How is pairing two of their own products together even a trust/monopoly issue?
In General, using a part of your business that’s on top to boost another part of your business that is not is typically seen as anti-competitive. Office is clearly the market leader, but Teams isn’t.
IMO, the EU needs to do with Edge and Office. There is now a toggle in Outlook that ignores your default browser and opens everything in Edge. It’s ridiculous.
Other chat companies would have great difficulty competing when Teams is bundled with Office 365.
It’s not bundled is it? Functionality comes with the licence. For example our teams usage is dependant on our Office 365 E5 licencing, which costs money. Word comes bundled with office yet no complaints. Google spreadsheet comes bundled with google workspace.
It’s also got native integrations with SharePoint, Azure, windows and anything Microsoft. And even then the functionality and user experience is alot better than the competitors. I hate WebEx with a passion.
Ah the ol’ bundle Windows95 with Internet Explorer trick.
I’m not an expert on EU antitrust but these things seem like they naturally go together. After all, Outlook comes with Office, right? Is that not a communication and collaboration tool?
Well… that depends on who you ask. Some say that Teams being a part of the bundle is anti competitive (which it is). Outlook used to be only a mail client, so it made sense when it was part of the Office package, as one thing that an Office user needs, is an email client. Exchange servers had to be hosted by the company. However nowadays, you get the client and the infra for a subscription based model so it was kind of grandfathered in, I guess. If I as a company say I’m not interested in Teams and want to not pay for it as I do not plan to use it, msft will tell me it’s not possible. Therefore, businesses like Slack can never succeed because I as a company will never look at alternatives if I already get a messaging app built into my Office suite.
I dunno, I’m just mumbo jumbing really and not a lawyer (or an EU citizen, for that matter). I just hate Teams.
Therefore, businesses like Slack can never succeed because I as a company will never look at alternatives if I already get a messaging app built into my Office suite.
I’d like to see evidence of this, because I don’t really believe it in practice. In my experience Office is always installed, but that doesn’t stop companies from also using Google sheets and docs as well, shit I worked somewhere that used Lotus Notes too. Multiple video call services were used at my last job, Zoom and Workplace. I’ve got multiple types of SQL databases that I use daily, SQL Server, Postgres, Oracle, and even sometimes Access which is included in the Office suite. Companies love redundancy.
Not sure exactly what evidence I can show you other then myself being a sysadmin for companies who used the M365 suite and refused to use anything other then teams for communication. Anytime we brought up an alternative (even Zoom) it was always shot down by finance who said “we already have Teams”. Same thing for Slack.
Yeah we have the whole 0365 package at work. It’s just not fit for purpose.
Teams also worries me in that it’s incompatible with Safari’s security settings. I don’t fully understand what that means it’s doing but MS’s fix is to turn them off. Great.
How is it not fit for purpose? Legitimate question - as an end user, I’ve used Teams, Slack and Google’s Hangouts/Chat/Business Chat (whatever the fuck they call it now) and they’re all functionally the same. Chat, video calls, audio calls, etc - they all work fine. They’ve all had extension ability and webhooks and everything.
How is it not fit for purpose? You’ll wish you never asked! 🤣
I guess it’s worth bearing in mind that, AFAIK, organisations’ O365 suites are in part bespoke so things that are bad at one company might be just to do with its specific implementation. But this is part of what makes O365 bad: if you need to find out how to get something to work, the on-line help is often useless, because it won’t apply to your own company’s set up. E.g., menus & buttons might be different.
OneDrive is probably the worst offender. Here are problems that I’ve noticed, or heard about:
- General MS problem with characters in file names—i.e., files won’t sync them until you’ve worked out which file needs to be renamed. There’s no built in renaming tool, which I imagine is pretty easy to implement. But the bigger problem is that I’ve been in the situation where I’ve had to retain and share original documents, for quasi-legal reasons. I can’t change anything. The workaround I have to implement is to zip the original file and name it something that OneDrive likes.
- Many people in my organisation work on projects with people out of the organisation. It is possible, though not easy, to achieve this; but sharing ceases after a few weeks.
- Apparently, OneDrive has problems with subfolders: they disappear!
I’ve used several other cloud services which don’t suffer from any of these problems.
SharePoint:
- Sharing is confusing. I’ll often receive links to Office documents that don’t have the right permissions, or somethings failed. Lots of emails get sent from recipients to sender asking them to fix the permissions so that they can do their jobs.
- Excel in SharePoint is really poor. Many important desktop functions are missing. Worse, filtering and sorting operates on the SharePoint document, not on the specific user’s view of it. This has created problems where one person filters an Excel spreadsheet so that they can process things for their job and this means that another person, with a different role, can’t see things that they need to for their job. Some people download the Excel file to work on locally, then edit the SharePoint version, as a workaround; so that defeats the whole point of SharePoint.
Teams
Perhaps not-fit-for-purpose is an exaggeration; but these features are, at least, inconvenient.
- Often poor quality, video; often with cut outs.
- You are muted, by default, on joining. This makes sense for big meetings; but it happens even on one-to-one meetings.
- Excessive power use. My laptop needs to be plugged in to use Teams and it’s the only time that the fan kicks in to keep it cool.
- You can’t mark a message as unread & pinning is not salient. So if you read a message that you can’t process at the time, it’s easy for it to get lost in the swamp.
- New messages, within a Team, are not indicated at the top level. You need to go into the individual Teams area to see if anyone has contacted you there.
- You can’t use Teams on Safari—I think that this is something to do with the security settings+weird things that Teams want to do.
- As with OneDrive, using Teams with people out of the organisation is not straightforward.
Outlook
- As with Teams, new messages that are sent to subfolders are not indicated at the top level. This means that you either need to keep the uppermost folder open, defeating the point of sub-folders; regularly check; or miss emails.
- The mail rules are useful, but there are some important Boolean operators missing so you often can’t get them to work in quite the right way.
That’s kinda what I’m thinking. It’s just a new app that is part of Microsoft Office but also available standalone. Pretty sure you can also just… not install it during Office install, just like all of the other apps. They all work independently of each other.
Except Outlook only lets you add Teams meetings to appointments, not Zoom, for example. Teams is prioritised in several other parts of MS Office suite
We use Outlook and have plenty of zoom and Google meetings connected to outlook appointments.
What? Office Apps of course allows 3rd party plugins.
Zoom:
Google:
You can actually add zoom meeting links to outlook by default. I do it every day at my company, and we don’t use Teams at all.
No one would use Teams if it wasn’t bundled together with other stuff.
I absolutely agree : our company used slack, Google docs, and self-hosted exchange.
Eventually, MS forced us to replace our self-hosted exchange for MS’ cloud solution. This was basically a ramrod for shoveling O365 and having it replace Slack with Teams and Google Docs with O365.
The migration was painful… going from “I have the exact tools I need for the job” to “jebus, this is the best MS has? On Teams I can only see 4 people at the same time? What was MS thinking”.
My company only uses Teams and it works fine from what I can tell, what’s so bad about it?
Lots of weird polish issues in my opinion… One that really peeved me was (for a while at least) you could search for a message, but there was no way to jump to that message from the search results. So you couldn’t read the context unless you scroll all the way back up.
But primarily it’s that the mechanics are different from things like Slack and Discord in ways that are just less intuitive.
Channels function more like announcements + comments rather than a chat—you are really shoehorned into posting a “Topic” and discussing it in the replies. There’s no way to carry a linear conversation in a channel otherwise. And to load replies you have to keep clicking “see more” as if this is a social media site, so it’s very annoying when your 800+ comment critical discussion happens there. Not to mention notification settings aren’t granular enough, so you either get hammered by all activity, or remain oblivious to discussions which may have popped up in an older Post.
What tends to happen in my experience is small working groups spawn off a group chats because the flow is better for daily conversation there than in Channels. Which, of course hides this activity from anyone not in the chat. And group chat’s are entirely linear in Teams—you don’t have threads the way you do in Slack, so chat history tends to get messy quick.
The channel-then-thread organization Slack uses is much more natural for the teams I tend to work on, because you just have the one main discussion which can be segmented into threads as needed.
No company will ever use Discord as a replacement for Teams. It’s not nearly secure enough
It’s certainly not wrong to take a look into Microsoft and its subscription business, but I don’t see much success in pressing this particular point: Not only was there always some sort of free version of Teams since 2018, but since 2022 there has been a Teams Essentials subscription, a version that doesn’t bundle O356.
If anything I’d like some compensation for the loss in sanity you get trying to understand the dozen different subscriptions and (incompatible) versions of Teams, all of which are confusingly named.
Now do google and DRM
I’m no big fan of MS. And even if I were, using Teams would make that praise fall in the shitter
But I’m tired of these groups arguing that something should be less complete as a good thing
Why doesn’t Yamaha sue Honda for including their own radio in the car? And surely customers would be irritated that they had to go and get another fucking radio
If I buy “Office Suite” I want it to have all the products included. If I think teams sucks I can get something else
If they make it difficult for that, like they did with IE, that’s a different story. But merely including it? Come on
They tried that shit with antivirus. I’m GLAD MS includes defender. If I had to get all that shit separately, I’d be irritated. And if I don’t like defender, I’m free to get something else
I use a lot of MS products. But when they try to trick me into using their browser every time I update, I have to dig through settings to remove Teams,and I have to install a third party app to choose the browser and search engine used from search bar, it’s clear they’re running amok
Well that’s the kind of shit I was talking about with actual issues. It’s annoying
Same in edge where it keeps trying to enable recommendations and other trash. Even now on my phone it keeps trying to send notifications to get me to use bing chat gpt. You’re a glorified wallpaper rotation, gtfo
I keep edge as my default for work. It’s just easier with the typical shitty intranet that breaks down if you use a different browser
I’m all into inspecting big companies like Microsoft but this seems a little bit like, over reacting?
They relentlessly try to coerce us into using their browser, messaging, and Bing using windows. They undermine developers of apps like Firefox who try to sidestep their restrictions. They clearly need to be reined in
Yeah, but Teams in Office? Is that really the main problem?
How they pick cases is mysterious to me. I would go after them about Edge first, where they’re doing real harm to Firefox, and Bing. Both of these are also pushed through Office. But maybe there are chat apps based in Europe that provide them jurisdiction, I don’t know enough about it.
I can understand Teams in Office, particularly O365 for organizations… what I don’t get is Teams being mandatory in Windows 11…
Seriously you can’t have windows without having teams now?
I have a feeling when I finish rebuilding my gaming PC I’m not going to be a fan of using windows again…
When can I get an iPhone without iMessage being preinstalled? Microsoft is, if anything, late to the party on this kind of anti-user BS.
iPhone without iMessage being preinstalled?
Someone wants a choice, yet chooses platform that does not provide a choice? Wondering if there is any other platform that allows you to customize your phone. Hmmm. 🤔🤔🤔
Hooooooold on, let me be crystal clear: I’m never buying an iPhone.
The point was that if the EU is going to go on an anti-bundling campaign, there’s a long line ahead of MS Teams of more egregious behavior.
Microsoft is, if anything, late to the party on this kind of anti-user BS.
…do you not know about the IE lawsuits?
Microsoft office is a great example of product that extremely sucks, yet is popular.
Because there’s nothing better. Not for lack of trying, of course, but because Office is such the juggernaut it’s hard to iterate on it while also keeping up with current features.
Note: I’m talking for business/finance, etc work, not home work where LibreOffice and OnlyOffice are perfectly cromulent.
The only thing from office that has no competition is Excel. If you type your documents in Word and not in sth like Latex, you are just wasting your time. Same for presentations - they can be done in Latex/Slidev which are both better than Microsoft alternative. No mention needed about Access.
I get that people use it even though it’s mostly a piece of garbage - they are simply get used to having Word.
I remember a similar case regarding Windows shipping with IE. Whatever happened with that?
They added a browser choice window to Windows 7 where you could select and download a web browser to install. It isn’t present in Windows 10 and on, possibly wasn’t in 8 either.
It’s because you can uninstall Edge now so they don’t need the browser choice thing.
They removed it before Edge existed though.
If they would also investigate Apple for forcing Safari on iOS
Eu commission : Let’s pretend we’re are really going to change something 😜 !
Us, the spectators : Oh thank gosh, the EU is the one standing up to Big corporations 👍.
Microsoft : Stop bullying us EU 😭 , we are going to complain to daddy US of Arms again .
US of Arms: Hey EU, 😡 How about I remind you who is the World Boss !
EU Commission: Oh sorry sorry, I will tell my big sister the High court to take your side , BFFs again ?! 🤗 🤗
The EU is actually standing up to tech giants: usb-c everywhere, removable batteries in 2027, GDPR and the list goes on and on
Free mobile phone roaming in EU
