Notably Brad Smith was their chief counsel back then and he still is now - he's gotten a promotion to President in fact.
Sony didn't help as they are notoriously buying exclusivity with every single game they could (which has worked in their favor)
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.
Bundling is basically their modus operandi.
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.
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.
Asked another way, why is Apple allowed to bundle Music with the iPhone, but Microsoft is not allowed to bundle Teams with Office?
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.
I believe this may be the first time I've heard anyone say that.
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 sync my files from Teams using OneDrive, and then they open in the desktop apps...and work like a regular folder in Windows
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.
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 might like to use Slack and Zoom, however, the prices they charge are completely off.
Microsoft 365 Business Premium costs 20 euros per month per user.
Google Workspace Business also costs 20 euros per month per user.
There is no way to justify paying 14 for slack and 15 for zoom.
They are not that much better than Meet/Chat/Teams to justify the cost.
If Zoom/Slack was 5 each, I might consider it. At 15, no way.
This move is only protecting Slack and Zoom from having to compete in value.
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).
According to statista, google suite has 50% vs 45.5% of microsoft 365.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/983299/worldwide-market-...
Teams is so dense, it's almost designed to avoid those general chat situations.
Not to mention if you have any amount of Linux users, they're basically second class citizens.
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.
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.
From my perspective stagnant would be better than taking away useful features.
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.
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?
Its an attempt at making something an open office / standing room type situation so people can wander in and out of huddles to check in with folks.
In practice, I don't see it used much. Everyone wants to setup a Zoom call.
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.
[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.
just not at looking appealing to companies
I mean they have:
- good chat
- new okayish forum feature
- pretty good video calls (better then Teams AFIK)
- many of the same misc features
- good probably better moderation features then slack
- a nice balance between convenience and security wrt. their login
- ways to ad good code highlighting for a lot of programming languages
- somewhat okayish (AFIK better then modern slack) accessibility features
it's just that all of this features are tweaked with small to mid sized hobby communities in mind instead of companies
For better or for worse, Slack has a huge UI overhaul right around the corner: https://slack.com/blog/productivity/a-redesigned-slack-built...
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.