Wallet / Google Pay shouldn't be the default.
Same for Apple and Microsoft.
Apple Cash shouldn't be the default in Messages, ... the list goes on and on.
Platform providers can easily attack businesses outside of their core business by setting defaults. They use these synergies to wield unfair power over hundreds of markets.
Don't even get me started on how you now have to pay to protect your brand name in search across these platforms. The fact that you might appear fourth in search for your own brand name in the App Store or on Google is absurd.
I’m not going to tell my mom how to curl a copy of Brave onto her machine because no browser was provided.
Kidding aside, where exactly does it end? How do you consider when you’ve hit “too much” and how many pieces must be split out when you do? Should every product in the Office suite be offered only individually?
Or if Word and WordPerfect should be sold without spell checkers, and they'd need to interoperate with third party ones.
That means that Firefox nextcloud and bitwarden are installed by default on windows/macs
You're right that there are a lot of gray areas in the law, where the two sides are clear but there's a blurry line. One famous example being, should Pringles be taxed as potato chips or as other chips? Because they're not fried slices of potatoes, they're a fried and shaped mixture of dried potatoes, corn flour, and rice flour. People think of them as potato chips, but they're not really. But it's still relatively straightforward to just draw a line somewhere.
The problem with antitrust is that we don't really know how to define it at all. It's not just a single dimension like "is it a potato chip?" where there's just a single line. It's more like a blob with lots of dimensions where different reasonable completely just completely disagree on what the basic most important elements even are.
> Sure it'll be a bit messy, but better than doing exactly nothing
That's where you're wrong. Badly applied antitrust law can actually be much worse than doing nothing.
I'm not saying to give up. I'm just saying, it's not nearly as easy as you're making it sound. There are really smart people who research antitrust and try to come up with recommendations, and they have profound disagreements with each other. The problem is actually a lot harder than you seem to think it is.
Maybe, but they already solved that once already https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
I cannot say the same for Windows and Edge. Teams open links by default in Edge regardless of OS settings as far as I know (but it can be adjusted in Teams settings). Searching from the start menu also opens Edge and Bing rather than my choice of browser and search engine.
At least for me, chrome was asking me last week what search engine I want to use. Made me switch to duckduckgo.
The DSA and the DMA doing what they are designed to do (in Europe)
It's unfortunate that the regulators and legislators will have to fight over every one of those services individually for a while until mega corps get tired of their games and retreat to making train- instead of boat loads of money.
All of the 365 products as well as similar from Adobe etc have been bundled in ways to lock out competition. Even Spotify is planning to.
At some point EU needs to bring clarity to their competition laws and decide what they want the landscape to look like. Because right now they are just making up the rules as they go.
So what Adobe does, or what Spotify wants to do by bundling their own products within the same market, is far from the level of bundling Teams with Office, which is bundling across markets and where Office is extremely dominant.
I don't think the EU is just making up the rules here, there are rules and this case is far more egregious and more clearly in violation than the examples you gave.
Microsoft basically gave Teams away to corporate customers. Now, couple this fact with how many manufactures include a pre-installed copy Office 365 on consumer devices, add in this automatically included Teams since 2019, and you have a nasty combination. Bonus: Microsoft gets to inflate its numbers on adoption.
Finally, Adobe Creative Cloud has roughly 30 million subscribers. Spotify has about 213 million subscribers. Windows, in general, has about 1.3 billion users.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/why-do...
I just restarted one of the workstations with Teams startup enabled and Teams ran when the computer restarted. Then I tried disabling Teams startup in the task manager on the same workstation and then restarted the workstation, and Teams hasn't started. I checked the startup tab in the task manager and Teams is still disabled after the restart. It hasn't appeared in the task manager either. This is Windows 10 Pro, so the behavior might be different on different versions/editions of Windows. Also this behavior might be affected by updates. These machines automatically install updates every Saturday, so they're running the latest Windows 10. Even if the setting is reset on a future update, I can create a GPO to disable it or even a scheduled task if I'm not allowed to manage this computer at the domain level.
Sounds like the Windows version of saying "I don't understand why the whole world isn't running Linux."
Also, funny thing: clicking this link pushes me thru https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/v2.0/authori...(...) - feels like they're expecting me using Edge so they could log me in automatically with snatched MSA credentials
[1] https://github.com/winfsp/sshfs-win
Microsoft does not screw around with backwards compatibility. There are multiple ways to start applications on launch now, including the user or public user startup folder, registry entries, and via scheduled tasks.
I feel like people want Windows to be evil so they oversell the issues.
That's not to say that Microsoft should be forgiven for their obvious over-promotion of internal products. They really need a strong hand to rein in all these departments with their own metrics and agendas.
It's not enough that we can just ignore or correct these things that are just happening on our own computers without our consent. These things should not be happening to begin with.
This, is it exactly.
Microsoft makes some very bad decisions, do not get me wrong. I agree with you and I think this is the core of why people complain so vehemently about Microsoft.
This goes to explain a lot of reactions that Very Online people tend to have to things. There must be a villain and that villain must be irredeemable. Even when, as the Brits would say, "cock-up" is a more likely explanation than "conspiracy."
Indeed, they've been playing shenanigans with OneDrive, but you can actually uninstall it now easily. That didn't used to be the case. Yes, it gets re-installed, yes it now is auto-enabling itself, but hey - you can easily remove it now.
I'm pretty sure I solved definitively the Teams autostart problem long ago, easily enough I can't recall what I did. It's not a problem for me, even on 'Home' machines.
Long, long ago we had names for software that auto-installs and auto enables even after you have removed it: malware, or spyware if it's not very destructive.
Then after za'o decades of stories like the above (it is merely the most recent of many) one might wonder how does Microsoft with so many programmers and so much money produce such kusogeware? That continues to waste my time?
1. Windows has an absurdly short maximum path length of 260 characters.
2. On Windows, moving files to a temporary directory can fail, if the temporary directory has a longer prefix than the original path.
3. When uninstalling, the python utility "pip" first collects files into a temporary directory, then deletes that temporary directory.
4. To avoid running into MAX_PATH limits, pip doesn't use a normal temp directory. Instead, it makes a temporary directory adjacent to the directory it is removing. (https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/6029)
5. If pip is interrupted while uninstalling, the adjacent temp directory is never deleted.
So, in order to work around a Windows-only problem, pip stopped using standard file locations, creating a new problem that only existed due to the workaround. And then I'm left trying to figure out why I'm running out of disk space.
Yeah, I don't see Windows in the top 5.
This is something that languages/runtimes with more effort put into portability already handle for you:
https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/java.base/win...
If Python doesn't do this it's just because the sort of people who write Python don't care about Windows enough to fix it.
I've got a work laptop with a teams for the work domain which I want.
There's also a completely different copy of teams, "Microsoft teams (Personal)" teams, which I have to close.
Not just every boot, even after I close it manually, I still find it running constantly.
I've no idea what triggers it, but it doesn't seem to obey any startup settings.
;)
Teams (Windows, Old) showed them a rewrite from the ground up could still be a dumpster fire.
I was working at Microsoft during the switch to Skype for Business and the employees were dogfooding the beta. Terrible time to be alive.
Every step was about as fucked-up as every other.
I don't understand why they keep doing this. I guess because the names are recognisable enough that they want them advertised as such for both use-cases, but it is confusing.
I forget the exact course of action, but from what I remember:
- ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist
- ~/Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft\ AU\ Daemon/
- /Library/Application\ Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft\ AutoUpdate.app
Nuke all of that, though for the last one you may have to chmod 000 it.
Then do a search for everything with Microsoft Update in it and delete that too.
This process kind of reminds me of removing spyware infestations from Windows XP.
I usually pipe it into a text editor (mdfind 1password | subl), use my editor to put rm or so rm at the beginning of each one, then paste it into terminal to run. That lets me audit the files first as opposed to xargs but I'm sure there's a million ways—the point is mdfind can be useful.
If you can't drag and drop an end user application into the Applications folder and have it work, just find another option in the same software category.
The exception would be system utilities that modify the OS.
It's perfectly normal for those to require administrative permission to install.
Say what you will about Google, at least I never had these issues.
Edit: I'm not the only who constantly has this issue, see: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/new-te...
i was never able to track down what device it was, we reformatted a couple of laptops, wiped a couple phones.
By that standard I'm also including Internet Explore 8 since that should be just sufficient enough to download a modern browser of the users choice. /s (but also a little bit serious)
Installed plenty of Windows 10/11 Pro recently, comes with a whole bunch of stuff that in no way benefits business clients and in many ways will hamper them.
Yes you can buy teams separate from office now, but MS is still clearly abusing their market dominance to force teams upon you (same about onedrive to be fair)
The article states
> The software giant unbundled Teams from Office in Europe last year in an attempt to address regulator concerns
Which is a pretty generic statement that makes it hard to follow why they would be accused of bundling still
And what do you mean you can't uninstall google maps and gmail? Are you using a Pixel?
Also both Apple and Android have come under fire about this stuff.
The DMA also forces them to make all of these apps uninstallable.
I suspect that many other players are about to see such charges against them.
> In 2009 Microsoft was also forced to implement a browser ballot box in its Windows operating system to ensure users were presented with a choice of web browsers, after years of Microsoft bunding Internet Explorer with Windows. Microsoft was then fined $730 million in 2013 for failing to include the browser ballot in Windows 7 SP1.
That is 15 years at most, and 11 years for the most recent incident.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
Roughly the same crew still running the show, it didn't slip through their mind, just the $732 million fine wasn't enough to deter them from doing it again
[1]- https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/technology/eu-fines-micro...
Fine the C-suite n years of total income (including unrealised income).
In all seriousness - giving yourself an advantage is obviously what all companies want to do.
Why doesn’t the EU just, for each company, say exactly what they want? I honestly don’t understand the EU - they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?
Seems like an exercise in mediocrity. I guess par for the course given all of the EUs top companies were all started last century. Clearly out of touch.
Edit: wow the top 15 EU companies by revenue are utilities or auto.
As for anti-trust issues, you clearly don't understand them.
We will see in 100 years if regulation was the right move or not.
As for education - I doubt all public education in the EU is equivalent, or tutoring is banned, or additional resources, etc.
Perhaps. But for completely different reasons, certainly not regulation. And furthermore, while this _may_ hurt the EU in the long-run, they are still very good at the kind of industries that employ a large number of people across all skillsets.
> We will see in 100 years if regulation was the right move or not.
No need to wait, we can see this right now. The internet and app economy is completely enshittified. Only regulation can fix this, the market had 20 years and it only got worse.
Are you able to cite any examples of 'missing the boat'?
- semiconductor manufacturing
- Internet and social media, streaming services, etc.
- Cryptocurrencies
- Smartphones and related app stores
- Electric cars
- Self-driving cars
- AI
It certainly feels like all the technological innovation happens in the US, and sometimes in China, but never in Europe.
ARM originated at a European company (Acorn/Olivetti).
Bluetooth originated at a European Company (Ericsson)
Psion, Nokia, and Ericsson invented what would be considered the basics of the Smartphone (via Symbian, Series 60 etc)
Spotify is a Swedish company.
Nokia and Ericsson produce a good amount of the telecoms infrastructure equipment.
While Europe certainly hasn't had a start-up culture on par with the US it hasn't been a complete slouch either.
Apple didn't come along until much later.
Last I've checked UK was firmly in Europe. I assume you meant something different, because literal interpretation makes no sense to me. Can you clarify?
The very WWW originated at CERN in Europe.
> Cryptocurrencies
For all we know Satoshi could've been an European. Same goes for Nicolas van Saberhagen. Vitalik is neither European nor from the US. I'm not an expert, but most of the US cryptocurrency startups I see are cheap pyramid schemes, and no real innovation anymore.
> AI
DeepMind was a British company. It had several successes, and was acquired by Google later, which raises a question what does it mean "innovation happens in the US". In this case innovation happens in UK, but it's owned by a American company.
There's certainly a lot more, but (similarly to you) I don't keep track of nationality of every company I interact with. And the question is pretty fuzzy in case of very international companies.
> they don’t want any company to do anything to have an advantage compared to their competitors?
Let's imagine the answer to this question is yes. Let's assume the EU doesn't want any company to do anything to have an advantage and that they believe a company should gain or lose market only based on the quality of their output. Would that be a bad thing?
The alternative is if they don’t like the company they should just ban wholesale.
I honestly don’t see the point of banning bundling. There are plenty of bundled things that are ignored. Great example of this ironically is iMessage in the EU. Bundled but dwarfed by WhatsApp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
> In the year 2081, the Constitution dictates that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear "handicaps": masks for those who are too beautiful, earpiece radios for the intelligent that broadcast loud noises meant to disrupt thoughts, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
You could just have a better product
It's quite the simple thought experiment, if teams is a better product than the alternatives no harm will come of it from being unbundled from unrelated products
If on the other hand its usage will fall then that means that there were better (for some users) products whose creators were being harmed not because of any fault of their product but because their product wasn't owned by an established company which could exploit its own position
https://www.statista.com/chart/20028/daily-active-users-of-s...
I do agree it shouldn't be bundled of course. But even Chrome isn't bundled for example, so I don't think Google is actually pushing many apps.
OEM's have to ship them all or none of them.
It's totally uncomparable. Also google is not actively pushing it's customers to use it to kill their competitors
They knew full well that the average IT department would not approve paying for a second tool and offered no "discount" if you didn't want to use it. It was take it or take it.
My only complaint is that this didn't happen sooner, but I'll cut them some slack for not taking swift action during the notably-unremarkable year 2020.
Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.
Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging this position to capture the colab software one. Google is not a market leader and in addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace, though this is less significant than the market dominance.
Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.
Microsoft wouldn’t have a problem if they provided a choice of Office with Teams and Office without Teams.
By this logic I can buy Excel + Word + Powerpoint and avoid Teams. They offer each office product individually or all their office products as a subscription. Why would it be different if they also offered a special subscription that just excluded teams?
Do you have stats that show this? "Market share" sites never feel very trustworthy to me, but they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience.
> addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace
This doesn't make sense to me as an argument. It sounds like you're saying that because Google hasn't bothered providing an offline version of their product they get a pass on bundling collaboration software, whereas because Microsoft provides an offline version that makes their bundling more egregious. Why exactly would that be?
I 100% believe that is your experience as 'HN-commenting SWE/tech bro/STEM worker', but just as strongly doubt that that is correct in the broader market.
This site claims Office365 absolutely dwarfs Google Workspace in # business customers/licences , which is more in line with my expectation: https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/
team communication seems like a core feature of an office suite in 2024 just like those other features feel like core parts of an OS in 2024
Of course there is overlap, but there is also lots of overlap among those who need chat/meet and those who need slides.
Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.
Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software?
My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.
Microsoft has always sold a cheaper "office suite" without outlook. What businesses have historically bundled and not bundled is irrelevant to what is best for society going forward.
Surely there were many features that many software businesses add that weren't there before. What if Microsoft relabeled Teams to be part of Outlook? Like they made Calendars part of Outlook. It all feels like starting at the result and working backwards towards a justification.
Being around for a long time is a quality of its own. It strongly implies familiarity and good enough fit for everybody. (Traditions compete in a sense, some do not survive)
My own company uses office 365, and of all the included programs, I basically only use excel, outlook, and teams. I haven’t even opened word in years, all documents are shared as PDFs. As such, word has no more inherent need for “bundling” than teams.
It just seems arbitrary. I’d be more comfortable just stating that companies over a certain size can’t bundle at all.
Suddenly, you are the loser, while they are selling below investment cost to simply push you out of the market.
So that's the issue.
Similarly, it should probably be made illegal for VC-backed startups to undercut incumbents just to shut them down: that's very similar to me.
It's not.
The argument you're replying to is remarkably similar to the ones in the EU+Apple threads: Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such. Why isn't Xbox or Switch a "general purpose" computer? Because people don't consider it as such. The whole thing boils down to circular logic of "it is a general purpose computer because it is".
The same thing is happening here: Why is it ok to bundle Word and Excel, but not Word and Teams? Because people consider the first one ok, but not the second. Ok, but WHY?!?
It's like arguing with a religious fanatic. You are wrong to assume there is any logic behind it.
If you really dig into why Microsoft and Apple, and why not Spotify and SAP, the only real answer is: because the EC defined the boundaries of the DMA to include the types of businesses that are run from America and exclude the types of businesses that are run from European. When you finally back them into a corner, the defenders of the DMA fall back to "well $AMERICAN_COMPANY is a gatekeeper, but $EURO_COMPANY is not a gatekeeper".
Spotify and SAP easily meet the quantitative thresholds that catch MS, Facebook and Apple, but the EC carefully defined that a "gatekeeper" belongs to certain categories of businesses (operating system, social media, etc.) and does not belong to certain other categories (music streaming, business software) so that it does not catch them. And as we saw with iPadOS, the quantitative thresholds don't even matter if the EC feels like ignoring them.
I don't see why Spotify is a gate keeper. You have e.g. Deezer or Apple Music and you can switch very easily.
I don't.
No more than I consider NetApp OS or OneFS general purpose, even though both are based/built on BSD (I've SSHed into OneFS CLI often in my last job)
At least with Apple/iOS (not sure about Android), phones and tablets were purposefully designed to be appliances from the very beginning.
https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s.
If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!
Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software?
Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup.
This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together?
Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more.
How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?
I think part of the problem is "what is an OS utility" and "what is an app". All your OS configuration could be done via a REST API, text files or some other well defined protocol. So you could have competing configuration apps that all help you manage your config in their own way and unbundle the control panel. Realistically looking at your average sparse linux distro shows just how "minimal" an OS can be, and even they bundle applications. Yet, I realistically don't thing consumers or the tech market at large would be assisted by a law mandating that all operating systems be as minimal as the linux kernel (no GNU/Linux, that's bundling!). And even if you did go that far, now we get into arguments over monolithic kernels and micro kernels.
sorry, no, that shouldn't be allowed either. as someone who's working on a cloud task scheduler, OS's should be forced to unbundle thread management. Linux needs to be banned in the EU until it doesn't come with a default thread manager.
Chrome didn't need a browser ballot to defeat IE. Almost no one bought or shipped the N versions of Windows. Spotify, iTunes et al still managed to come around just fine despite that pesky default install of Windows Media Player!
Although I may be ok with no requiring them to port it to OSes other than Windows. But you should at least be able to gaze at the bytes without buying Windows.
If the EU makes Apple unbundle all the good stuff from macOS I'll finally move to the US.
The only reason to move to the US would be because you really don't want to have a choice, but that would be weird.
You have to admit it sounds slightly ridiculous, right?
Let's take Google services as an example. I'm no fan of Google but their integrated search/Maps/PoI/hotels/directions/flight tickets experience was perfect, my workflow depends on it a lot. Now I can't use it without a US VPN, the only thing I get without it are some useless web search results and a small picture of a map that doesn't show anything interesting and doesn't do anything on click.
Not going "back" BTW, I was born in EU. And of course, it's really not just about the online services. Land costs absurd money, wages are absurdly low, energy strategy is completely idiotic and thus energy prices are absurd, business administration is unnecessarily hard, regulations are hard to understand and navigate, and so on. I don't want to live in an environment where a bunch of ideologists chosen by people out of my own state fight my life at every step. Wanna bet when they try to pass Chat Control again? Why am I required to own a Google/Apple controlled device to do basically anything, like register a car or pay taxes?
In general, MacBooks have always been bundled with MacOS, and Apple did not hold a dominant position in laptops when they started bundling OS (and everyone else usually does too: computer is largely useless without an OS).
If you price bundles commercially (eg. price of Word itself should not equal price of the entire Office suite), and not at a loss, that is generally ok.
So if Apple is forced to unbundle the OS but decides to sell at $10 or $20 (usually the price of Windows on laptops you can get without an OS), do you think it changes anything for customers who like MacOS?
It only ensures Apple has to support those who don't want MacOS.
Having non-interoperable features (like charging ports or iMessage green bubbles) has nothing to do with it, and those are ok (at least for anti-trust laws).
It's a totally abusive and subservient relationship.
But then again the US doesn't allow the EU to have software companies, so they might not care that the data that would go to Teams is being hovered by a different US company instead.
...pardon?
As people, who most likely are outside of the intelligence community, we don't know who blew up NS2. Current lead suspect is Ukraine, although speculation ranges from the US to the Russians doing it themselves. Of course, if there's some substancial evidence aside from "Biden said something one time", I'm sure people would be interested. But before such evidence is presented, this conspiracy theory doesn't really hold water.
But let's entertain the idea some. Assuming that CIA or whatever did do it (again, need more evidence), why would they a) do it again, and b) do it for the sake of Microsoft of all things? At least NS2 can easily be seen as a strategic liability. Meanwhile, it'd be pretty nearsighted to do this kind of an op just because Microsoft is being held liable for bundling Teams and abusing its dominant market position with it.
Current lead suspect is Russia. Don't repeate Russian propaganda.
But given that the pipe was already closed when it blew up, it most likely was FSB trying to frame Western powers and/or UA. Wouldn't be the first time FSB blows up Russian stuff to blame others.
The Nadella era has seen a lot acquisitions and investments, and they are milking the Windows/Office cash cow until it falls over, but everything else seems to be moribund. Revenue in every segment of Microsoft apart from Azure has either been flat or in decline for the last decade based on the last chart I saw.
What happens when the Azure cash cow stops growing? I don't see anything in the pipeline that Microsoft has that others also don't have access to.
I think if Microsoft had been split up into 3 companies (OS, software, web properties) then it would have moved them beyond the DOJ era quicker and would have put those 3 companies in a much better position to reap more opportunities from the 2000-2020 boom across a wider space.
That ruling's only fault was that it didn't go far enough in hammering Microsoft's anticompetitive "moat" practices.
This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls)
That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition
The only reason the Web exists as it does now is because of Firefox. Even with the ruling, Microsoft put IE into maintenance mode and disbanded the team once IE6 won. The only reason IE7 came about was because Netscape opened their source code, and eventually firefox started really gaining popularity. And that was only because it was a foundation and volunteers, not a proprietary business (otherwise it would have died like the others.)
So you can thank the Netscape and Mozilla folks that the modern web isn't still IE6 with the state of the art being the marquee tag, ActiveX, and VBSctipt/ancient JavaScript.
It is somehow worse than mIRC and I used that 30 years ago.
In that context, maybe Teams is user-friendly and high-performance!
Is that the "exception that proves the rule"?
What else ya got? Genuinely interested.
Other software in finance:
kdb, for time-series analytics [0].
AmiBroker - amazing tech analysis package, and AmiBroker Formula Language (AFL - found this because I like J and APL), an array-based PL with debugger built-in to the AmiBroker platform. Fast [1].
I have been programming since 1978 starting on a Commodore PET 2001, but I saw computers and programming as tools. I was studying neural nets and genetic algorithms in the early 90s. I gravitated to lean, simple and easy software, but somehow every software I use just seems so bloated, in-your-face, inefficient, that I have chosen simple tools to use now. I keep a J interpreter open on my desktop along with Frink as more-than-desktop calculators. I use a Home edition of Mathematica, the orginal notebook interface, that has so much curated data and built-in functions that what was once complicated is now a great ecosystem to do math, analysis, reports, engineering, etc. And, yes, Excel, no matter how much it is disparaged by programmers. I gave up Inventor and other CAD programs for Alibre Design (yes, I have SolveSpace on my toolbar for fun!). I am so glad I steered clear of IT/SW engineering/etc. after speaking to many in all parts of the industry. The tool is their job, not the thing the tool does.
PS: I have run hundred-million-dollar construction jobs in SE Asia and MENA using WhatsApp in the field from my Samsung Note to annotate drawings, photos, etc. even though Slack and high-end PM programs were back in the office.
[0] https://kx.com/products/kdb/
[1] https://www.amibroker.com/
You can go into do-not-disturb mode to stop the flashing, but then pings aren't delivered and you can't do 1-on-1 calls. So there's a pretty significant tradeoff. I wasn't able to find a way to disable them any other way (registry hacks I saw recommended online didn't work).
This sucks because if I see the taskbar flashing, I MUST go and check out Teams. It's too distracting to leave on. So there can't be a background group chat where I'm not taking part and doing other things -- I get dragged into checking every message which is extremely annoying. I suspect that 'immediately check out the app causing the taskbar to flash' is basically a conditioned response for most computer users so I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
----
I also strongly dislike the vibe of the Teams emoji set. The :) looks like it's playing dumb, and it adds that connotation to messages I see from people using it. (admittedly I've only seen it be used by my dumb coworkers)
Nowadays I just get irrationally angry at the utter imbecile that decided you want to copy an abbreviated date and the sender name whenever you copy a message.
(Just give me fenced code blocks, please!)
Oh, and line breaks get replaced by something that breaks some editors¹, and quotes obviously get mangled.
1 - I mean, look at their name! Teams is right here!
Can everyone please use Mattermost, Slack, or Matrix chat?
A standalone product the user can buy and install if he wishes to.
You know, like other companies who don't happen to be the OS developer.
It's wild to me that Teams is so fucking horrible that many businesses who effectively get it for free as part of other dealings still choose to pay for Slack.
Sadly I know of many, many more companies where the offer is indeed too good to refuse, much to the disappointment of their workforce.
I was helping out at a place where two employees needed Word and Excel licenses, and somehow they got a massive, free Teams license out of it.
It's free per user, but it's quite expensive if you start adding meeting rooms, voip, webinar, ...
Zoom+slack are literally cheaper in total, but the startup cost is very visible and teams startup cost is 0.
The moment the EU opened an investigation [1], they reacted [2] by getting it out of their bundle pack [3], and offering it on the side instead, with the new bundles being marked "[bundle name] EEA NO TEAMS", and teams being priced 5€/user/month.
At least I guess kudos to Microsoft for learning a trick Facebook/Meta/Apple keep ignoring, the moment they say it coming they switched gear because they know the EU won't buy their "good for the user" thing.
> 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. These changes will impact our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. They are designed to address two concerns that are central to the Commission’s investigation: (1) that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and (2) that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites.
They also made it extra annoying to switch from a regular package to that one, and somehow when you search on products in your admin (if you're already a customer) you need to know what to type for those no teams bundle to show up.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...
[2] https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2023/08/31/european-com...
[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-...
They run Windows rather than macOS. They think in terms of Active Directory. If it’s not MS then it isn’t “enterprise” in their world view.
I don't agree.
For many years now I use Linux. I pay for Slack because some of my clients use it and it is convenient. For some other clients I need to use Teams.
I like Teams better. I never had issues with them. Slack I reinstall every 2-3 months because it breaks in some weird way; last time yesterday when I uploaded a 'big file' (csv of a few mb), not only did it crash but restarting it didn't help. Teams work good for chating, for the calendar, and for video calls. I have a lot better experience with Teams for video calls than Google Meet.
And slack does not support audio/video calls on Linux/Firefox.
If I am not desperate for work I tell contracting firms "no teams meetings" in writing when we setting up new contracts. Often, this is isn't a problem and they setup a zoom, webex, or even a plain phone call. Frequently, they try to setup calls on teams and usually about 15m before I remind them that I won't do teams and either they tell me to install teams and send me a windows download link (which does me no good) or the frantically struggle to do anything else. When I explain that I won't install ms software and I will skip their offer for it their mind is blown and and I refer them back to the email they saw, responded to, and agreed to. Then I avoid working for someone who ignored me and would likely ignore me again over more serious matters.
I should probably have more filters like this but avoiding this and the C# work closet to me has saved me a lot of long term pain.
It is like Java but married to microsoft while philanders as it pleases. And when I say that out loud some putz always responds "but Mono!" and then the thing I need is inevitably not supported on Mono. When it is working it is stuck on windows server and needing a reboot for some half-assed update microsoft is pushing. With Java I can have all that on a Linux but at least pick which major vendor bends me over! Maybe C# works in Unity, but that is its fan scattering mess.
In C, C++, or Rust I am not beholden to one company and can actually control the hardware to do my bidding. I can go into the compilers to find bugs and the creators are responsive when I make bug reports. Often these are more expressive and have tinier code as well. Isn't C# supposed to be faster to develop in these old crusty systems languages? Why that never the case on real teams I am on?
If performance isn't what I need but rather short development cycles there is Lua, Python, BASH, or my personal favorite Ruby. All of these allow hacking together stuff so much faster, and when I have needed they it offer more control of the garbage collector or other runtime features so I often get better performance out of them.
Then there are the shops using C#. I don't know why, and I see no obvious mechanism that causes this but the culture in C# shops are invariably terrible. I have done 16 contracts in the past 22 years and the least stressful most productive shops are always the nix using professionals or JavaScript slinging kids fresh from college.
The overly corporate C# shops always seem stuck in bad ways, pushing some non-agile scrum, lacking any critical thinking, and are often overtly hostile. These are the shops that buy whatever consultant are selling and force it on me without ever consulting me. I have seen one fist-fight break out in the office and it was in a C# shop. Somehow those backend Unix greybeard wizards are always able to talk through their differences with the 22 year blue haired kid who wants progressive typing on the TypeScript interface that is fed by that wizard's service, and they often do it while discussing technical merit instead of political posturing.
At last C# contract I started I left after 2 weeks (and I am not counting that towards my 16), because the lead developer was preposterously racist and felt comfortable opening up to me about that in that short a time period. I had a lot of self reflection about why he felt comfortable dumping his race war crap on me, and I have no clue why.
C# is not as fast as the slow languages but productive languages. C# is not productive as fast but low productivity languages. And every other thing I mentioned doesn't even have a wiff of vendor lock-in. I am good without C# and the cultures that somehow arise around it.
(and the pay sucks I easily get double doing anything* else)
I fail to recognize the language you are talking about, but perhaps the fondness of Ruby is a subtle hint of warped perception of reality?
But interesting that you throw shade at Ruby with no explanation. Feel free to expand at length. I would like to hear your objections.
But frankly your sentiment on C# is so unhinged that I don't even know where to start.
Edit - No Rails, I never said rails.
But I guess by the time it installs Rails finally completes serving the first request.
I sure would like to see the software development shop that uses C# and not Visual Studio.
Ideally, iOS's Mono usage will be eventually replaced with NativeAOT, but for now it's still being worked on, not in the least in iOS-targeting GUI frameworks like MAUI to provide better NAOT compatibility. In addition, NativeAOT's linker/trimmer is based on Mono.Linker and Mono.Cecil, so the project became part of .NET as was intended.
But you are right in a way, because the above is often confused with a separate, outdated Mono distribution that some people incorrectly keep insisting on installing on their Linux systems.
Microsoft has long bundled Lync/Skype-for-Business with Office 365. Hell it did that, I’m pretty sure, before Slack even existed.
From anti user perspective MS does a lot worse than adding teams - mandatory online accounts to begin with.
It's not mandatory - there's a simple 11-step sequence of hacks that if executed correctly will let you create an offline user /s.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/install-windows-11-witho...
This does not represent the actual reality where MS crams their products down users’ orifices - like so many other companies do too.
> but apple limiting which software you can run on your device is not
This is also bad. Users deserve the respect and right to have general purpose computing platforms be open.
Edit: whitespace
If you are talking about iOS and the app store, that is another ongoing battle between the European Commission and Apple. It has been reported here on HN a number of times recently.