Microsoft to face EU competition investigation over Teams and Office bundling

kixik@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 109 points –
Microsoft to face EU competition investigation over Teams and Office bundling
irishtimes.com
5

Rather than bundling they should look at APIs in office apps. The ease of use of sharing PowerPoint say or a spreadsheet in the same.teams.call really helps.push users to the apps

Kinda confused by this, you can buy teams licensing directly from Microsoft without a bundle: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/compare-microsoft-teams-options#tabx2feaf2053ffc4566a48cdcc58109c73a

I think you got it the other way round - EU are upset that Microsoft used its massive customer base with Office to ship a video conferencing product like Teams for free in order to dominate that market.

I assure you, very few people would actively seek an individual Teams license. I’m very sure companies force their employees to use Teams as it’s part of the license.

Teams, especially when compared to Slack, is incredibly slow and bloated while being entirely lacklustre. Slack is lean and efficient at what it sets out to do (while being pretty expensive).

Ahh yeah I guess I understand that. But is it that different from when they included Skype with o365 licensing?

I sell Microsoft licensing and agree that Teams is quite a bloated mess. “Let’s take a video conferencing software, mix in instant messaging, a share point backend and also whatever else seems good”

I miss when I had slack but as a MSP we use what we sell unfortunately.

That’s actually a really good point. I think, ui wise, skype and slack served a different audience. I think skype was about 1-2-1 messages and calls, whereas Slack was about chatting amongst team members.

Teams as a product feels like a really direct competitor to Slack in a way that Skype could never do (at least in the last iteration I used it in).

As for Teams, same here. In my last job I had slack and it was quite pleasant to use. Now at my new(ish) job and we are all forced to use Teams as part of the license. And I guess that is the reason behind EUs decision right there.