What I find extraordinary is that Microsoft paid $8 billion for Skype only to let that brand wither and die. (I still support a Skype for Business system so I know it's not gone but it's faded from most people's consciousness).
Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used.
And despite all this Teams (which isn't even particularly good) is still looking like it'll crush the competition in most enterprise environments.
>Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used.
This isn't surprising at all, Skype for Business was a joke - the verb used at the time was Webex. What is shocking is how horribly Cisco bungled the entire thing. They went from market dominance (61% market share) to almost an afterthought in a matter of a year.
> This isn't surprising at all, Skype for Business was a joke - the verb used at the time was Webex. What is shocking is how horribly Cisco bungled the entire thing. They went from market dominance (61% market share) to almost an afterthought in a matter of a year.
Webex was just as bad and unreliable as Skype for Business, the only reason why that shit even existed was that it integrated nicely with your existing Cisco telephony and conference room hardware. First, Zoom came in with an extremely easy to use solution right when Covid hit, and Teams sealed the fate of both by being cheap to effectively free and being even lower in barrier to entry - including the effort for compliance stuff like SSO and auditing which eventually grew more important for companies as the "it's a pandemic" excuse ceased to be viable.
Personally, I do not think that there is a chance that MS Teams can be displaced any more in the enterprise space, simply because of the compliance overhead that everyone else has to do while it's considered "done" for companies that already use Office 365. And now that MS is offering VoIP integration, companies are also ditching their expensive and, let's be honest given their reputation for security issues, insecure Cisco stuff.
Without a Cisco device WebEx was such a nightmare. I don't think video worked in any call I ever joined that didn't use Cisco equipment. Somehow computer audio was usually unavailable for reasons I don't understand. This was before bluetooth audio was omnipresent due to AirPods and I had to use the shit phone speakers and microphone. For me it always was the worst experience of any conferencing tool by a wide margin.
Webex is definitely a lesson in never accepting that you've won no matter what your marketshare in a space is, especially if the "switch cost" is essentially nil
The switch cost wasn't exactly nil. As far as I'm aware most cisco stuff came with a commitment to a per-device, per-user or per-seat license and support for a period of time where the cost of those is reduced more the longer you commit when you negotiate the contract. Webex was bad enough that some enterprises were switching mid-cycle to another product and just letting the license/support for Webex go unused. Which is impressive considering how cheap corporate/enterprise procurement/finance/IT are. Granted, a lot of teams or departments were initially signing up for other services without knowledge of their corporate/enterprise IT departments which really made the quality contrast between them and Webex undeniable but that happens with a lot of stuff that gets squashed even if teams like it better and it makes them more productive.
I dunno. Half the interviews I had in last 6 months were Webex invites. The other half MS Teams and one radom Google Meet in there. (in Germany, so probably Webex is more sticky with these dinosaur companies over here)
I'm German (firstborn American, really, but all my relatives are over there) and as a tech guy it's always surprised and dismayed me, especially over the last 20-odd years, just how significantly laggardly the German world is technologically. I don't know if it's a conflict of values, Helmut Kohl being a complete Luddite idiot (and the bad legacy thereof), or some other combination of things, but Germany sure seems to have some very smart people who are also very lacking the benefits of tech that are routinely enjoyed in the States. (They would surely argue that they are, in turn, also enjoying the lack of drawbacks of some of those things, such as increased general population fitness/health, etc.)
Had I been born there instead of here, I often wonder how things would have turned out as I got starved of exposure to computers, modems, programming languages, Internet, cell service, etc... I mean, I know there are communities of people there who are into all of those things, but it certainly seems to be massively de-emphasized
Did I mention Helmut Kohl made some of the worst decisions possible in this area? It cannot be underemphasized how badly he mis-stepped on this stuff.
Well, it's not just his decision, but it did end up having a broader cooling effect in general. This is a decent explanation of the current Internet situation in Germany and the historical decisions that were contributions to it:
Based on their features and bug fixes in their releases and how it got progressively worse in terms of reliability/performance for the backend: I think it was clear they made a decision to stop investing/prioritizing it and only tried to fix things when they realized they had their market share absolutely annihilated in no time flat. I can't imagine it was a "surprise" to anyone in management there but I'm not sure they expected resting on their laurels to result in major blowback as fast as it did.
Very much not the case. They just got lazy because the competition was so bad. Pandemic hit and they got destroyed with the increased traffic causing businesses to rapidly seek alternatives.
IIRC Cisco owned most of the underlying infrastructure and just couldnt scale fast enough.
> Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used.
Teams instantly dominated the work world in the UK at least as soon as the pandemic hit.
Pretty clear why Teams wins anyway... Assuming you want SSO in your corporation.
Zoom price: £160 per year.
Office 365 business standard: £123 including Office, Powerpoint, Excel, Exchange, Sharepoint...
And after this change, you also have the option to just buy teams for £60 - £100 less than the Zoom price.
Also, they do really good regional pricing. In Vietnam it's $36/user/year for the basic version. There's nothing else with close to similar functionality at that price and it means we can forgive a lot of clunkiness.
It's less than half the price of Slack with way more features. We even get Loop knowledge management which is shaping up to be pretty great actually.
Skype has a very, VERY small subset of Teams features. Teams is the nexus for a much broader, fully integrated ecosystem - Azure AD, Azure itself, Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, M365, Todo, etc.
Anybody starting a new enterprise project in a Microsoft shop will look at building it around these technologies first. We are talking about compute, storage, front-end, back-end, integration, etc. all hosted on this stack, with Teams providing the entry point for the experience.
Skype, Zoom, Slack, etc. will never compete with this vision.
But why didn't they leverage the Skype brand? Wasn't this the whole point of Skype for business?
Obviously the consumer product we were all once familiar with wouldn't suffice in terms of features, but I never understood why they didn't stick with the Skype brand.
They did leverage the Skype brand, at the cost of the Lync brand people in business all knew. They made that one change because people in business all associated the brand "Lync" with a low quality product.
At the time of the pandemics, they decided to push the Teams brand instead of Skype because people in business all associated the brand "Skype" with a very low quality product.
That's only because they never invested in the corporate side of it.
Both Google Meet and Zoom have both consumer and business users. Skype could have done the same if Microsoft didn't let it rot.
I'm not even sure when or why people (including myself) stopped using Skype... I used it constantly a decade or so a go both for business and personal. It's like Microsoft just forgot about it while other competitors entered the market and ate away at their market share.
A strong Skype brand and decent Skype for business product would have made so much sense. Regardless of quality, wherever I've worked Teams always felt like a soulless forced corporate product. The brand is almost universally hated, and for what? They had a great brand with Skype it was just neglected.
Funny thing about Skype for Business is it was a last ditch attempt to revitalize the image of Office Communicator, an absolutely terrible enterprise instant messenger service with half baked group chat functionality. Might have also had voice and video, I can't recall if they were missing that feature or if it was also half baked and terrible. They just borrowed the name from the Skype consumer product and slapped it on the newest version of Communicator. So not only was it not Skype, it was probably one of the few pieces of Microsoft enterprise software that was hated more than SharePoint (in my experience). Which is really impressive considering how much people absolutely despise SharePoint.
I don't even think it was a deprecation for a new product, just a standard version deprecation. Office Communicator became Lync and Lync became Skype for Business. They were successive major "versions" that came with rebranding and some changes in direction.
Microsoft paid $8B in offshore money they couldn't repatriate without paying taxes. Think of it as a way to launder a portion of that money while getting something in return.
The evolution of Teams Office Communicator -> Lync -> SfB -> Teams. Skype consumer had no impact on Teams sans the name and original codec which is no longer in use by Teams.
Skype consumer (skype.com) has nothing to do with Teams, Skype for Business, Lync, or Office Communicator. People are getting this very confused in this thread.
They shared a name for a handful of years. That's it.
Teams does not share components with Skype consumer; at most they both used SILK, but Teams moved to Satin in 2021. It does use [backend] components from SfB as it is the evolution of that service.
This was super obvious. We used Slack and Zoom in my old job and then as soon as Teams became part of Office365 we ditched the Slack subscription and didn't pay anything extra. I prefer Slack but I can totally see why a business would make that choice from a financial perspective.
Given their history of legal troubles I was pretty surprised at how brazen Microsoft was with bundling Teams into Office for free, a move that looks a whole lot like dumping. Remember, these are the guys who destroyed the market for paid web browsers (and almost killed the open web along with it) when they bundled IE into Windows back in the day.
Notably Brad Smith was their chief counsel back then and he still is now - he's gotten a promotion to President in fact.
> Given their history of legal troubles I was pretty surprised at how brazen Microsoft
I mean they won right?
The competitive advantage the bundling has given them is enormous.
And while un-bundling it now will stop "additional benefits" it won't in any form remove the benefits they already got.
E.g. companies which are on a bundled plan and use both are now used to it and their cross integrations (which won't go away) so as long as it's price wise competitive with other solutions they likely will keep it and now pay for both.
As long as anit-monpoly low doesn't 1) penalizes based on the long term benefits gained 2) shifts more to anti-massiv-power-abuse laws in their phrasing/formulation/public discourse we will just see stuff like that happening again and again. We sadly life in a world where huge companies braking the law is the norm as long as it's expected to yield them noticeable more money then the fall out through penalties and publicity. And that isn't just limited to vague laws like monopoly power abuse, e.g. Ubers operation is quite not so fully legal in a lot of countries.
In the case of Internet Explorer it did at least start as a technically decent product, which I have never seen anyone claim about Teams. The later atrophy is a prime example of the long term problems with this behaviour though.
Idk. Teams video calls have always issues, but the also tend to always work after some fiddling something I can't say in my experience about either Zoom and Slack which both sometimes plain out refused to work no matter what was tried.
Not saying that market power abuse is in any form right.
Actually I would argue it's wrong no matter how technically decent the product is.
From a certain angle it looks like they're currently trying to destroy the market for paid video games in a similar manner with extreme bundling/giving away.
Hah, everyone was towards that direction even before Microsoft did Game Pass. Wall St wants fiefdoms, every company is forced to turn everything into a subscription model.
Sony didn't help as they are notoriously buying exclusivity with every single game they could (which has worked in their favor)
Looks like they got away with it too? Teams is now something people use. The fine (if there ends up being one) probably won't come close to costing MS what dumping Teams on customers brought them in value.
> Notably Brad Smith was their chief counsel back then and he still is now - he's gotten a promotion to President in fact.
All of that stuff back then had basically no consequences, which is probably why MS continues to increase their anti-competitive behavior. They will continue to do so until there are consequences, obviously.
It's because of the outcome not the action itself. Apple bundling music with iPhone doesn't risk putting multiple public companies out of business. If Apple partnered with google (and maybe Microsoft/Windows) to bundle apple music into Android you'd probably have a stronger case.
I like Teams, but I hate that the actual chatrooms are all DMs and Group Chats. I don't understand why you cant have a main chat in a Teams Team. This leads to dozens upon dozens of group chats that go stale, and for some reason someone on the team picks a really old one, and says they've got a dentist appointment or something obscure.
Microsoft, at least add a limit to how many normal chatrooms a Teams team can have. This forum for channels approach is annoying, those are useful for like automated messages.
It is nicely integrated wit (not in all but good enough amount of) Microsoft's ecosystem. If you're a Microsoft shop (we've got plenty of .NET, Azure, Azure DevOps, M365, etc) then its also a no-brainer. It could use with some polish, but my biggest peeve is where chats are housed. How can I have a "Team" space and no dedicated chat for it? Makes zero sense to me. At least give me ONE "General Chat" at a minimum.
It smoothly integrates back with Outlook, the experience is slightly different, but we have all our meetings over Teams, and the call quality is always great. If you ever have network issues, it suggests calling into the meeting on a land line, which is a small but really nice thing, even sometimes when watching a screenshare it offers listening from a land line whilst watching from your computer in order to cut down on data.
Teams has an insane amount of potential for complete greatness, but given how Windows itself does as well and it gets overshadowed by marketing decisions that anger power users, I'm not holding my breath on Teams achieving what it could. The infrastructures all there, and it is insanely extensible.
I haven't used it myself, but I've heard lots of non-tech people say they like it. I think they are probably comparing it to skype/email rather than to slack.
I actually dislike Teams because of the Office integration. Teams where I work ends up with 10’s of ‘teams’ with 100’s of channels. Each channel having its own set of documents that have been uploaded and added as tabs to a channel. It’s impossible to find anything, but even when you do, you end up with a half broken version of web word or excel that fills the page so you can’t chat anymore.
I’d rather teams did 2 (albeit complex) things; Direct & Channel chats (with one or more people), and video calls with one or many people. If I want to use Office, I’ll use the right app.
It feels like Teams is trying to do too many things, and it’s bad at all of them.
I also like Teams, clunkiness aside it's a great business asset for the price. Unmatched at even double or triple the price by anything else out there I think.
However, I've only been using it for six months. So maybe it used to be worse and that's where all the hate comes from?
Also, most of the clunkiness seems to hit me the worst as the admin and sole tech person at our company. The rest of that users seem to be doing just fine.
For me at least, it seems fairly unintuitive and primitive vs Slack or even various open source options (Mattermost, Zulip). It feels like a product where Microsoft just did the bare minimum to claim they have a competitor in this area.
But what if companies simple can not compete in value without massively subsidizing their business in ways which are a form of market power abuse? (idk. if that is true)
What if slack cost 14 due to all the features beyond chatting, like especially video calls.
Maybe this change now gives them a motivation to provide a "text only" version of Slack for 5 or 7, because if I would guess 50%+ of their operation and development cost come from this additional features?
> is not forced to unbundle them
because monopoly law sadly sadly only applies if you are somewhat winning, but not if you are somewhat irrelevant to a point people forget to even evaluate you when making a choice (in the EU Microsoft 365 is clearly winning huge and e.g. Zoom and Google Workplace are _much_ less relevant/successful compared to the US AFIK).
Well, Zoho, which is a very small player, has a suite with everything, and they are doing just fine. An i am sure they are not subsidizing anything. See here: https://www.zoho.com/workplace/?ireft=zoffice
According to statista, google suite has 50% vs 45.5% of microsoft 365.
And now that Microsoft has stolen a bunch of customer to Slack through their anti competitive practice, they are now making this move to avoid lawsuit, even though the harm is already done…
Not sure I want a tool I use all day to evolve very quickly and change much, I don't really feel like there's some big missing features that would change things dramatically. No business is going to use Discord in a corporate environment.
> No business is going to use Discord in a corporate environment.
The current crop of students are all using Discord to collaborate during lab work. Wait 2-3 years until they are team leaders at work and there will be Discords everywhere. I can promise you every Fortune 500 already is using Discord in production, just as they are using generative AI.
Well if Discord offers an Enterprise version that's tied into the tenant's SSO at least it becomes possible to create an account. Or maybe they'll instantly lock those, too?
They are worse than stagnant. They just took away what I (and a lot of my coworkers) feel was an important feature -- the ability to leave a thread open as you change to a different channel or DM.
From my perspective stagnant would be better than taking away useful features.
Teams chat has long had an obvious and fundamental feature -- ability to open a thread or conversation in a new window. And have as many of those open as you need.
Slack, by design, makes it painful to engage in more than one conversation at a time. It's so annoying to maintain a "save for later" list of things you need to come back to, or mark things as unread.
You can do this with slack by using the web client, but that has its own annoyances with not being a native application.
If the Slack desktop app had a way to open a workspace in a new window I'd put the Slack window of each of my customers in the virtual desktop of that customer instead of having to move Slack to the workspace of the moment.
Except for that, they could stagnate. For example, what the huddles were for? Did I miss any new functionality that they added to the old calls?
The customer of mine that pays for Slack uses huddles. I never thought about entering one that I was not explicitly invited to. I hope it's possible to make them private.
All the customers that are not paying for Slack are using Meet. One attempted to use Teams once but it's too complicated. Zoom for work calls? It surely happened but I can't remember when. Skype, I had a customer using it and actually screen sharing in Skype is good: it wastes as much of the screen in useless borders and toolbars as all its competitors but at least it's possible to zoom and get a pixel perfect view of what is shared.
I hate Slack with passion[1], but it's not a good excuse for Microsoft doing shady stuff with their monopoly position with Office.
[1] mostly because it's slow, their UX is clunky as hell, and it still doesn't support audio/video calls on Firefox despite WebRTC being supported there since 2015.
Zoom is basically a respin of WebEx. Teams is a bunch of modules bolted on to SharePoint and Exchange. A “team” is an exchange artifact, the voice and video is a module and the rest is a SharePoint front end.
Zoom is a better value if you need features beyond the base teams. You pay a simple fee and get the whole shebang. With Teams, you may need different SKUs, including Azure AD, etc to get the full feature set. It’s a funnel to E5.
For one thing: more than 120000 congregations of Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide started paying for a Zoom account in early 2020. As far as I know, most of these congregations still pay for Zoom accounts until now.
Call quality was not the factor. It was that zoom was easy for people to use, no download required, just click a link and enter your name and you’re connected. No logins or downloads so old people could actually work with it.
I never used the zoom web version, but for the client: it simply worked. Getting videocalls with WebEx always was a pain, where it was noisy, video hat issues ... switching to Zoom was day and night. Suddenly doing a video call was a click and it worked.
Of all the things that actually need a subscription, video chat and cloud storage of data seems like the one because it uses bandwidth on Microsoft’s end. Charging a subscription for all of the other Office apps has always been a cash grab.
sadly this won't stop the considerations, as we do use Teams for video calls and idk. why but using slack for the video calls seems to not really be considered
through tbh. I find both somewhat subpar/dissatisfying.
I'm a Microsoft critic on lots of fronts, but I can't understand how people consider bundling teams with office to be anti competitive. Isn't team communication essentially a modern feature of a productivity suite that you'd expect to see included? Why is it not considered to be meeting market demand. I consider it a plus to have everything integrated together (even if I don't particularly like Teams). What's the legal or moral basis for calling it anticompetitive? If anything it feels like a normal result of competitive pressure.
It is anti competitive because it destroys the potential market for others.
The correct course of action is to have an API that allows other apps to integrate and provide this feature in Office.
To give an example, Google, when adding storage APIs to Android KitKat worked closely with competitors to Google Drive to ensure that the storage API worked with third party providers. Google are not perfect, but that is a fine example of the right general idea.
Companies undermine potential markets for others all the time - that’s what adding new features does. Facebook adding chat was a huge blow to MSN messenger. Reddit adding image uploads natively to their platform was a huge blow to third party image hosts. Excel adding python scripting is a huge blow for a large class of data analysis tools.
And yes, O365 adding chat was a big blow for Slack. But I think Teams' displacing Slack has more to do with the fact that Slack doesn't offer value equivalent to it's fairly high price. There are lots of features in O365 that never disrupted "premium priced" competitors - BaseCamp exists despite O365 ToDo, project management tools exist despite O365 Planner, etc.
The difference is that Office has almost complete market dominance in productivity suite space. Using that dominance in one market to crush competitors in an unrelated market is generally a big no-no. It doesn’t result in better products or better prices, it just allows a company to abuse more customers.
You claim that Slack doesn’t offer enough value to justify its price, then why did people pay for before? Teams is cheaper, sure. But is that because it’s actually cheaper to operate, or is it because Office is a giant cash cow, and Microsoft are subsidising Teams pricing with Office profits?
Teams is quite clearly a separate product to Word or Excel. Both Teams and Office represent entirely distinct products that are fully featured and can be used completely independently of each other without any real loss of functionality. There’s no reason why they should be bundled, Office was perfectly profitable without Teams for many decades. It not even vaguely the same as Excel adding Python support, Facebook adding chat, or Reddit adding image uploads.
> Using that dominance in one market to crush competitors in an unrelated market is generally a big no-no.
Phone lines have always been part of a functional office. Not sure how you can argue that communications (voice, video, screen share) is not part of a modern, WFH enabled office suite.
You know there are people out there with office jobs that need chat tools and not word right? Equally there are plenty of jobs that need word processing tools but not chat tools. Why should people be forced into by both together?
And what does comms and phone lines have to do with Offices market dominance? Are you suggesting that Office should come with a mandatory bundled phone line as well?
Smartphones include features that have relegated to niche markets the consumer camera market, consumer dictation equipment, mp3 players, navigation devices, etc.
I don’t think any of Googles many abortive chat applications are ever a good example of company acting anti-competitively. Honestly Google seemed to have made a sport out of shooting themselves in the foot.
With regards to Google’s productivity suite vs Office. Googles stuff is very impressive, but honestly not even in the same league as Office. Googles stuff is pretty useless for anything beyond pretty basic editing, and I say that as some that used Googles offerings extensively in a professional environment for many years.
Are you also in favor of unbundling office chairs from their wheels? After all it's uncompetitive behavior preventing the development of a booming chair wheel industry
Sure, I love standard wheel sizes since it prevents me from having to throw away the chair. I also like the integration in android to share/print/BT transmit with whichever chat app I have installed, though obviously all these apps should be replaced with google talk plus circles for teams.
It's a piece of junk but my employer went for it since we're already using the M358 suite, so there are no extra licenses, no extra contracts, no extra procurements, and no extra costs.
The product performs very poorly because its quality is not a major driver of its sales - many if not most customers select it for the reasons I just mentioned above.
This causes Microsoft's competitors to not be considered at all, losing customers (and here you have the anticompetitive aspect), while Teams lags and underperforms because quality is hardly a metric.
It is a plus to have them integrated, I believe the issue is m$ was basically giving it away for free for anyone who has the office suite. As a CTO faced with reducing spend on SaaS, do you cut slack for essentially a free clone of it? Not a hard call, but that becomes anticompetitive behavior. Similar to the shipping of IE with windows back in the day.
Thinking Teams is a clone of Slack suggests neither Office nor Teams is being fully used.
Teams is a re-imagining of UI atop SharePoint and SfB/Lync APIs or functionality we all loathed, and does a not terrible job of it.
When you realize that "screen sharing" is now "app sharing" instead, and every user can collaborate, a light bulb goes off.
When you realize you can offer Teams with web-based office suite collab at $3/seat to remote collaborators, fireworks go off.
When you realize all of this is fully compliant for regulated industries, there are no other choices, because the incumbents didn't bother becoming compliant for actually collaborating.
Most tools in this space are siloed chat, or presentation viewer, and god bless for permissioned file spaces.
As far as we've been able to find, both at the 2nd largest bank in free world and a startup of just dozens, the M365 E5 suite with Teams backed by SharePoint makes this all work together for role based group access to real time collaboration at scale while remaining seamlessly compliant.
> I believe the issue is m$ was basically giving it away for free for anyone who has the office suite.
That's the OP's point: what you call "giving away for free for anyone who has the office suite", I call "adding another feature to the office suite". Particularly for features which everyone understands are now just necessary in the space, it's a little weird to say "you can't add new features to your software, that would be anticompetitive".
You're suggesting it's a problem for a dominant product to release new functionality? Like once something gets big enough it can't improve anymore because that would be anticompetitive?
Apple is expected to add a new type of lens to the iPhone in a few weeks, which will signficantly improve optical zoom and decrease the utility of many point and shoot cameras. Under your morality, should Tim Cook be thrown in jail for this?
You can't understand leveraging one distribution channel to expand into another market segment could possibly be anti-competitive? Like using Windows to expand into web browsers?
It's a bit confusing to young people, because in this millennium enforcement has been so lax as to be almost nonexistent.
I don't see anyone prosecuting Google for bundling Chrome with Android and pushing Chrome in Search, or prosecuting Apple for bundling Safari and iCloud with the iPhone, or prosecuting Amazon for bundling streaming video with Prime, or prosecuting Microsoft for pushing Edge with Windows.
But markets change. Video calling and team-based chatrooms weren't considered necessary in the space before, and now they are. When market demands change, products could change accordingly-- the point of the debate here is it's a little odd to say Microsoft isn't allowed to add new features to their software that the market is asking for.
What? Why does that mean team communication tool must be bundled with office tools?
They’re hardly “just adding features” to existing software. It not like teams is just a “feature” in Word or Excel, it’s entirely separate. Do you think that Office and Teams should be bundled with Windows as well? So your only option is to pay a subscription for windows, and get Office and Teams “for free”?
I think it's anticompetitive because MSTeams is a software of a very low quality, lacking lots of features found in other software for years, yet everybody is using it because... nothing. So how can we encourage competition if the most used software in a field got there not because of its merit, but because of corporate practices?
"I can't understand how people consider bundling teams with office to be anti competitive"
It's a judgment call to be sure. Google has integrated Meet with their office tools, but nobody (AFAIK) has shouted about it being anti-competitive.
Does Microsoft block or make it more difficult to add Zoom info to a meeting in Outlook? It's pretty easy with an add-on to add that info via GMail. If they're adding barriers to integration, that would be strong reason to consider the bundling anti-competitive.
I briefly used Office/Teams when I was at Intel. My recollection was that Teams was really tightly integrated as a Slack/Zoom replacement through the whole suite.
Because Teams is not an alternative client to a messaging platform. It is the platform.
You may realize that they are still allowed to bundle Outlook because it is just an alternative client for E-Mail.
Every business which is in the Office365 ecosystem will never use a competitor to teams, because it is just bundled with Office "for free". There were competitors before teams was a thing, but the regulators realized if Microsoft would go forward with this, an entire Market Segment would just die.
Making an Antitrust Case out of this, not only protects current communication system providers but also opens the market up for more competition.
It's the same story with Google Workplace. If I'm writing the checks, you'd better have a really good rationale for why I should pay for some alternative collaboration component rather than using the (typically well-integrated) one that comes as part of the suite.
Some people have individual preferences--even strong ones--but I'm not sure how much there is to truly distinguish the major solutions at this point.
> I'm a Microsoft critic on lots of fronts, but I can't understand how people consider bundling teams with office to be anti competitive. Isn't team communication essentially a modern feature of a productivity suite that you'd expect to see included?
No. Team communication can happen just fine without some ridiculous chat program. Many businesses just want office and have other methods of communication, and want to use other chat apps. If teams is included in Office, it will make it harder for other companies to sell their products. People should pay for what they want, and not get a bunch of useless, bloated junk along with it.
> Seems to me a rather circular definition, because I'm not sure anyone except Microsoft has a 'productivity suite'?
LibreOffice and its descendents (e.g. Collabora) spring to mind immediately. There are a few. Apple has its own tools (Keynote, etc) but I don't think they're necessarily a suite.
There aren't going to be a lot of new productivity suites, due to how overwhelmingly dominant Microsoft is.
In fact, the key metric for any office site isn't its features or numerical prowess, but rather how well it can read and write Microsoft office files.
It's funny how for many years the push to switch to almost-but-not-quite as good OSS solutions has been the cost savings. Then MS gives Teams away for free and all of a sudden it's "oh those evil monopolists". Would it be any different if Teams was OSS? The client is basically worthless to them. The licensing fee covers hosting costs.
This was the same 20 years ago. Netscape lost the browser wars not because of bundling. Netscape lost because Netscape Navigator 4 was crashy garbage, possibly the worst browser ever made. The reason Firefox was developed was because Netscape was so intolerably bad, an alternative to the alternative needed developed.
You know the old saying, "If you can't beat them, go cry to the European Commission."
It's the old "first hit is always free" thing, where Microsoft buys a product (skype), bundles it in adding value to the product (not to mention ocs/linc sucked), and then raises prices each generational based on that. Once it's inside though, the products just linger, and generally become worse in doing so.
Any old slog of a company full of windoze admins will always vote for the quick/easy of enabling Teams to show some modernization value to an org vs. going out of their way with Slack.
Anyone using Slack does so because they are pointedly NOT Microsoft, or has ever actually used Teams prior to know how soul-crushing it is. Particularly so if you have a lot of Mac and/or Linux users. Like Office, M$ treat any non-Windows user as a blatant alien anomaly with minimal support or care, if any.
I support Microsoft as much as they support me as a Linux user stuck helping customers of mine with Windoze environments. I simply hate any of them that make me use Teams, so they usually don't remain customers long if so.
I've been using matrix and have even been extending it to build my own little platform to help me manage my consulting business. I've been using Element as a client and despite some occasional hiccups it works great and I can host it in my closet.
because I have had to use teams and have found matrix to be a better alternative? Also while they are busy "decoupling" this from office and causing all sorts of problems I figured people would like to be aware of some alternatives.
Presumably, someone at MS did the maths and elected not to pursue a Slack acquisition, leaving it to Salesforce. As part of that calculation, I always assumed they considered what it cost to build Teams out to reduce the appeal of Slack. However, having been subjected to a Teams call recently, I was appalled at how terrible it was, and it became clear that MS has made little or no effort to compete with Slack on features or UX. Is this because they were pursuing the bundling strategy instead? Let's be honest: MS has the resources to ape Discord or Slack, but glancing at Teams makes it clear they've not even bothered to do that. Could this unbundling mean MS has to invest in Teams as a standalone product so people think it's worth paying for?
It's curious and sad to see so many people comparing the products on price when they should be comparing value; what they enable you to do, and how well. If you merely wanted to save money you could buy nothing.
I understand that the old package (with Teams) is still available at the same price, and is still the default? So MS will still have about a very similar competitive advantage (IIRC Slack/Zoom cost way more than the extra €2).
Most Slack users I think particularly pay the extra simply to NOT use anything Microsoft, and Teams in particular. Over the years I've had several customers with Teams I've had to participate in along side Slack, and it's a day and night difference, not only in the product, but levels of participation in each.
With Slack orgs, people genuinely communicate casually and friendly, but in every Teams org, it's like people are afraid of saying anything like they're being monitored by the government. People seem to treat Teams like email, but more weird and dysfunctional as only Microsoft can make with something having to do with human interaction.
The idea of someone purchasing Teams (i.e., paying money) sounds ludicrous to me. The only reason I can think for someone to use Teams is this: it comes free with the office suite (IIUC).
Sorry, why would unbundling avoid further antitrust investigation? Why would that magically stop you from still being investigated and inevitably be found guilty of antitrust practices?
That's a completely different question. It is established fact that Microsoft is engaging in anti-trust behaviour as far as European law is concerned.
Whether a company that's orders of magnitude smaller, with nowhere near the same reach and force, would be considered engaging in anti-trust if they did similar bundling is basically unrelated to why Microsoft unbundling their Teams product from Office would stop them from being further investigated. Past violations of the law don't magically stop having been violations just because you decided to stop violating the law.
So why isn't Google forced to do the same? I mean, I feel (the bundling) is good for the end consumer, not bad.
The real problem, IMHO, is that Zoom and Slack have crazy high prices for what they offer.
WhatsApp is free, Signal is free, Telegram is free, Viber is free, Messenger is free, Skype is free, etc. Yes, you can say that you are product or whatever, in the end, for me, the value proposition that Slack and Zoom have is not worth their cost. Slack, is charging almost 15 euros per user per month! That is crazy expensive vs Google Suite, Office 365, Zoho Office, etc., etc.
For me to consider Slack/Zoom, they should not cost more than 5 euros per month each. They should lower the price to get more customers, not keep this crazy high price.
The EU investigates and metes out punitive measures to all companies that exploit their market position in the EU to prevent entry by, or to push out, competition though anti-trust practices. Whether the competition makes products that people want, or whether there even is any competition is entirely irrelevant to that, the crime is "breaking anti-trust law".
Now of course, some of those fines are no more than a slap on the wrist, but some of them are properly "you fucked up hard and your business is on the line" high. Like Google getting fined 2.5 billion dollars.
And in this case the EU is being pretty soft: Microsoft knew they were going to be hit with this order from the start, because they've already been through this several times in the past with their IE and Media Player bundling. Making the decision to not fine them is the curious part here, not the part part where the EU told them to do what they already told them to do several times in the past that they appealed, lost, and complied with.
If a company violates EU anti-trust law, they're going to get investigated either by individual member states, or if the violation's significant enough, by the EU itself.
The glacial rate at which regulators address these issues makes the proposed remedy largely inconsequential. The toothpaste is already out of the tube.
The only acceptable "remedy" would be to unbundle Teams from all existing subscriptions and have it as a separate add-on only, requiring an opt in, an extra charge and a chance for a competitor to make a sale. Unbundling at this stage doesn't reverse the damage to the market.
EU fails to understand that if my market widely adopts Teams as a mean of communication, I will use it to conduct my business regardless of what the EU gov thinks about it.
But when they regulate the unbundling and Microsoft might make me pay extra to use something that I always had "included", they are actively making more difficult to run a business.
It's just a tool. If I want to use Zoom, I will use it. It's not like I am being "protected" by a move like this.
You are being protected through lower prices driven by competition. If you read the article, it mentions that MS is selling O365 without Teams at a lower price, so you’re not really paying extra (or marginally so based on the standalone Teams pricing). If Teams is bundled with O365 for free, as a business, why would I use Slack or Zoom if I am cost conscious? Fast forward 5 years, Teams is the only video/messaging software left in the market, and MS can price as they wish because you don’t have another option.
Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used.
And despite all this Teams (which isn't even particularly good) is still looking like it'll crush the competition in most enterprise environments.