Microsoft Agrees To Stop Bundling Teams With Office (ft.com) 48
Microsoft will stop forcing customers of its popular Office software to also have its Teams video conferencing and messaging app automatically installed on their devices, in a move designed to prevent an official antitrust probe by EU regulators. From a report: The US tech giant has made the concession to avoid a formal investigation, said two people with direct knowledge of the decision, following a 2020 complaint by rival Slack which claimed Microsoft's practice of bundling the two services together was anti-competitive. These people said that, in future, when companies buy Office they can do it with or without Teams if they wished, but the mechanism on how to do this remains unclear. The people stressed talks are still ongoing and a deal is not certain. The move is part of an effort by Microsoft to try to avoid what would be its first antitrust probe in more than a decade, having sought to avoid legal battles with the European Commission that have proved bruising in the past.
Great! (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Great! (Score:1)
It's rather bogus anyway (Score:2)
It really does seem like Microsoft tossed it in there in hopes of getting more drive-by installs. On the Mac version of Office, at least - on more than one occasion I've had the Microsoft Auto-Updater tell me that Teams was up to date, only to have Teams tell me an update is available.
Now that I think about it, I don't think Auto-Update has ever told me about a Teams update. It reports Word and Excel updates... but Teams is always listed as current.
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Teams is pretty buggy. It's updating is confusing, and I've been on calls where everyone claims their Teams is up to date but in which three differences in UI are seen. I think part of this is that Teams is really a web app so that the desktop application is just a bundled browser.
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Re:It's rather bogus anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that it's more sinister than that. It felt like Microsoft made Teams "free" with Office 365 to kill off corporate use of Slack.
It seems like they succeeded in that effort, too. Slack also appears to be losing small-group users to other chat programs like Discord.
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Then to make matters worse they charge you a small fortune for functionality that's just free and better with Teams.
Nothing that has ever existed has been "free".
That - in fact - is the very reason bundling Teams is a potential invitation to trustbusting government forces.
There's an eternal economic-policy debate about whether antitrust is better than the alternatives, but using your existing marketshare/platform to "give away" a "free" product to destroy other competing products that don't have any underlying marketshare/platform is precisely one of the criteria for antitrust investigation.
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You should actually try using Teams for real sometime. It's complete dogshit compared to Slack, Zoom or Discord. Microsoft hasn't yet ripped off enough features and functionality from their competitors to make Teams useful in any way other than it's "free" for Microsoft users since pretty much every company has to license O365.
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It used to by that certain O365 levels got Skype. Then those were being migrated to Teams. Then the pandemic hit, suddenly everyone had Teams. Teams mostly updates itself, for better or for worse.
Why does the EU have to do this for us, D.C.? (Score:5, Insightful)
Have the feds already forgotten the antitrust actions of Microsoft (with IE in Windows 98) just 25 years ago? Why does an American company have to fear European regulators before they make the right changes?
Corporations have to be constantly monitored and regulated 24/7 to keep monopolistic behaviors at bay. And it feels like D.C. is at best drunk at the wheel.
Re:Why does the EU have to do this for us, D.C.? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Because they're always pushing the envelope. Push back on consumers and fair marketing until someone hints at resisting, then back up a bit.
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> Have the feds already forgotten the antitrust actions of Microsoft...just 25 years ago?
Yes!
I suspect part of the reason feds don't care as much this time is because MS lost ground in the consumer market, and politicians are more focused on consumer complaints. That is until businesses complains loudly and threaten to withhold campaign donations, which for some odd reason hasn't happened of note.
I called this for YEARS! (Score:4, Interesting)
Many businesses need/want Exchange/Outlook and Excel; M$ knows this. So, M$ uses monopoly-like powers to install or offer products as a "bundle" at prices competitors with a narrower offering cannot match. Outlook and Excel desktop apps are still probably the driving factor for Windows OS usage as well, for business deployments. "Teams is free with O365" is why a company I know is trying to minimize or eliminate their entire Cisco voice and WebEx footprint. The only real problem is old copper telephone lines, some emergency phone regulations and a call directory.
I have often been down voted for bringing this up, now a very large government points out M$'s unfair bundling tactics. I hope they review decoupling Windows desktop OS license as well.
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5 Years ago it might have made a difference, but today I am curious how many customers would opt to forego Teams; the whole integrated communication is the selling point.
I would have thought requiring them to conform to a specific standard to allow interoperability would do more to stimulate competition.
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While "integrated communications" is a selling point, it is still proof of their ability to shout out competitors due to their pricing structure and first party knowledge, i.e. monopoly powers. If "integrated communications" alone was the real selling point, you wouldn't see companies ripping out multi-million dollar competitor solutions if the annual cost of Teams was comparable, i.e. Teams rollout not subsidized Existing MS Office applications and email revenue. They were able to get corporations to "tr
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their ability to shout out competitors
How does that go? Something like:
"Yo yo yo! I just wanna shout out to my peeps at Google and Amazon! Spring break, bitches!"
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What would the internet be like without typos?
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Teams has been around a lot longer, although it used to suck. We used to use the Google suite along with slack, asterisk, and zoom, but ended switching to Microsoft specifically for the integration. Google was better for email and spam management, but Microsoft was better at everything else.
Things not required should not be mandated. (Score:1)
Things not required should not be mandated. They also should not have steps taken to make them be required. Doing otherwise is authoritarian towards the customers and anti-competitive. Both are bad.
But so much else they get away with (Score:3)
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Ms accounts, forced internet access at install
Buy the pro version of Windows. Most people are better off with MS accounts*, that way they can have a modicum of security and backups to Onedrive when they click on that email...
edge
What do you propose? An OS with no web browser out of the box in 2023?
clickbait news in the widgets
Have to agree with you, let's hope the "news" can be configured or disabled without disbling the widgets as a whole.
tiktok installs
?! Never heard of that, care to elaborate?
s mode
May not be good for you right now, but many parents and school districts thank their $Deity for the exist
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Ms accounts, forced internet access at install
Buy the pro version of Windows. Most people are better off with MS accounts*, that way they can have a modicum of security and backups to Onedrive when they click on that email...
That's great until you have to set up Windows to run on an air-gapped network with a single private user account as I had to two weeks ago. I had to fake it with my personal MS account, and I'll have to strip those bits out prior to delivery to the customer.
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Ms accounts, forced internet access at install
Buy the pro version of Windows. Most people are better off with MS accounts*, that way they can have a modicum of security and backups to Onedrive when they click on that email...
That's great until you have to set up Windows to run on an air-gapped network with a single private user account as I had to two weeks ago. I had to fake it with my personal MS account, and I'll have to strip those bits out prior to delivery to the customer.
And why you were setting up a Home version of Windows for an Air Gapped install?
That seems like a work for Windows Pro, or even better Windows LTSC, and neither of those require an MS account...
You seem to me a L337 user, you shoud know this.
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It was Windows Pro, but its setup process would not let me proceed without some sort of credentialing. To be fair, if it noticed it had no Internet connection, it might have done things differently, but this was a one-off for a specific customer. For our next go-around, I'm going to push for Linux, since there's nothing in the product that requires Windows; it's just the GUI front end.
As for my own knowledge: Unix/Linux, about the amount of 1337-ness you'd expect having started out on Bell Labs Research V7.
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It was Windows Pro, but its setup process would not let me proceed without some sort of credentialing. To be fair, if it noticed it had no Internet connection, it might have done things differently, but this was a one-off for a specific customer. For our next go-around, I'm going to push for Linux, since there's nothing in the product that requires Windows; it's just the GUI front end.
As for my own knowledge: Unix/Linux, about the amount of 1337-ness you'd expect having started out on Bell Labs Research V7. Windows, not so much. I don't know the process or the code for compiling Hello World in C#.
To be fair to you, the pro version will let you proceed without an MS account even when connected to the internet BUT they use "dark patterns" to make it hard to realize where the option is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I still think that y'all should have gone with an LTSC (being such a specialized application and all). But then again, it was not probably your desicion
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So why did you not remove that requirement? I think Rufus still works fine for that.
They'll just force install it in a Feature Update (Score:1)
Windows (Score:3)
Microsoft is doing this to gain fake trust and fake good will.
Teams SHIPS WITH WINDOWS 11
Windows is by far and away Microsoft's largest market share. So why even bother shipping Teams with Office, which is an add-on product, when they can ship it with the core Windows product!? And then make a huge hype about how they're trying to appease regulators, when in fact by quantity they're shoving it on a higher volume of people now.
Its total bullshit, and MS knows it.
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"Teams comes with Windows 11" is direct to consumer/regular people; it easy for them to not use Teams. When the bean counters and MBAs, tell IT that Teams is the cheapest option and is "good enough" because you're "already paying for it with Office", that's when you see M$'s monopolistic powers in action.
They will just include Skype instead (Score:2)
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or NetMeeting!
Not sure what to make of it. (Score:2)
Seems to me that Teams and Outlook (and Sharepoint) have a lot of overlapping features and should have been one product..Either mail functionality should have been added to Teams to be the next generation mail client, or the instant messaging and AV conferencing of Teams should have been integrated with Outlook and leave fi
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I have office and never had Teams Installed (Score:2)
forcibly (or otherwise)
May it have something to do with me being on Mac? Or with me already having skype? I do not know.
By the way, I have office via subscription (with the app executables locally installed on my machine updating every month) and not a box copy/perpetual license.
But having said that, good for all parties involved that litigation has been avoided.
Pricing (Score:1)
Too late (Score:2)
It's too late, the damage is done. My company uses O365 and apparently we were absolutely powerless to stop Teams from installing onto thousands of machines along with Office. Users started using it and myself and the rest of IT were told we now officially support it. A year or two later we're in the process of switching from the other VOIP/chat software we use to Teams. This might have happened anyway, but every user having Teams automatically install and automatically open it's large window on every login
How about bundling with Windows (Score:1)
It is not like they are bundling Office with Windows 11.
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Why? (Score:2)
Office is bad software, Teams is bad software: they go together.
Not like a Reese's peanut butter cup... more like two blobs of gritty, low-quality peanut butter.
I know a couple of other products (Score:1)