Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says

Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.

Gee, I wonder...

Like the other comment here, it's ironic that it is the EU pulling from the market/capitalism playbook now.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...

So is bundling office and PowerPoint which killed a massive number of presentation apps before they were even born. How is this particularly different? Should bundling any apps/sofware/services together be illegal? Should that only apply to specific companies?

It's a bit like saying that that them bundling PowerPoint together with their other apps is unfair towards any startup potentially wanting to enter that market. Which very well might be true but what's so special about Teams? MS and other companies have been bundling apps together since forever...

Firefox doesn't seem to be intentionally blocked by Teams in my experience (or at least not anymore?), but maybe it should be.

You can not convince me Microsoft isn't an evil company.

I don't think MS Windows ever shipped with these.

Has that ever actually happened? Or do you have any reason to believe it might in the future?

That lower cost people pay upfront thanks to monopolies, is then drained back with interest, using higher prices, reduction in social mobility (of new founders/startups), reduction in innovation & increase in rent-seeking behaviour.

Breaking up monopolies has been long overdue, it’s a good thing its starting now.

I worked in a company that also sold a collab solution and we had technical champions all over the place that 1000% agreed that our product was better than Teams in every single metric, including performance, UX and productivity. Yet they couldn't secure a budget since the higher-ups knew they got Teams for free in their E5 license.

The problem you have is that the people making the finance decisions are often far-removed from the ones making value-based decisions.

The ones making the decision from a finance-perspective look at the offering from Microsoft, realise that it does video and chat for free (well, they're paying for O365 anyway) and that's it.

They don't care (or know!) that it's a resource hog, buggy etc. The value from the OP's product would not even be a consideration even if it was 100x "better" (use your own definition of "better" here!)

So I think it's unfair to use that comparison in this case

"As a product manager myself, I believe that the use of an advantageous market position to strengthen vertical integration is a reasonable practice, so long as the bundle cost of the final product to the consumer remains the same."

The problem with this, and the reason we we anti monopoly laws in general, is that this practice can be self-reinforcing, and allows for the capture of an entire market, extinguishing all competition. This then allows pricing for the good on offer to be set at whatever arbitrary price the monopoly deems reasonable.

Failure to innovate kills those companies.

Just look at the latest "innovation" of the OP: a wrapper around SES (5x more expensive!), like thoudand others exist.

On the one hand that's a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both prevents consumers from having choice, and also therefore in the longer term allows the monopolistic company to raise prices without consumers having any option other than to pay more or go without.

So in reality the harming or competitors can be considered the harming of consumers.

Focusing on short term repercussions for consumers has significantly hurt long term consumer interests and there is evidence that it hurt the economy in general. In the decades preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and that extreme power concentration (as we e.g. see today in the IT sector) is hard to reconcile with efficient markets and political freedom.

See [1] for details, here is an excerpt:

> An emerging group of young scholars are inquiring whether we truly benefitted from competition with little antitrust enforcement. The mounting evidence suggests no. New business formation has steadily declined as a share of the economy since the late 1970s. “In 1982, young firms [those five-years old or younger] accounted for about half of all firms, and one-fifth of total employment,” observed Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But by 2013, these figures fell “to about one-third of firms and one-tenth of total employment.” Competition is decreasing in many significant markets, as they become concentrated. Greater profits are falling in the hands of fewer firms. “More than 75% of US industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades,” one recent study found. “Firms in industries with the largest increases in product market concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins, positive abnormal stock returns, and more profitable M&A deals, which suggests that market power is becoming an important source of value.” Since the late 1970s, wealth inequality has grown, and worker mobility has declined. Labor’s share of income in the nonfarm business sector was in the mid-60 percentage points for several decades after WWII, but that too has declined since 2000 to the mid-50s. Despite the higher returns to capital, businesses in markets with rising concentration and less competition are investing relatively less. This investment gap, one study found, is driven by industry leaders who have higher profit margins.

[1] https://archive.is/HEik3#selection-1737.0-1737.346 (original: https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s... )

MSTeams hurts users 24/7 around the clock.

If I were Microsoft I'd reconsider bundling Loop, since it's going to disrupt tools like Notion. I mean, why would I bother using Notion, if I can just use Loop? : - )

I doubt the price covers the costs, especially after they added Teams.

Kill the competition, raise the price. G-MAFIA/FAANG playbook

That’s absolutely the basic idea of antitrust.

Using dominance in Market A to get advantage in market B

But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waking up every morning to discover that someone has very deliberately, specifically decided to make my life worse, not out of personal conviction, but because it makes a line go up somewhere in a board room on the other side of the world. That I can not deal with.

Why the fuck would I want to do that?

"Oh sorry, I accidentally joined the Teams meeting instead of the Zoom meeting, nobody was there for 15 minutes so I left"

It would automatically reactivate that "teams" toggle.

Currently often the narrative is “we have it included for $0, why would we pay $100 per year per employee for a similar product?”

But what is success? Anyone who has a pre-existing relationship with the customer is going to be able to have the opportunity to inform the customer about their new products, brand trust and convenience go a long way in co-selling.

People that make basic apps frequently complain that they have had their app "stolen" when a, typically larger, competitor releases similar functionality. However was it truly their "idea", or were they just an early entrant that squandered their early lead?

The majority of ordinary computing functions of today started out as 3rd party applications, some churn is expected - I don't see it as innovation if we give companies false monopolies on ideas. If Apple can't protect the iPhone paradigm as a unique combination of features, no one should expect to keep possession of simpler or smaller ideas.

Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.

https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...

By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s.

If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!

Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software?

Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup.

This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together?

Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more.

How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?

If the EU makes Apple unbundle all the good stuff from macOS I'll finally move to the US.

Having non-interoperable features (like charging ports or iMessage green bubbles) has nothing to do with it, and those are ok (at least for anti-trust laws).

Your idea of what a desktop OS should be feels subjective. I'm using Linux as a desktop operating system for 20 years, I've used Windows before, I use Windows sometimes even today (currently only in VMs dedicated to malware analysis and reverse engineering tools), and - to me - Windows is much more annoying. This feels like personal preference and not an objective statement like you did.

Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.

I don't see how tying yourself to a single vendor is advantageous at all.

It is somehow worse than mIRC and I used that 30 years ago.

In that context, maybe Teams is user-friendly and high-performance!

You can go into do-not-disturb mode to stop the flashing, but then pings aren't delivered and you can't do 1-on-1 calls. So there's a pretty significant tradeoff. I wasn't able to find a way to disable them any other way (registry hacks I saw recommended online didn't work).

This sucks because if I see the taskbar flashing, I MUST go and check out Teams. It's too distracting to leave on. So there can't be a background group chat where I'm not taking part and doing other things -- I get dragged into checking every message which is extremely annoying. I suspect that 'immediately check out the app causing the taskbar to flash' is basically a conditioned response for most computer users so I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

----

I also strongly dislike the vibe of the Teams emoji set. The :) looks like it's playing dumb, and it adds that connotation to messages I see from people using it. (admittedly I've only seen it be used by my dumb coworkers)

Do you draw the line at APIs? Should Apple be forced to sell H1 chips and let other headphone makers create the same experience as AirPods?

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/why-do...

For the data side, likely any requirements wouldn't go into effect until a dataset is deemed sufficiently large/societally important, and there could be a period of exclusivity similarly to the patent system to encourage innovation. This system works very well for new drug creation, with competitors free to copy the drug for pennies on the dollar after patent expiry, so I very much doubt it would stifle innovation in tech, especially given the lower capital requirements to innovate.

I'm not suggesting at all the government mandates private companies implement a public write api into their own datacenter. I'm suggesting the privately hosted data must be replicatable and thus hostable by competitors. Likely the practical way to do this, technically, is to support a public kafka/persistent eventing system such that anybody can firehose all historical and new data. Ideally with funding help.

Hosting data is cheaper than ever, and continues to deflate in cost. The companies in this line of fire are already quasi-monopoly behemoths, so I don't buy into the cost-prohibitive/stifling innovation perspective.

If a client application refuses to implement functionality, that's on them, not the original developer. If I want the new feature, I'll switch.

These days however, new features nowadays are usually things I don't want. Not strictly outright anti-features, but usually completely pointless "Bob needs a bonus[0]" changes that lets a middle manager put something good in their promo packet. The whole reason why people want compatible file formats and third-party clients is specifically so we can dictate to the originator of those formats and protocols how and how fast they can iterate on their products and limit how bad they can deliberately make them to increase profits.

[0] https://youtu.be/ssob-7sGVWs?t=2748

And yet, a few competing alternatives appeared anyway.

Most of the time you don't even need to read the specification.

Compare that with the times of eg. closed binary XLS format.

YouTube is evidence of that already.

A more straightforward way to accomplish this in areas where content size is large/expensive is to disallow coupling client creation with data hosting, and data vendors would license access to their data to client creators.

Bundling becomes anti-competitive at a certain network size, because there becomes no meaningful way to create a competitor network. The essence of what makes capitalism effective is competition driving costs lower, and in many areas in tech we have very little competition due to large network effects.

Keep in mind Capitalism != Free Market. A fully free market is a form of Capitalism that has no laws, and no impediment to monopoly formation. Competitive Capitalism with minimal laws to encourage competitive where large network effects or monopolies form is far more societally beneficial in the long run.

Decoupling client/data has already been done many times in the past in analogous situations, e.g. when movie producers were not allowed to own the theaters where the movies were played, giving a much more equal footing to smaller content producers.

This is... The entire point of a government. Yes, they're flawed, but they're meant to exercise the will of the people, especially in terms of regulating entities that have outsized power vs. an individual citizen (corporations, wealthy magnates, etc).

Unfortunately, the level of technical knowledge of the population is going down. People do not care or treat tech as a magic. On a higher level of education, Microsoft can rely on a cohort using Windows at school/home/university/work.

> As you say, it's only a matter of time before the walled gardens start to crumble.

Watch what Microsoft and others are doing in the acquisition space. Microsoft is buying into businesses that use their products. What are the chances of those businesses witching away from Microsoft software stack?

The frontend/backend split of Pidgin/libpurple makes this tricky, and we still don't have voice and video in a Windows release (my main dev OS these days)

Here are some random examples of things Teams does that are easy to copy from memory.

+ Azure AD integration without making it an enterprise pricing feature. SSO is such an important feature, and yet most apps seem to charge extra for it, and so price themselves out. Make sure your app privileges can be controlled by AzureAD groups.

+ Grab the org chart from Azure AD. Who does Joe Bloggs work for, who are his team. Where does he work. What is his mobile number

+ Sync the Calendar properly! Put my new meeting in Outlook properly.

It is hilarious that Slack still has not been able to introduce proper video calls while introducing relatively useless integrations.

The article states

> The software giant unbundled Teams from Office in Europe last year in an attempt to address regulator concerns

Which is a pretty generic statement that makes it hard to follow why they would be accused of bundling still

Nowadays I just get irrationally angry at the utter imbecile that decided you want to copy an abbreviated date and the sender name whenever you copy a message.

(Just give me fenced code blocks, please!)

Oh, and line breaks get replaced by something that breaks some editors¹, and quotes obviously get mangled.

1 - I mean, look at their name! Teams is right here!

I had to paste the meeting link into an incognito window to successfully join. This was on Linux.

> In 2009 Microsoft was also forced to implement a browser ballot box in its Windows operating system to ensure users were presented with a choice of web browsers, after years of Microsoft bunding Internet Explorer with Windows. Microsoft was then fined $730 million in 2013 for failing to include the browser ballot in Windows 7 SP1.

That is 15 years at most, and 11 years for the most recent incident.

OEM's have to ship them all or none of them.

My comment is more about how ineffective this type of rent seeking has been against Microsoft for the last 3 decades.

Edit: wouldn't this mean that Apple could never have added a preinstalled app to the iPhone after the phones became successful?

And the hilarious part is that Slack is still crap in regards of video calls.

This isn't about consumer protection. This is about petty people still trying to "get" Microsoft after 30 years, it's all so tiresome.

The moment the EU opened an investigation [1], they reacted [2] by getting it out of their bundle pack [3], and offering it on the side instead, with the new bundles being marked "[bundle name] EEA NO TEAMS", and teams being priced 5€/user/month.

At least I guess kudos to Microsoft for learning a trick Facebook/Meta/Apple keep ignoring, the moment they say it coming they switched gear because they know the EU won't buy their "good for the user" thing.

> Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it. These changes will impact our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. They are designed to address two concerns that are central to the Commission’s investigation: (1) that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and (2) that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites.

They also made it extra annoying to switch from a regular package to that one, and somehow when you search on products in your admin (if you're already a customer) you need to know what to type for those no teams bundle to show up.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/api/files/docume...

[2] https://blogs.microsoft.com/eupolicy/2023/08/31/european-com...

[3] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-...

They run Windows rather than macOS. They think in terms of Active Directory. If it’s not MS then it isn’t “enterprise” in their world view.

And slack does not support audio/video calls on Linux/Firefox.

If I am not desperate for work I tell contracting firms "no teams meetings" in writing when we setting up new contracts. Often, this is isn't a problem and they setup a zoom, webex, or even a plain phone call. Frequently, they try to setup calls on teams and usually about 15m before I remind them that I won't do teams and either they tell me to install teams and send me a windows download link (which does me no good) or the frantically struggle to do anything else. When I explain that I won't install ms software and I will skip their offer for it their mind is blown and and I refer them back to the email they saw, responded to, and agreed to. Then I avoid working for someone who ignored me and would likely ignore me again over more serious matters.

I should probably have more filters like this but avoiding this and the C# work closet to me has saved me a lot of long term pain.

I’m not going to tell my mom how to curl a copy of Brave onto her machine because no browser was provided.

At least for me, chrome was asking me last week what search engine I want to use. Made me switch to duckduckgo.

I'm in a decent amount of engineering social channels and while I never heard someone leave specifically for that i could see it. I absolutely saw people not take jobs because of it.

Which, considering all of the layoffs and how the markets going now, I miss having that power.