Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-separate-teams-office-globally-amid-antitrust-scrutiny-2024-04-01/

by comebhack • 2 years ago

72 104 2 years ago

reuters.com

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

But, you can still bet on the pricing to be such that you'd be insane not to subscribe to both.

microtonal• 2 years ago

The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Aug. 31 last year.

Yeah. The changes are already active in the EU and Office without teams is Euro 9.80 per month and with teams Euro 11.70. This will still convince managers to get Teams, torturing employees everywhere and murdering the competition.

They are indeed trying to do the separation so that in practice everybody will get Office365 with Teams.

(I think similarly, including OneDrive disrupts the market for file sync.)

metalrain• 2 years ago

I wonder what this means for Copilot integrations in Microsoft products?

Quinzel2• 2 years ago

There are no words in the English language that exist that I can use to describe my disdain and hatred I have towards MS Teams. I hate it so much.

redwood• 2 years ago

That's how I feel about Microsoft generally

Quinzel2• 2 years ago

I actually don’t understand how Microsoft is still such a big player when its programs are so clunky and awful generally… And yet - my go to for writing anything is still Word -.-

Spooky234• 2 years ago

According to “Spooky23’s universal law of chat”, the apogee of chat clients is circa 2002 AOL Instant Messenger, and chat clients can only get worse with time.

Teams is unique as a combination of chat, phone and SharePoint client. Thus it was born an abomination and the laws of nature dictate that it must only get worse.

hutattedonmyarm• 2 years ago

Clearly the apogee was ICQ in the early 2000s

Rinzler892• 2 years ago

and chat clients can only get worse with time

Not just chat clients, but pretty much any stable piece of SW from a major corporation that reaches peak perfection, is forced to get worse and user hostile over time, because those VPs, execs and managers in charge of it want a promotion or need to justify their bonuses on a yearly basis, so they force needless changes to have something to present to the board every year till they jump ship or retire early with their masive stock piles.

And then the next people who take over, have something to tear down and rebuild, so they can be the ones making their careers on "fixing" that product and the cycle of shittiness repeats.

They are not products anymore that need to serve the best interest of the customers, but fiefdoms and vehicles designed to propel and fuel someone's ego and career advancements at all costs.

It's an effect of perverse incentives in corporate promotions. You'll never make a career at these companies by doing QA or saying "well, the product we have was perfect already, so I did absolutely nothing to it, added no new features, just fixed some bugs and kicked back".

aunwick3• 2 years ago

Every rocket has apogee

hiatus• 2 years ago

AIM would spawn a new window for each conversation. That hardly seems like the pinnacle. Pidgin, with interop with a ton of protocols was superior, and was also an amalgam integrating numerous chat networks.

tuwtuwtuwtuw• 2 years ago

Maybe you should check if your employer offers therapist sessions if your work equipment causes that kind of reaction. Doesn't sound healthy, long term.

abhinavk• 2 years ago

It's ironic that VSCode (best performing Electron app) and Teams are made by the same MS. I know MS is gigantic and these being different orgs but expertise is still inside the company.

aunwick3• 2 years ago

Do you think company knows or cares?

dutchCourage2• 2 years ago

Teams was a rushed Slack clone MS pushed during the lockdowns. VSCode didn't have the same incentives.

I was working for a large company using Office 365 back then. Our teams were using either Slack or Skype. The company pushed everyone towards Teams because it was included in 365 only to eventually backpedal and move everyone to Slack because Teams was an unfinished software. What's surprising to me is that they have had a few years to improve Teams yet its UX is still far behind Slack.

petabit• 2 years ago

antitrusting by default untill too late design patterns

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

Back when I read in detail about the original antitrust investigations into Microsoft regarding the browser and the OS, I truly thought these antitrust investigations were a good thing.

Well, I still believe in antitrust laws, but I feel they have become much more of a symbolic gesture in a contellation of gestures that pay lip service to the function of law as something good for society. I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good? How many businesses will now switch to a different product given the tight technical integration that Microsoft offers to large and medium-sized businesses?

Tech companies have learned how to handle antitrust: now, they make their products highly interoperable and integrated. They also bundle their products and they KNOW that even if antitrust laws come to past, the initial entrenchment will already have done "the damage" of getting the product "out there", and the worst that happens to them is a small fine and some minor legal troubles, easily handled by the best legal teams.

This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that the Microsoft of the future would not even have the resources to create Microsoft Teams in the first place (if they were already focused on Microsoft Office).

aunwick3• 2 years ago

I'm confounded. Backup 30 years and replace Microsoft with at&t and it sounds like the chorus line. Somewhere between agile is bullshit and Microsoft is bullshit is something that makes life and work better for all. Where is it?

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

Who knows, but it would be much easier to find if big tech did not exist. In that case, medium-sized organizations would have many more opportunities to try things and make a modest profit. As long as big tech exists, your ideal point will never be found.

foolswisdom• 2 years ago

Antitrust has almost never been applied to big tech, in part because antitrust enforcement in general is only given lip service for many decades. This environment means it's also very difficult for antitrust enforcers to win even if they wanted to. This has been changing recently though. https://www.thebignewsletter.com is a great resource on these things.

chipdart2• 2 years ago

I mean, for the majority of people, does this really give us something good?

I think it clearly does the world a whole lot of good. It would be disastrous if a single company leveraged it's monopoly over a platform to force-feed the world their own instant communication service just because they can deploy an email client bundled with a spreadsheet, word processor, and misc office productivity software.

Put yourself in the position of a company such as Slack. It is beyond any doubt a far superior service than Microsoft Teams. Yet, forcing Teams to be bundled with Word, Excel, and specially Outlook ends up forcing Teams upon people in spite of being a clearly inferior alternative. If any person in the world was forced to choose between the two, I assure you that no one would pick Teams ever if not for Outlook.

So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

I agree, which is why I said I believe in antitrust. But my point was that the good it does is an incremental movement to a local maximum, which is in a series of descending local maxima that is leading to a worse world.

So while you are correct that it does do good (and I acknowledged that), the good it does is merely the movement to the next in a long line of shrinking islands in a poisonous sea.

jodrellblank2• 2 years ago

"If any person in the world was forced to choose between the two, I assure you that no one would pick Teams ever if not for Outlook."

And you'd be wrong. I've joined internet groups that use Slack and left specifically because Slack is so bad, but stayed in places using Discord because it's much better. Teams is nice. Part of why Slack is bad is because they're trying to turn "send small amounts of text over the internet" into a billion dollar VC funded business and the foundations can't hack it. Part of why Teams is nice is because it integrates well with Office and Microsoft 365, that makes it a clearly superior alternative.

"So, how exactly is forcing Teams upon the world anything other than abuse of a de facto monopoly and anti-competitive business practices?"

How exactly is making a better product (Teams) which integrates well with other products (desirable features) 'forcing' or 'abusing' anything just because you're a hater with an axe to grind?

silverquiet• 2 years ago

they make their products highly interoperable and integrated.

This does not reflect my experience - I can't make a video call from teams to someone on Zoom; I can't chat with someone on Slack. My iMessage client loses all kinds of functionality when I send a text to someone using Android. I could go on.

I worked at a place that dropped Slack for Teams. Everyone believed that Slack was the better product, but the company already bought Office which bundled Teams while Slack cost money. It's the most obvious anti-competitive practice I've experienced.

icegreentea2• 2 years ago

The think OP means interoperable and integrated within their garden/product offerings.

geraldhh• 2 years ago

nothing wrong here, thou imo (anti-)trust is an integral part of societal organization as almost every interaction requires some trust and can't handle too much.

sunaookami2• 2 years ago

It just sounds like you have given up because these companies can do anything and the fines do not affect them. The answer is splitting them up and preventing them from abusing their market power in the first place. And in fact Microsoft should have been split up since 2001 but Bush intervened. The US would never do anything that damages the monopoly power of a domestic company.

vouaobrasil4• 2 years ago

Given up? Not really...my goal is to promote the dissolution of large corporations and big tech in particular and I think that is entirely possible.

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

they make their products highly interoperable and integrated.

The 90s componentware comes to mind as a possible direction here. Allow interop & integration, but require it to be over public APIs that anyone can use.

I was a kid messing around with basic and c++ and then web for a lot of this time, but it seems the object-oriented world of the 90s was trying hard to create all manners of components that could integrate, embed, & use each other. Corba, DCOM, OLE, ActiveObjects, whatever NeXTStep was doing... this was going to be the future, before the internet showed up & rescoped the scale of interconnectivity to be beyond the machine level.

This is systemic to big tech: as consumers, we need much more than flabby antitrust investigations. We need big tech to be dissolved completely, and a limit on the absolute size of tech companies so that

Not really sure if I'm opposed or not. But I do think we absolutely should have Competitive Compatibility/Adversarial Interoperability. We should be able to riff off & extend each other's software, without everyone making software getting to write whatever incredible legal moat their army of lawyers can masterfully craft around the products/business.

We are stuck in the old Ma Bell age, where Facebook says you can only use Facebook provided software to connect; it's so rampantly apparent that this hijacking of software & property law by contract law & terms of use - that gives companies whatever control they please - is a terrible curse & constraint on humanity. We need a Carterphone decision for the 21st century (for all software, not just the big softwares).

probably_wrong2• 2 years ago

Oh, look! It's rant time!

Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing.

Sorry, but no. Teams became popular during the pandemic because MS didn't give you a choice: with Skype deprecated and with your subscription paying for Teams whether you wanted or not, few IT managers would approve a second videoconference tool.

MS used the pandemic to force all of us into being beta testers for a crappy tool that consumed every resource it found, ranging from your computer's CPU up to your patience and will to live. So let's not pretend that Teams succeeded for any reasons other than monopoly power.

cm2187• 2 years ago

To be honest skype for business was a piece of shit. Teams is an even bigger piece of shit. Don't think that made much difference to users.

xxs4• 2 years ago

'skype for business' was lync and had little to noting to do with skype, aside branding

Rinzler892• 2 years ago

skype for business

Because Skype for business(what a shit name, why not call it Skype Enterprise?) wasn't Skype at all, it was just Lync renamed, which was Office Communicator renamed, which was Windows Messenger renamed, which was Exchange 2000 Conferencing renamed.

It's like a Matroska doll of Scooby-Doo masks.

arcosdev• 2 years ago

Will that stop Teams from sucking?

mensetmanusman• 2 years ago

Good.

shiroiushi• 2 years ago

The regulators need to forbid MS from bundling these two at all, so that you have to pay separately for Teams, and that price is no different than if you subscribe to Office or not. The only way it should make any sense to use Teams is if they're basically giving it away for free or close-to-free (in which case the regulators can then bring a court case against them for "dumping").

cjk2• 2 years ago

Free is still too expensive.

pards• 2 years ago

forbid MS from bundling these two at all, so that you have to pay separately for Teams, and that price is no different than if you subscribe to Office or not

Agreed. As it stands, Teams will still be much cheaper than Slack so it's unlikely any enterprises will make the switch, given how entrenched Teams has become.

gardenhedge• 2 years ago

Lots of things are bad about teams. Here's one that annoyed me the other day: In a channel, I opened a power point presentation. It opened within Teams. I wanted to message someone about one slide. To do that, I had to leave the presentation, navigate to the chat section and search for the person I wanted to message. When typing out the message I realised I wanted to copy paste a phrase from the slide... but now the presentation is closed. So I go back to the channel, open the presentation, go to the slide, copy paste and then close the presentation and go back to the chat - infuriating!

tldr: everything opening within teams is a poor ux

redbell• 2 years ago

The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned, opens new tab competing workspace messaging app Slack.

For reference, here is the complaint (2020):

https://slack.com/blog/news/slack-files-eu-competition-compl...

In a nutshell:

The complaint details Microsoft’s illegal and anti-competitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law. Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.

So basically, this behavior from MS is the same with IE being bundled in Windows in the 90s and, later, probably Media Player.

nerdjon• 2 years ago

So because of this bundling it has been a long time since I have used Slack.

Is Slack still good or has it had its own problems?

I hate using teams but I don’t want to try to push for Slack if it has also gone downhill.

viraptor• 2 years ago

Slack is ok. Its latest redesign added bugs and made the interface quite annoying. It could be much better with a few trivial tweaks, but it's not terrible either.

Also, I don't know if teams handles it any better, but slack has absolutely no offline capabilities / cache on the desktop. And electron sucks for electron reasons.

ghusto3• 2 years ago

I've never liked Slack, but it's UX perfection in comparison. I'm so sorry you have to tolerate MS Teams. Have you thought of quitting? Joking aside, it says a lot about a company when they use MS Teams.

chollida12• 2 years ago

I'v read this thread and there are soo many rants on teams.

What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams?

My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.

I've never had any issue with teams, not even once.

What are the issues people have with teams because there are a lot of rants about teams but no specific issues are mentioned.

As a meeting tool its perfect, its there, just works and then goes away.

Are the rants directed to it as a chat app? or a company wide messaging app?

Because I use teams4-5 times a week and cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting.

its the definition of a tool that just works and then goes away until I need it again.

What is making everyone so angry at the tool?

quenix• 2 years ago

I believe the rants are directed at its crappy performance as yet another bloated web app masquerading as a native program.

ryanjshaw2• 2 years ago

Try opening teams.microsoft.com in Edge and compare the memory usage with the app. On my system the website uses double the RAM.

taspeotis2• 2 years ago

I think Teams is the best “all ‘round” for chat and video and screen sharing.

Slack is best in class for chat though.

Teams chat sucks in a few ways:

* Posts? Why can’t messages be more lightweight.

* No custom emojis like party parrot.

* Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block.

* Please fuck off with trying to offer me apps every time I paste a link.

cassianoleal• 2 years ago

* Posts? Why can’t messages be more lightweight.

The alternative is group DMs but those come with many issues as well:

* They tend to proliferate every time you need to chat with a slightly different group of people;

* No support for threads whatsoever;

* Why is it in a completely separate place from "teams"?

* No custom emojis like party parrot.

Custom emojis and gif search integration. I know Teams has the latter but it's clunky.

* Total crapshoot whether it converts my three backticks into a code block.

Agree. Formatting a message in Teams is like playing the lottery. You have a chance of winning but really in all likelihood you will lose.

Slack's WYSIWYG editor is pretty bad as well, but: it's much, much better than Teams's; and I can disable it altogether.

maxerickson2• 2 years ago

In the privacy settings "Optional connected experiences" will turn off the app previews (and web previews).

npalli• 2 years ago

I think the poor performance (memory bloat) on Macs is probably the reason. Very loud complaints from a tiny segment (for Microsoft). The other is Slack users who think searching past content is way better. In my experience, and I'm on Windows, Teams is rock solid never had any issue, Slack went to shit after SF bought it so all these complaints feel a bit exaggerated.

skhunted• 2 years ago

How do you start an online meeting in Teams? I can’t figure it out. I’m using the iPad app. There is no button or link for starting a meeting. With Zoom I have a static url and just send it to people.

I would use Teams for my classes but the interface is so bizarre and user hostile. What the hell is a walkie talkie for if there is a chat feature? Why is there a calls button and a walkie talkie and chat? I don’t get the user interface. I think Teams is a terrible piece of software.

rightbyte• 2 years ago

I have no clue but I guess the walkie talkie is a symbol for those voice messages you can do in chat that exactly no one use?

quickslowdown3• 2 years ago

For me personally, it's death by a thousand cuts. It works fine, when it works, but the number of small annoyances & quirks is very high. I personally don't hate Teams, but I wouldn't call it a joy to use or anything.

beeboobaa32• 2 years ago

Sounds like you don't use teams.

You get invited to meetings by those that do.

chollida12• 2 years ago

:) Is that not using teams?

pid-12• 2 years ago

Sysadmin here.

Teams audio / video calls are really good.

Chat is full of intermittent bugs that makes you question your own sanity.

kyriakos3• 2 years ago

One would have thought chat would be the easy thing to get right. My experience matches yours, meetings are solid.

pwg• 2 years ago

What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams?

The "channels" and accompanying wiki/file store is simply sharepoint with a different web-ui -- and it inherits all the problems of original sharepoint, i.e., it is where documents go to die.

It fails miserably to recognize when the system is "locked" and to "STFU" with its bleeps/blurbs/rings for new IM's/phone calls/whatever else it decides to be noisy about. Locked system means "not at work" which should mean "no noises from you, ever".

If you first initiate a screen share with someone, you can not add in a voice call (thereby making the screen share rather less than useful in most instances). Yet, if you begin a voice call first, you can then add in a screen share and keep the voice call going.

It is an "electron" app, so it is the single biggest resource hog (second only to Win11 itself) on the system. It even manages to out-hog Google Chrome by about 50% or better, which given Chrome's legendary hogginess is a testament to MS's ability to produce bloated software.

Just about the only thing it does get right is holding meetings. Click the link, meeting widow opens, hold meeting, click "leave" when done.

jodrellblank2• 2 years ago

"It is an "electron" app"

No, it isn't. It moved away from electron to WebView2 for better performance: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/...

ryanjshaw2• 2 years ago

Locked system means "not at work" which should mean "no noises from you, ever".

Many companies auto-lock desktops after a few minutes of inactivity. If I go to chat to someone away from my desk, I definitely want Teams to make noises if somebody is phoning me - especially since I no longer have a desk phone.

emmanuel_1234• 2 years ago

I personally love teams. I don't particularly like my job, and Teams is so buggy that I can blame it for all the miscommunication.

Example: I've not responded to a message. Is it because I was away for 2 hours, or is because Teams shat the bed again? You'll never know!

It also makes my severely limited, monitored and controlled work laptop even more sluggish to the point that it takes a whole minute to simply start a shell, and 10 seconds to run any command on it (before the command actually runs). When coding, any keystroke takes a second to register. Is my productivity shit because I hate my job, or because my laptop is a dumpster fire in large part because of Teams? You'll never know!

nunez• 2 years ago

I want to join a meeting.

I open Teams. First, Teams opens two windows. Why?

Afterwards, Teams finds my audio devices. This works sporadically.

I join the meeting. The audio input device I chose isn't sending audio for some reason. Need to close Teams completely and join again.

I am finally in the meeting.

If I join from my iOS mobile, chances are good that I'll be able to join, but exiting and re-entering the app will put me back on the login screen. While I can get back into the meeting by typing anything into the Name text box, it's still bad UX.

Then there's screen sharing. When it works, there's no guarantee that it will keep working for the entire meeting. Especially on mobile. It will die for no reason.

Zoom has none of these problems.

But Zoom is expensive because Teams comes with Office 365 for free. Just like Google Chat and Meet (two other not-so-great collaboration tools) come with Workspace.

MattPalmer1086• 2 years ago

Umm... Where to start?

It randomly won't connect to meetings on the PC. Calls drop regularly. Screen sharing sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. If I have joined on the phone so I can get audio working, it's a total crap shoot whether I can also open it using the PC client to see anything someone else is sharing. About half the time I have to join using the browser rather than the actual client. Nobody uses the actual team groups, the notifications of new messages appear in the activity section along with loads of other irrelevant things. It constantly pops up a window telling me I'm muted and when you close it, it pops up abother one. I could go on...

probably_wrong2• 2 years ago

What specifically are teh workflow issues people have with teams?

Quoting myself regarding workflow: Two problems with information are duplication (too many copies around, all of them slightly different) and finding where it is. MS Teams makes it easy to store duplicate data and hard to find it later: did you upload the data as a file in the "development" channel, or as a link in the "updates" wiki? Nobody knows, not even the search function. And with each new project manager creating five channels per project, only two of which will actually see any activity...

When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.

When I get a Teams link I first try to open the web interface - there used to be a native Linux client, but it has been discontinued. That interface has consistently failed me for at least two years - it enters an infinite loop where I can join a meeting but get kicked out immediately with no explanation in Firefox, Chromium and Chrome. Nowadays I can only join from my phone.

cant' think of a single time its failed me or crashed or slowed down during a meeting.

When MS imposed Teams on us during the pandemic I had to request a new laptop because the one I had could not keep up - it was fine for PyCharm which is not precisely lightweight, but Teams was just too much. Whenever I had a meeting I had to close all other programs. And do you know what what was in short supply during the pandemic? Toilet paper. But also laptops. So I spent several months dreading every single meeting until I could replace my perfectly-good machine with a newer model.

I have so many issues with Teams that it's not even funny anymore.

datavirtue3• 2 years ago

This morning, it acted connected and showed me as away for hours. Eventually I noticed because an error message appeared asking me to log in. Like WTF, yeah log in bitch, that's what you are supposed to do. I clicked the login button and it connected again (??). Then I had to manually set myself as available.

Things were going so well...

ghusto3• 2 years ago

Oof, you chose the wrong place to ask that question ;) Or maybe the right place.

I won't pile on to the endless list of examples you asked for, but I'd like to say that this statement:

My experience is that someone books an online meeting, i get a teams link. When the meeting comes I click the link, everyeone's face shows up, we have the meeting and then close teams.

made me sceptical of your motives here. This has never been the case for me, or anyone I know. The first thing we do now when we get an external MS Teams meeting link is request an alternative like Google Meet.

jasoneckert• 2 years ago

Am I the only one reading this thinking that this is an April Fools joke (given the date)?!?

ivanmontillam• 2 years ago

You're not the only one, but it's hard to say. Does Reuters ever pull off April's Fool? I have no knowledge nor precedent.

EDIT: Meditating a bit more about it, I don't think Reuters can afford to pull off a joke, as Reuters news cables can disrupt financial markets in such a way that could cause major damage.

aetherspawn• 2 years ago

I don’t mind Teams because the standardisation of it means that I can send Teams messages to someone in a completely different org by their email and 9/10 times it just works.

As it stands, Teams is “free” for me (with Business Premium or E3 or something like that) and I’m not sure I like this news just because it sounds like more $$ for honestly the same outcome (I don’t care whether our chat app is good or not .. our messages go poof after a few days anyway. We just want something good-enough to get work done).

Does this mean that now every other org is going to send me invite links to their org channels hosted on some random chat app?

Ekaros• 2 years ago

I wonder how far this de-bundling should be taken.

Should actually there be complete ban for bundling more than single program in one solution. Like you could not have email and calendar in one, or something like Word and Excel. Cleary offering email+office suite in one is too far. And what about someone like Adobe, surely each of their softwares should be split up to own subscriptions and there should be no discounts for getting multiple at one time.

maxerickson2• 2 years ago

Why stop there? No reason for the program you send email with to have message editing capabilities.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Official post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-...

stadia42• 2 years ago

Can someone explain to me if the article in The Information on this topic is completely dumb, or whether I'm dumb for misunderstanding it: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/microsoft-unbundles-.... (You don't need to pay, just read the few paragraphs visible for free.)

The author claims there's no benefit to consumers because prices went up. The whole point of the rule is to prevent MS from killing off competition by keeping the prices low. So the benefit should be in the form of a healthier ecosystem (and long-term high quality / price tradeoff) rather than the price level today.

Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny

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