Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally in new attempt to appease antitrust regulators

kinther@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 329 points –
Microsoft unbundles Office and Teams globally in new attempt to appease antitrust regulators
geekwire.com
64

You are viewing a single comment

as a consumer product, yeah. but teams is ubiquitous in business and govt.

You'd think businesses wouldn't want to give all their communications to... a bigger business, especially one currently invested in AI training.

It would be like a company doing mapping/GIS stuff using Gmail for communications. You're just handing your data over to your largest competitor. It's fucking stupid.

When you’re an enterprise client paying serious money for the service, there are often data protection requirements. They have the capability to support things like export controlled information or HIPAA compliance in office, and appropriate legal agreements ensuring data protection. It’s the power of collective bargaining (they are buying 100s++ licenses instead of just one).

Exactly. If it's a regulated industry, they're not just paying for Teams. They're paying for someone else to worry about meeting certain compliance requirements and take the heat if things go wrong. I'm not sure how many companies besides Microsoft can offer that. At most it's a fraction of the available options.

Facebook violates HIPPA (The Guardian 2023)

Really though, what happens when a company gets so greedy they that they even think they can get away with something has probably the most predictable outcome

Facebook is usually not used by businesses which expect it to be in compliance with compex healthcare regulations, the law is spelled HIPAA, and that article is about the UK, which doesn't have that law.

You've clearly not worked in enterprise recently. Everything is about the Cloud, AI, and reducing Opex spending currently.

They already did before this. MS-hosted Office 365 is running the vast majority of worldwide corporate email and hosts a significant amount of corporate files on business OneDrive/SharePoint. I'll never understand why companies bought into 'the cloud' so easily.

For most these things, it is far cheaper to simply use some sort of SaaS than to actually set things up in house. There's probably plenty of times where it'd in theory be cheaper in the long term, but most businesses are going to see the short term savings as extra capital to try to expand.

In my size of company, it's simple. I simply don't want the overhead of running an email system. It's not just running a server, it's running a server farm for HA, dealing with domain blacklisting, retention systems, storage and firewalling to name a few.