EU launches antitrust investigation of Microsoft over bundling Teams with Office
EU launches antitrust investigation of Microsoft over bundling Teams with Office
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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.
I think this is a great explanation. Teams really is anti competitive and the way you laid it out made that easier for me to understand.
>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.
Yes. If they argued that oh no, we can't have excel in office. That's just too many products bundled together, I'd be pissed
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
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.
What? Office Apps of course allows 3rd party plugins.
Zoom:
Google:
I've got the new Outlook interface and it's not there. There are only three tabs on the top: Home, View and Help. The only online option is Teams, as in this screenshot
It's a third party plugin. It's not there by default. You need to manually install it.
We use Outlook and have plenty of zoom and Google meetings connected to outlook appointments.
Totally agree. Teams may not be the most fun messaging app. But to me it's a part of the office package.
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