My employer is a prime example for this case: We use Microsoft 365 because we need Microsoft Office and use their email hosting.
And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.
Saw the same pattern with 3 employers over the past 5 years. One killed Slack and all institutional knowledge in its search engine within a month. One replaced all remaining Intel Macs (not an insignificant amount) because Teams would being them to a standstill. The last one is currently happening and I'm wondering what unexpected cost will come to haunt this decision this time.
Though one thing that always suffers in Teams is the ability to self-organize. Slack makes it very easy to let everyone write an automation or open a channel. Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations that I saw adopt Teams, at least until they did.
I think Slack really dropped the ball in 2020, and that's ultimately why the inferior Teams and Zoom platforms have been able to solidify their market shares, and Discord was able to bastardise some of Slack's old market share. It took Slack nearly 2 years after the pandemic started to introduce features like Huddles - by which point, everyone who needed video conferencing software (which was basically every white-collar worker in the world) had adopted one of its competitors. Now, even at companies where Slack is used, they'll also have a Teams account where video calls happen. This is the case, even though Slack had a video call feature hidden in their UI all the way back in 2019.
Although it's bad now, in Feb 2020 Teams was genuinely unusable hot garbage, chats didn't work, calls dropped often, files wouldn't attach to messages etc. Microsoft, for all their sins, recognised the imminent need for mass work-from-home tools relatively early, and made huge improvements to the platform before the end of March. By mid-April was in a usable state.
Slack's better software, but better software's not going to be adopted if it's missing or hiding huge key features.
Do you mean April 2024 or 2025? Because the Teams I use on a regular daily basis is still unusable garbage. Granted it's better than February 2020, but it's still a train wreck of chats that don't work, calls dropped often, and files that won't attach to messages. Not that I am all that fond of Slack either.
I must be an unique snowflake, because I switched jobs around March 2020, and the new place used Teams exclusively, and... it was good. Not stellar, but good for the standards of software in this decade. Better than Slack, anyway. There were some weird glitches happening couple times a year, but nothing major.
So either I'm incredibly lucky, or - my going hypothesis - Teams actually does work quite well, if you deploy it along with SharePoint, Exchange, and other Microsoft products it integrates with.
My experience aligns with yours. Calls almost never drop, it's easy to do ad-hoc calls/meetings of arbitrary groups of people, it's easy to attach a teams call for an outlook event, having persistent chats associated with recurring meetings is great. I really just don't have any complaints whatsoever.
Other than it using more CPU than it has any right to, Teams generally has worked well for me as well. The workplace has pretty fully embraced onedrive and SharePoint. Running on Windows.
sharepoint / onedrive integration with teams is one of those "just works" things. its really great for collaboration. teams has a lot of issues, especially regarding performance but its very feature-packed.
I have experienced the same as well. I've been using team (on Linux for Christs sake) for past 3 years. Never had any major issues. Everything continues to be working as expexted. I'm using the web app on Chrome as a pinned tab since they are going to kill the Linux teams client.
Same experience here, at most I might've run into file attachment issues a handful of times, but otherwise Teams has been flawless for video conferences. Zoom has given me way more trouble than Teams on Windows, Linux and Android devices.
looking at my teams interface right now. there are three separate "..." menus. Behind one of them is the settings, one is the installed apps, the third is to install more apps. Everyone involved in the decision making process that resulted in this UX should be banned from computers.
My experience is the same. It was OK but flaky in 2020 and I un-fairly blamed the React native and JS for the subpar experience. Improved considerably by mid-2023 though I still wish it took lesser system resources. Probably will never happen.
Not the OP but I do run Teams on Apple Silicon and it is still a bug-ridden mess. Crashes, rendering bugs, file attachment bugs. At least once a week, usually more. Searches fail to find results that I can manually locate by scrolling through the chat history. I have reinstalled the app more than once.
I have shared these observations in their feedback pop ups and I know Microsoft loves collecting telemetry. Why should they dedicate more money/resources to fix defects when it clearly hasn’t stopped them from growing their market share?
Teams is the first example I use to begrudgingly explain to someone that quality doesn’t matter.
As per the hypothesis I stated, I think your problem is running Teams on an Apple system. I'm not defending Microsoft releasing a shitty product here, but I think it's most likely they didn't bother to properly test/debug it for other OSes and configurations than "embracing Windows and the Office ecosystem".
So, I had this exact same experience, until IT turned on whatever group policy allows you to see the New Teams toggle switch. [1] You might still be on the “old teams”. In classic Microsoft fashion, it’s 1000x more complex than it has to be.
Guess what? It still sucks. I still hate using it. I still do less work because of it. Can you scroll back thru messages without seeing a 10sec loading spinner every 15 messages? No. But it’s faster… in the general sense!
I think Microsoft managed to get it to "functional garbage" in April 2020, as did Zoom. Both sucked, but the UI made enough sense that even your most antiquated & computer-illiterate colleagues, friends, & family could join a videocall from the isolation of their own home.
That was the real MVP for video conferencing software in the early pandemic, and Slack missed it by years.
I don’t like Teams either but in my corporate environment it’s mostly without bugs at the moment. They dropped support for disabling incoming video for some unknown reason but that’s my only complaint right now.
The UX for teams is terrible compared with slack, but it pains me to say it, I find the video conference part better than zoom. I use the linux clients.
Scrolling the teams channels is also far from smooth. when you scroll up the message threads load slowly. You see they tried to improve it using virtualized lists but it did not work out.
Several coworkers and me also had the problem that we were unmuted but it said we were muted. Just today the teams screen blacked out when someone presented something.
Notifications are a mess too. And when you have multiple teams with the same channel names (project with microservices) it only shows the channel name, but not the team name in the notifications and in the UI.
Huddles... I never understood what they are for. Slack already had video calls with screen sharing. They were easy to start and they worked well. Then they added these huddles, more difficult to see (sometimes people do not realize they are invited to one) and they seem like the old video calls with a worst onboarding. There are only huddles now. So nothing changed except the setup of the call.
By the way, I'm not a native speaker. I know what a call is, I eventually checked what's a huddle now. "a close grouping of people or things."
Slack dropped the ball earlier than that on audio/video. They acquired Screenhero in 2015 and did nothing of substance with it. Also, the lack of any real meeting features means that Zoom or Teams always has to be in the picture.
Screenhero was the best screensharing software I've used to this day.
If anyone here knows the inside story of what went down with that acquisition, please share because I was expecting such great things when I heard Slack got them and then ... just nothing.
Was it a tech integration problem? A key team member leaving? Like what happened?
I think part of it was because around the same time that Chromium (which Electron is based on, thusly inherited by Slack) added baked-in support for capturing the user's screen and individual application windows - so Slack had no incentive to spend money to build their own native screen-capture and sharing code when they could simply wait and do nothing and then get it for free.
...but that still doesn't explain why Slack otherwise seems frozen-in-time: none of the significant end-user usability and quality-of-life issues I've had with Slack since I started using it in 2016 have been addressed (e.g. we can't right-click a message to get its context-menu: you still have to hunt for that awkwardly-placed "..." menu button).
See https://slack.com/release-notes/windows - this is their changelist for their Windows release and most of the releases since 2020 are described as "tweaks", was "tinkered with", or is "tuned-up" which, or "minor security updates" - which, as any npm user will tell you just means they ran `npm update` and not much else (well, besides the bare minimum of automated testing).
> In 2013, I co-founded Screenhero, an app that enabled remote pair programming and made developer collaboration over the internet “better than being in the same room” (to quote our old slogan).
Also, Teams integrates with the other MS stuff. If I share files in a channel, in the background it is "just" a SharePoint which in turn I can add to my OneDrive. Meaning I can save a file in Word to that SharePoint and everyone in the channel can access it.
Teams is a security nightmare, and Sharepoint as well. Access permissions are nearly impossible to grasp for normal users. The feature that all files dropped are shared instantly by everyone through sharepoint is a huge security risk. People in general have no understanding that they are sharing files with everyone that can join a Teams channel, meaning that confidential and sensitive information frequently gets added to Teams chats in "public" channels. Managing the correct permissions on thousands of Teams channels is hard to impossible, even with extra tools. Channel owners often adopt a "allow anyone who knocks" policy when they get permissions requests, because they are busy and do not really understand what they are doing.
Sharing files needs to be more cordoned off for security reasons. Not harder or more difficult, just less integrated and not inheriting permissions.
Why would anyone not think that putting a document in a public channel would result in people who can join that channel having access to it? Isn't that the whole point?
Because the correct minimum set of people is those who are in the channel when it was shared to the channel… and most people aren’t thinking of possible future information leaks when sharing documents directly into a channel with specific people the document is intended for…
The mismatch makes sense to programmers and IT types who have internalised the “computers are stupider than we make them look” way of thinking… but most normal non computer professionals are probably just thinking “I am sharing this with these people right now.
I’m still not at all sold. If someone put a file in the Ops Team folder of a shared drive then they’re sharing it with all current and future members of that team. The same is true if you post to #ops-team.
To be brutally honest people need to just stop and apply some basic critical thinking to their actions instead of expecting magic.
What if there was a free, open source alternative for Teams? I don’t mean Matrix or Mastodon. I mean something you could run on-prem and it would have chats, meetings, attach files etc. Do you know anything like this?
Well, I think so, but i'm probably biased given it's my company. Empirically we dogfood it successfully as a Teams/Slack replacement (and a WhatsApp/Signal replacement) while building it, and lots of others use it for that use case too: https://element.io/customers.
The biggest problems have been that the 'classic' mobile apps are stale, and are currently being replaced with Element X: https://element.io/blog/element-x-experience-the-future-of-e... - which far surpasses the Teams mobile clients in terms of UX & performance. Also, the E2EE reliability and UX on the old apps was also not great, but that's also fixed (at last) by Element X.
Will it allow my calendar to automatically attach Matrix/Element video calls to every appointment invite? Will it chime when such appointment is about to start?
This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.
> This is the kind of stuff that corporate customers care about. They want systems that integrate well.
Great. I just want a system that allows me to view a PDF file that my teacher sent me without having to click through a dozen menus and wait several minutes.
Yes. That's what you get from a well-integrated system. At work, I can open PDFs and Excel sheets and Powerpoints directly within Teams with a single click (and, one or two extra clicks to download an off-line copy).
We have <20 employees and managing an extra vendor for a chat application is a non-negligible % of our time.
Our new hires can log with their work account using a shrink-wrapped machine from Best Buy and will have all of their needed applications ready to go & signed-in without going to random vendor sites or file shares.
Quick contrary datapoint: I'm a heavy Windows user but the only interaction I've ever had with Teams is to figure out how to delete its icon from the task bar.
> Teams feels like it is imposing a culture that seems antithetical to most of the organisations
My employer, a large university, has moved to Microsoft, and I've definitely noticed this in MS's software. It feels like the software is designed with certain office culture and workflow patterns in mind.
For example, previously I was able to use standalone email software. Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features, which are not something I care to use. I've gotten an increasing number of meeting invitations through this calendar, and Outlook "helpfully" tells me whether I'm available or not. I'm in fact always "available", because I don't use Outlook to manage my schedule.
Outlook, in contrast, pushes its calendaring features
I've never understood Outlook being both email and calendar. Does no one at Microsoft ever want to read an email and reference their calendar at the same time, or vice versa?
No, people at Microsoft just didn't realize most users forgot how to work with multiple windows. You can have a separate calendar window if you care for it, you can even read individual e-mails in separate windows (that one is annoyingly bound to double-click...). That works on the web too - at least for people realizing you can have the same app open in two tabs, and then break them out into separate browser windows...
Beyond that, maybe I'm thoroughly infused with corporate culture at this point, but I find this perfectly obvious and natural bundling. E-mail, calendars and TODO lists belong together.
My attitude -- and I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege -- is that I don't care to share my calendar with my employer.
I'm a university professor; there's always pressure to join this or that initiative, to participate in more committees, and the like. But in the long term, success depends on maintaining much of my focus on my long-term research goals, which means saying no a lot.
PG wrote about "makers' schedules vs managers' schedules"
> My attitude -- and I acknowledge that this comes from a place of privilege -- is that I don't care to share my calendar with my employer.
Neither do I. Fortunately, my employer doesn't care about it anyway.
> Outlook feels designed around the manager's schedule.
That is 100% true.
However, relevant to this entire thread, it's typical to put "focus time" blocks on the calendar. If you set your free/busy status to "busy" on those blocks (which is the default anyway), then come focus time, MS Teams and Outlook will both show you as "busy" / unavailable for the duration. A little bit of automation, but it does a good job at deterring casual interruptions, as anyone who tries to "invite you" to a meeting, or ask you "a small question, 30 seconds tops" will have their Outlook tell them there's a scheduling conflict, and their Teams that you should not be disturbed and won't get the notification anyway.
Could be slightly worse... I can't access my personal calendar and my work calendar on the same device. I have to constantly check both (dr appts on personal) vs work meetings on the company laptop.
Sure they do - but you can have Outlook show your upcoming meetings in your Outlook sidebar, so you can see everything upcoming on a single computer screen.
Individually all of these apps are shit, the value is that they work well together. This is not unlike, say, the Apple computer which can do things like go back from sleep in 1 to 2 seconds because the software is written for one particular chip.
As a side note, it is not obvious to me that Teams is a separate product that you get for free. I would say it is just as correct to look at what you buy from MS is a standard office communication and organization service and Teams is just a part of that.
I hate that I can't view the calendar separately from the email editor... it is convenient to have the integration in terms of invites/notifications and the availability for scheduling meetings is nice.
My biggest gripe is the distributed db that backs exchange/outlook365 mail on their server... I operate on inbox-zero and when I clear all the filtered mail out, then try to empty the "trash" I either have to wait 2 minutes for all the other deletes to sync to the trash, or empty the trash multiple times.
It's significantly worse than it was in the 90's on dedicated server(s), though back then the hardware was really easy to overwhelm with too much email/activity.
I have some sympathy here, mostly because Outlook's calendering is horrible. I also think most people don't exclusively use Outlook for their calendar, even in environments where your calendar there is meant to reflect your availability for meetings.
I've never understood why neither Google or MS have the ability to give their calendar tool an ical feed and have the availability from that reflected in your corporate calendar.
I guess it made sense in the days of everyone being in offices on a fixed schedule, but in the modern world where people's work life and personal life increasingly intersect I'd love to be able to drop things like needing to pick my son up from school in the calendar and have that shared with my partner without also needing to duplicate that same entry in my work calendar so no one books a meeting with me.
They all support adding an iCal feed I can see. I want one that other people in the organisation can see the free/busy state from that gets merged with that from my work calendar.
To be fair, video calls on Slack were below par at the time when Teams came out, and little effort was made by Slack to improve the call feature in the months that followed.
Not sure if that counts as a success or a failure. More like a failure because you learn after wasting a whole month. And then everybody has to learn the same lesson.
I'm not sure what you expect everyone involved in such a culture to do, but the same disregard from executives that caused a lack of documentation (and runbooks for software I was on call for) caused the overnight Slack shutdown.
Not just teams on intel macs... running anything under Docker would do similarly... the Intel macbooks in particular would run against thermal thresholds all the time, and freeze sporatically to be nearly unusable. The last one I was issued was replaced with an M1 max after 3 months of being bottlenecked by the thing. And I couldn't underclock/volt it because it was locked down corporate hardware, I could do a lot, but not that.
It was an i9 (10th? gen), and performed worse than a 4th gen i3 in practice.
I don't use teams, but doesn't it have a web interface that runs on any platform? I have to say we use slack and the web version work just fine for me and I don't need anything fancy, chat/share files&code/threaded chats off to the side.
but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
I definitely understand this argument and I definitely understand how it plays out in the real world. At the same time, it strikes me as one of the ways companies can be foolishly cheap. If a product like Teams is making employees so unhappy, it's definitely worth spending some money to fix that. I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it. When friends are complaining unprompted about a piece of software from work, that seems pretty striking to me.
Yes, it's included with Microsoft 365, but it seems like the cost of it in employee pain make it far from free. I know the appeal of "free" for companies, but Teams seems like an occasion where they're really ignoring a lot of time/effort/frustration that their employees have to go through and the impact that has on their work.
Slack isn't cheap, but if you have reasonably compensated employees do you really want them wasting time and energy over Teams? Though, as I said, I certainly understand how this plays out in the real world. Many companies look at what something is costing them in their budget without having the ability to measure the pain and lost productivity those decisions might be causing.
>I've never used Teams, but I hear so much complaining about it.
People will complain about anything, though.
The nature of my work has me dealing with all of these platforms, depending on the clients. Guess what? I don't find Slack to be some joyous piece of software to use. It's better than the alternatives, I guess, but not to the point that I really care one way or the other. Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
> Some people complain about the bundling, but that can be really convenient for your organization.
If you have <50 employees and you are standing on principle against the completely bundled cable TV vertical that Microsoft is offering, I genuinely question how much you care about the success of your business. We should be able to have a rational, business-oriented review of their value proposition - as of 2023, not 2010 or 2018.
Organizations that have a lot of loose capital and cowboy investors might be more interested in playing in traffic with 20+ vendors and horrible integration stories, but we (aka our <20 employee org) really need to ship solutions to paying customers or we don't have any jobs in 12 months.
I always hear everyone complain about how expensive it is, but I feel like John Travolta meme each time I look at our Azure/Microsoft account. The per-seat & consumption/serverless billing models feel like dust in the wind when you have so few employees. Everyone is doing a lot, so why not put a lot of power under each seat? If you intend to do more with less people, I really feel like Microsoft is the answer. If you are a F100 org, I totally get it. Fuck Microsoft. Use something totally different. Build your own datacenters.
For many remote workers, this is the single largest connection they have to their coworkers and work. It is your main communication method you use. I think the argument is that if you define the problem as "all of them let you chat with one another", then they all satisfy it.
But when it's your main communication method, you want people to enjoy it, use it, and want to use it more. You don't want people to avoid communication because they have to use a crappy IM client. These small differences have huge impacts.
I've used all of them in the past, and Teams was, and still is, the one I avoid chatting with someone unless absolutely necessary.
If you're going to go by "people complained about it" then I guess you just won't use any software, ever. I hear complaints about how terrible Teams is. I hear complaints about how terrible Slack is. I hear complaints about how terrible Mattermost or Element or Jabber or whatever is.
For practically any given piece of software, you'll find a crowd of people who will tell you how absolutely trash it is.
I have seen companies being even cheaper, everything required for project delivery, including hardware, trainings and licenses has to be provided and paid for by the client.
The consulting company is providing only warm bodies.
It costs Microsoft ZERO dollars to remove the asinine keyboard shortcut control + shift + c to start a call.
Who does that?
Why is this right next to the ctrl + shift + v (for unformatted paste)
What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it?
My complaint against Azure DevOps:
Why is there no "date" field?
From what I've heard there are internal people at Microsoft who suffer because of this nonsense.
How hard is it to give a date only option?
And no, 00:00:00 is not the same as date only.
Oh, my one complaint about azure devops is that when somebody goes to the build or release pages and interacts with a build or release, the default action should never be to edit them. That's asinine and makes onboarding people way harder than it should be.
> What is the point of collecting all this metrics (kusto, whatever) if you don't ACT on it?
To sell it later together with other data.
There are a lot of bugs and stupid UI decisions which go unfixed by MS and telemetry hasn't improved anything.
It's particularly galling how Outlook invites *by default* include a Teams link. You can disable this on a per invite basis or in your settings, but it's pretty icky behaviour.
It may a per-tenant setting but I checked that and a new meeting created in Outlook doesn't contain a Teams link - you have to either select "New Teams Meeting" or select "New Meeting" and then explicitly make it a Teams meeting.
New meetings created in Teams do include a Teams link - but isn't that what you would expect?
In my work Outlook, it's similar to what GP says. There is only "New Meeting" (not "New Teams Meeting") and the message starts out with a Teams link, and then I actively have to opt out of that with an extra button press in the meeting composer.
I've been forced to use it because it's the only "allowed" one for a project I'm on (since the other party has the "we already have teams for free" syndrome). It's horrible to work with, sound fails to function half of the time and it is "incompatible" with firefox (our main browser of choice).
I tried using the linux client but it simply will not allow me to connect to anyone and keeps telling me I need to login and enable teams on my "account" (we do not have a microsoft company account).
This is the case with all of the management led (as opposed to technology led) clients I’ve worked with over the past 2-3 years. Pretty much everyone hates teams with a passion - even many of the managers now, but they’re forced to use it because the business gets it bundled with office365. Thankfully all of the technical teams I’ve worked with only use it for video calls and use Slack (not that it’s perfect) for all chat, bots and huddles.
Teams main feature is that it is a front end to SharePoint. Not chat. Not video. Even before the pandemic we were using Teams for project management (via the OneNote integration) and file sharing. Each team is a full SharePoint group.
Now that we are all back in the office and don’t use video, we are using Teams even more. The chat is a nice function we’ve adopted since the pandemic, but it’s a side offering really. MS 365 is a godsend for many small businesses.
I think the downvotes are unwarranted but I understand why people would disagree. Was SharePoint so bad before Teams? Is Teams that much better? I don't really know, my mega-corp work culture isn't "all in" and is not frankly that competent with a lot of tools so maybe we're missing out. But pre-teams we used SharePoint/OneDrive/WhateverBranding and it was fine. The big difference I've seen with document sharing is now you navigate a chat app to find stuff instead of a website and then you waste 3 minutes of a meeting trying to figure out how to open the document in the native app because the Teams embed is shit.
It was much more difficult to use SharePoint, at least for us, as we were a small team and had no dedicated IT person. You could use SharePoint and OneNote, sure, but it wasn’t obvious how to create a group with all the docs/notes in one place. We had Teams up and running in a couple of days. Anyone now can create a SharePoint site through Teams. Super simple.
MS has released a native app for Teams by the way. Performance is much better. I’m not an advocate for MS, I’m just saying Teams is far more than a chat or video app.
Yeah I agree it's more than chat/video I just don't see the need. And sorry I meant the native app for excel/word/powerpoint rather than the embedded versions in Teams. The embedded versions generally seem to be missing features or perform worse or get in the way of other Teams app use cases while using them.
It’s ridiculous this comment is downvoted. It’s a straightforward comment from the perspective of a long time user of Teams n a small business setting.
Many, many employers have done just that around the world. Because it's "free". It really is a massive anticompetitive move, made clear by the market-dominating force that is Microsoft. I have to say, I think the EU has them bang to rights, and they probably know it.
And the rest of the MS ecosystem is full of dark patterns to funnel you onto it also. Create a new meeting in Outlook - there's automatically a Teams link in it that nobody asked for. Even if it's a Zoom meeting.
There’s a bit more to it I think. Pricing and basic messaging aside, you can build robust applications on top of MS Teams and have complete freedom over the UI, functionality, etc., but you can’t do the same with Slack. In many cases, MS Teams can replace Slack, but Slack can’t replace Teams.
My company also killed Slack when Teams became bundled. With some bureaucracy and a written exception you can continue to use Slack if you're a "developer" which is like ?? but I'm not complaining because the code blocks and screen sharing on Teams are actual garbage so good to have an alternative.
What an awful experience, both the app and the forced move. The only people who like it are warm bodies who can barely use other Office products as it is.
I quite confident if there would be a group of people attempting to make Teams worse, exhibit a different buggy behavior on a weekly basis, they would absolutely fail miserably.
Teams is a peak example of what 'tying' looks like.
This is just weird because there has been a chat app as part of Office since 2007 (Office Communicator, then Lync, then Skype for Business, then Teams).
That's way before Slack even existed.
Is the claim that it's anti-competitive simply because they made their existing chat functionality better? Or because Slack decided to launch a standalone product? Can I make a standalone Excel competitor and then claim Microsoft is anti-competitive for "bundling" Excel?
And a chat app is very much not out of place in an office productivity suite. I have to say, I don't understand the merits of this case at all.
I didn’t use Lync back in the day, but I used Skype.
Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides. Teams, like Slack, aims at bundling the whole workplace experience in a single app, with actual groups and bidirectional integrations.
And of course, Teams defaults to Microsoft products for every single integration that can communicate with one.
I would say that regulators didn’t care enough, or were aware of, the potential risks of Skype being bundled with Office because it wasn’t that popular to begin with. On the other hand, this may be a preventive move to avoid another Outlook crapfest from happening.
> Skype didn’t have half of the functionality Teams provides
If one uses Teams, one would definitely see the edges of where Microsoft just started bolting things on to compete with other platforms. Skype was much closer to AIM with a phone bolted on than Teams. Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can.
> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat? Teams definitely smells of Microsoft trying to compete where it can.
To be fair, those are two different paradigms, and both are needed simultaneously. This alone makes Teams better than Discord and Slack, both of which - last I checked on them (~3 years ago for the former, and ~6 months for the latter) - try to shoehorn long-lived multiplayer threads into a sequential chat format.
Maybe it is anticompetitive in some ways, but out of the trio mentioned above, Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die.
As a tool to casually/ephemerally chat I rank best to worst Discord, Slack, Teams. The threading/replies in Discord is easily better than whatever Slack/Teams are doing. Casual VC is better in Discord, code blocks are better in Discord.
Teams I am frequently confused on where anything is and whether notifications are important or not. People never know if they should chat/share in the meeting thread or the team thread but oh wait we invited this random person so it really should be in the meeting cause they're not in the team but oh wait these 2 team members weren't invited but they really need to know as well... I see what they were going for and maybe it's just UI issues but at the moment it's a bad UX.
Knowledge does die in Teams though, hard disagree on them avoiding that fate.
> Teams seems to be the only one to avoid the fate of becoming the communication platform where knowledge goes to die.
I wonder how many people actually find any kind of information in teams logs that are older than, say, a few days.
Even leaving aside the fact that it's a horrendous experience because of the lag and messages jumping all over the place as they're loaded, the search function is an absolute joke. Half the time it doesn't find anything, and the other half it'll just give you give the message that exactly matches your query, without any kind of context.
I agree - search in Teams absolutely sucks. Fortunately, a basic threading capability that's separate from chat helps a bit - but more importantly, search in Outlook and SharePoint sucks much less (though still some), so in an integrated system, there are other ways to browse chat history, more suitable for building up a knowledge base.
I'd have to ask my corporate IT, but I understand that if you perform enough unholy rituals to bind Exchange and SharePoint and AD together, everything somehow becomes smoothly accessible from everything else.
Like, e.g., hovering over someone's profile on Teams is the quickest way for me to check if they're on a leave and have auto-responder set for their e-mail. Or, calendars staying in sync, and Teams automatically applying a "Busy/DND" status based on your "busy" blocks. Or, from the more annoying side, how Yammer (Microsoft's pseudo-Facebook for Work) updates pop up in both Teams and Outlook. Or how the same files you exchange inside teams in Teams can also be found via SharePoint, and even pop up in Outlook. Etc. There's a lot of those tiny things.
> Like, why are there two different paradigms for text communication in Teams? A Teams team is a threading conversation, but there is also unthreaded chat?
This drives me nuts. Teams UX is a joke, at least on mac.
I did use Lync back in the day, and it was the same as Skype for Business (which was anyway just a re-branding of Lync as far as I remember). There were a few Outlook-Lync/SfB integrations as well, but mostly those were part of Outlook rather than Lync I believe.
Reading the article, I feel this is just a corporate equivalent of a kid complaining to the teacher that the other kid is making the sportsball game hard for them. Or a kid whining about their elder sibling to their parents - "No fair! I had this idea first! My idea my idea my idea! Mom, dad, do something!".
Parents will discretely roll their eyes, make a small show of telling the elder kid to behave, so that elder kid behaves and younger kid shuts up, and then they'll go back to the kitchen and try to finish eating their sandwiches before either of the kids lodges another complaint against the other, which would be the sixth one this evening.
In short: nothing to see here, just regular motions of the entrepreneurial game.
You forgot the prefix "speaking out of a bias for MS".
Chat app wasn't bundled with office. The base version only came with word, excel and powerpoint. MS is striving to make Teams a default Windows app. It is a default Office app today. Which means you're forced into it as an org with a need for some doc tools. It works poorly on all other OSes. It is simple to synergize between other MS tools but other synergiez magically work poorly (attach file, highlight bash syntax).
Sure, someone who isn't proficient in law _may_ miss these oversteps. Additionally, the US is heavily plagued by corp corruption (aka lobbying) and they'll always signal the OK sign. Luckily, the EU is more mature in the domain of privacy and free market where shady practices are fought early on (relatively). Rather than after it is too late and a large corp killed all competition.
The issue is not just VS Slack. There are a plethora of privacy oriented office products that have zero chance when a corp like MS exploits its OS brainwash to nullify all alternatives.
> And a chat app is very much not out of place in an office productivity suite. I have to say, I don't understand the merits of this case at all.
The article talks about M365/O365, but I suspect the bigger issue might be that Microsoft includes Teams Personal (WebView) in Windows 11. From what I understand this version will eventually reach feature parity with Teams for Work & School (Electron)
It's not clear to me if Teams Personal will be kept as a separate app, or if the new features will just be subscription-gated from that version. Either way I can see why competitors and regulators might be a bit concerned about it.
Side note - I really hate Microsoft's product naming. Finding resources about all these different versions of Teams is such a pain, not to mention how confusing it is for end users.
> It's not clear to me if Teams Personal will be kept as a separate app
It's pretty clear if you use the Teams preview version. It already is a unified app in the Preview. You can sign in with a work and a personal account at the same time.
In this case Microsoft had a chat app several years before Slack was created. Admittedly, it was rebranded and upgraded a few times - however Skype for Business had group chats before Teams came out.
If I'm not mistaken, Microsoft's chat apps were never part of Office. That's the issue at hand. Microsoft is not forbidden from making competing products, it's forbidden from misusing a dominant market position in A to seize the market in B.
Office Communicator came out in 2007. Hard to say "Office Communicator" has no relationship to Office. That's six years before slack's initial release.
I'm old. I've used every single version of Office both at home and in the Office and none came supplied with a chat app. The only exception at one point being Skype for Business, but I'm fuzzy as to whether this was a default or optional package.
Honestly I chalk this one up mostly to just international trade mercantilism.
The EU relatively weaker at developing international software, so slapping "antitrust fines" on Microsoft (which probably have nonzero merit) is a good way of "group negotiation" to get a bulk discount on Microsoft (US) products.
The analogy is how the USA is relatively less good at making quality cheese and wine compared to the EU, so the USA allows any sparking wine to be labeled "Champagne" and any Emmental-style cheese to be labeled "Swiss".
Trump got many things wrong, but got the trade negotiation right when he slapped back luxury wine tariffs on France in return for France fining US software companies -- bulk discounts in both cases.
Per the article, it seems that it's Slack that's been making the noise and pushing for this, and EU is just playing ball (perhaps because of the mercantilism you mention).
But both Slack and Microsoft operate in the EU market as well. Slack is trying to buy itself some breathing room by convincing the EU to go after Microsoft.
This is really good, but needs to be done in parallel with the investigation of how Google destroyed a thriving browser market just as it was recovering from IE.
(Massive ad campaigns, and products that had weird bugs in other browsers for no good reason.)
> Chrome ate Firefox and IE back in the day because it was monumentally better, technologically speaking.
The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox. The explosive growth from Chrome can't be explained just by it being better than competition, or Firefox would have replaced IE in 6 months earlier.
The real explanation is that Chrome benefited from immeasurable (can't really calculate the cost of chrome being advertised prominently on every Google property) amounts of advertising.
I think you're forgetting some of the key benefits:
* auto-updates when firefox was still: HELLO WEDNESDAY'S VERSION HAS DROPPED WOULD U LIKE TO DOWNLOAD IT?
* tabs were isolated per process where an entire Firefox session could still get taken down by one tab not responding
* That super sexy tab handling code where the resizing happened when you clicked away meaning you could close multiple tabs by simply clicking a lot (which you couldn't in Firefox because it was resizing them all the time).
My point is that being incredibly more advanced than the incumbent browser was simply not enough to have a great adoption, as evidenced by FF or Opera's market progression before Chrome's introduction.
People who make that claim in 2023 simply ignore how important Google's advertising was in securing Chrome's position.
Forgive me, as I also feel compelled to start with a mandatory posturing statement that adds nothing to the conversation.
Now that's done with; I would also suggest that given how much better Chrome was at the time than any other browser that much of its adoption was organic. At the time of its release Google still had a considerable amount of good will from the tech public. I was certainly telling anyone willing to listen at that time to install Chrome because of genuinely good it was.
> I would also suggest that given how much better Chrome was at the time than any other browser that much of its adoption was organic.
I tried it a number of times.
The tab close thing was the only thing that was significantly better on my machines,
... and if I really want to close a number of tabs quickly and without thinking I just right-click and chose "close tabs to the right/to the left/other tabs".
I am one of those who can sense and get annoyed by a few tens of milliseconds lag and for me Linux is a massive UX improvement despite its font issues and alignment issues (actually I can't see them even when I try) because all the random lags from Windows are gone.
I never experienced any improvement on Chrome on any of my setups so I discarded it immediately because the extension API was so crippled right from the start it was mostly just glorified web sites, not actual extensions like on Firefox.
(At that time Firefox had full blown FTP clients implemented as Firefox extensions, and even Firebug [1] was just and extension, so going for a browser that only allowed canned websites as "extensions" for trivial performance gains wasn't an option.)
[1]: not the first such tool but I will argue it was so impressive that it became the inspiration for all later web developer tools in all browsers.
> The difference between Firefox and IE was orders of magnitude larger than the difference between Chrome and Firefox
I don't think so. When Chrome came out it was much better than competition too[1]. I don't know if Firefox was that much better than Internet Explorer.
It is also possible that Chrome rode the wave of Firefox i.e, Firefox got people thinking about improved browsing experience by switching from Internet Explorer. Then Chrome came along and picked up many new users who may have otherwise gotten picked up by Firefox.
Who else has been allowed to advertise on the front page of Google?
None as far as I am aware of. Not even - again AFAIK - disaster relief after the biggest disasters we have seen after Google was founded.
I'd argue that is quite clearly the same league as Microsoft pre-installing Media Player and Internet Explorer: taking advantage of a niche that they completely dominates and abusing it to wedge their way into another ecosystem and then completely dominating that too.
When you try to change the default browser on Windows (a setting ignored by some Microsoft apps, which will always use Edge btw.), you can't just change it, you get a pop-up going like:
You SURE you wanna do that? Edge is better you know. And more secure. And shit.
[ BIG BLUE CONTINUE WITH EDGE BUTTON ]
Arial, 6pt grey on white, "Use my choice" link
Edit: You also can't move or remove the Edge symbol from your desktop without admin privileges. So for a normal, unprivileged user there's just two things you can't remove from your desktop, recycle bin and Edge.
If Microsoft could get in trouble for bundling its own product (IE) on its own OS (Windows) then IMHO this can in fact be seen as abusing monopolistic market power in the search market to benefit in the browser market.
Both cases they're abusing market power in one category to compete unfairly in another market. Apparently this is called "monopolistic leveraging" and is a somewhat unsettled area of law in the US. [0][1]
Here's another example. Amazon using its market power as an online marketplace to benefit in both the logistics market and its own-label goods market. [2]
By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it could also be said that Google is practising "Refusal to deal", which is also forbidden, although I admit that case is somewhat weaker. [3]
> Google does not force you to install Chrome in order to use Search.
I believe that just means they aren't practising tying, which is yet another abuse of monopoly power.
> Here's another example. Amazon using its market power as an online marketplace to benefit in both the logistics market and its own-label goods market. [2]
This is vastly different from advertising a product in the company website. Amazon got caught peeking into their own partners data, then leveraging that knowledge to unfairly compete with them.
> By not allowing anyone else to advertise on its front page, it could also be said that Google is practising "Refusal to deal", which is also forbidden, although I admit that case is somewhat weaker. [3]
Again, not the same. "Refusal to deal" means that Google would prohibit Microsoft from advertising Edge, their Chrome competitor, in their ad network, which is not happening.
But it's worth noting that Microsoft does the same with Bing and Edge, displaying a modal if you are using any other browser. They also got caught displaying large banners in the Chrome download page, which I personally think is even worse [0]
I admit, the cases are different, and I may be more stating how I think it should be than what a court would decide. But yes, Microsoft is doing even worse now, because the government failed to act previously.
Google, like Microsoft before them, pushes their own products in ways that no others are allowed to:
- Microsoft pre-bundled IE and Windows Media Player when no one else could bundle anything.
- Google pushed ads against Firefox and for Chrome on the front page of Google search (i.e. before a search was typed) something I am not aware if anyone neither humanitarian or commercial entities with the worlds largest marketing budgets being allowed to do.
For me, this example alone is enough to demonstrate behind reasonable doubt that Google, like Microsoft before them (and after them with Teams and Edge) have abused their position in one market to crush all competition in another market.
Everything else like the very convenient issues showing up in Firefox on major Google properties like Search, Calendar and YouTube is just icing on the cake.
Google did not cripple their products to work only on Chrome. It did not force customers to install Chrome on their computers, nor had partnerships with OEMs to preinstall its browser.
> Google pushed ads against Firefox and for Chrome on the front page of Google search
I highly doubt that Google, one of Mozilla main sponsors, had ads against Firefox in their Search homepage. They do promote Chrome in Search and Gmail, but not in YouTube as far as I know.
But that is beyond the point. Google uses its own real estate to promote their products, exactly like Mozilla does with Firefox and their VPN and Relay services. Mozilla also bundles Pocket within Firefox, by the way.
It's not great, but I think that a company should be allowed to promote a product in their own spaces, always respecting the autonomy of the user, and without aggressively pushing it.
Which is exactly why Microsoft is and should be in trouble. They not only bundled Teams in Office 365, but also defaulted to or pointed at Teams for every single operation coming from any other Office application.
> Google did not cripple their products to work only on Chrome.
Without defending Microsoft, they deserve a visit from relevant authorities, at least Calendar, the search results page and YouTube have had "funny" issues with other browsers and sometimes they have went away if one changed how the browser identified itself.
> I highly doubt that Google, one of Mozilla main sponsors, had ads against Firefox in their Search homepage.
I saw it.
"Download a better browser" it said when I was already using Firefox.
Google does force me to use Android to use certain tools of theirs (eg manage their Google wifi pucks), as opposed to just using a local admin page like every other system.
Chrome when it released was faster than Firefox, but it wasn't "better".
It ate far more RAM than either Firefox or IE did (and still does), back when RAM capacities were still practically limited, and Chrome was (and is) rendering the internet in Chrome ways much like IE did in Trident ways and Firefox has in Gecko ways. Chrome also had and still has its own UI paradigms, including no title bar, menu bar, nor status bar, and an omnibar instead of an address bar.
What really made Chrome the victor was they kept improving things common people care about, particularly in JavaScript and therefore JavaShit execution, while Mozilla got lazy on "winning" the war and Google dollars and IE was too late in getting back into the game.
Only reason Safari feels fast is that it has avoided implementing features. There's still stuff that's been present in Chrome/Firefox for 10 years, but still doesn't work in Safari.
Does Google still show the old search results page design to Safari users? It did that for a long time.
If those features slow down the web then that’s a knock on those features. Plus I’ve yet to see a single one of these supposedly “missing” features actually matter in the real world.
May I recommend Orion? It's based on Safaris engine, but imo improves massively on its ui (for example it comes with a fantastic (opt-in) tree-style tab browser).
But most importantly it supports chrome and firefox extensions. Most of them do just work out of the box.
It's funny how massive the impact of "bundle a bunch of proprietary stuff into our open browser" was on the browser wars. Between H264, MP3, Flash and PDF, Firefox never had a chance.
I can't remember firefox ever being included in installers for flash updates, antivirus, etc with install by default checked either.
Perhaps Chrome did succeed mostly on its own merits, but it wasn't above techniques used by things like Bonzai Buddy and Ask Toolbar to get the job done.
To top it, it could be argued that Chrome is a worse piece of spyware than Bonzi Buddy ever was.
You don't put a single character into the address bar of Chrome without notifying Google.
Yes, even if you are typing a domain instead of planning to search for something you have told Google about it, which means they know everything you visit, both internal websites at work and everything else.
The problem is that there simply wasn't a better option at the time.
Ogg Vorbis was a novelty at best, and it was the only decently widely adopted open source competitor for any of the items listed that was available at the time.
HTML5 was only just published when Chrome launched. So Flash was at that point the only option available to show a video in the browser (sure, downloading a RealPlayer file was always an option, but it was clunky, creators didn't like people being able to save stuff locally, and was also not open source). Chrome in fact arguably accelerated the process of getting web video open sourced: Google bought On2 in 2010 to get the rights to VP8 (the only decent H.264 competitor available at that point) so they could immediately open source it. The plan was in fact to remove H.264 from Chrome entirely once VP8/VP9 adoption ramped up[1], but that didn’t end up happening.
Flash was integrated into Chrome because people were going to use it anyway, and having Google distribute it at least let them both sandbox it and roll out automatic updates (a massive vector for malware at the time was ads pretending to be Flash updates, which worked because people were just that used to constant Flash security patches, most of which required a full reboot to apply; Chrome fixed both of those issues). Apple are the ones who ultimately dealt the death blow to Flash, and it was really just because Adobe could not optimize it for phone CPUs no matter what they tried (even the few Android releases of Flash that we got were practically unusable). That also further accelerated the adoption of open source HTML5 technologies.
PDF is an open source format, and has been since 2008. While I don't know if pressure from Google is what did it, that wouldn’t surprise me. Regardless, the Chrome PDF reader, PDFium, is open source[2] and Mozilla's equivalent project from 2011, PDF.js, is also open source.[3] Both of these projects replaced the distinctly closed source Adobe Reader plugin that was formerly mandatory for viewing PDFs in the browser.
Chrome is directly responsible for eliminating a lot of proprietary software from mainstream use and replacing it with high-quality open source tools. While they've caused problems in other areas of browser development that are worthy of criticism, Chrome's track record when it comes to open sourcing their tech has been very good.
Chrome's crushing advantage is/was perfect Google service support. For a long time Safari has struggled with Google Suite, Youtube support is/was janky on almost every other browser etc.
The Edge incident was kind of a perfect illustration of how Google either didn't care or actively threw spikes in rivals' wheels.
Chrome's throne is reinforced by the combined factors of websites increasingly becoming only compatible with Chrome, and JavaShit increasingly assuming Chrome-levels of execution speed.
I mean, the former is 90% of modern capitalism (even in supposedly democratic "politicss"), and it's very hard to prove the latter due to the nature of code (especially with the spaghettigi and duct tape we call a "programming language").
Like half of Javascript, user-agents were a horribly abused concept that many sites have perverted for various technical and non-technical reasons. "weird bugs in other browsers for no good reason" describes most of the 00's web development environment.
Microsoft should be forced to stop requiring "Microsoft accounts" to activate a box license, let alone binding such licenses to a specific user forever. As a small business you can buy a basic Office box for a new employee and forget about having it back once they leaeve the team. This is bullshit.
Firslly a private person should not be forced to have or use an online account either.
Secondly, as a small business, we prefer to just buy box versions (even if they cost more) from the nearest computer store the same way we buy office supplies.
Neither was a problem in the past, everyone could just buy a box, install and reinstall it on any PC.
Now the very meaning of a box version seems destroyed (I don't understand what does it mean anymore).
Meanwhile, there is a EU Court of Justice case saying people can re-sell used software.
They’re under fire in the areas where their practices have noticeable consumer impact, namely the App Store, USB vs Lightning, and repairability.
Their services are an afterthought in terms of market share, particularly in Europe. For example no-one really gives a shit about iMessage and “green bubbles” here because most folks are just using WhatsApp.
Yes, their marketshare overall is lower however in certain very large EU countries their market share is very high and their practices shouldn't escape scrutiny as this type of law also applies to smaller players. I suppose it's an issue of allocation of resources for the regulators. Smaller has less impact. The individual country regulators can also address this.
When there's only two competitors and the margin is only 20% in some subset of the population, that's not "very high market share." EU-wide, Android is >70%.
Interop compliance should be a thing. Enterprise customers are missing the plot here. Please ask your software vendors to support interoperability. Example - Outlook should support/declare standard interfaces for video calling meeting links from other products. I see the need for a body for enterprise integration standards. Please help me such a body if there already is one.
I look specifically for something of the likes for Enterprise Integration Act of 2002 for software vendors.
> I see the need for a body for enterprise integration standards.
Both ISO and IETF could and should do that. IETF in particular seems to be less effective than it used to be - an RFC used to mean something, to carry some weight, but now they're often just words into the void.
When was that? AFAIK, the great differential of RFCs is that they never carried any weight, and as a consequence the process wasn't taken over by entrenched interests.
They carried weight with the people trying to make this shit work, down in the trenches. It wasn't a perfect process, but it was a process - geeks trying to talk to each other, beyond bullshit corporate boundaries.
I don't think anyone really wants to talk to anyone anymore.
Just a side note the Microsoft Teams installer is really annoying.
Install Office 2021lts and Teams gets installed and set to autostart for all users. This has the feeling of desperation and crap ware IMO … I will launch Teams if I want to use it.
To remove you will find the Microsoft Teams store app and regular app in the add remove programs… scroll down and you will find another Microsoft Teams system wide installer listed… why?
Teams works okay and no need for the program to come at users this way.. it’s just another annoying hook to use a “Microsoft account”
Nice. Now can we please add Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta to that list? And while we're on it, how about breaking up all the oligopolies that sprouted up over the last 40 years or so?
I wish EU doing the same thing with Apple. They add more and more integration to their product. Just like how MS integrate Teams, O365 and other products.
Apple, Google, Tesla etc seem to have mastered the art of regulatory dodgeball through observational experience and a successful series of pr campaigns of brand identity. There's no better evidence than HN itself where it's common practice to defend these companies for the analogous actions.
That same perception is why I think ms tends to be under scrutiny, as it should, but others don't. It's a real shame.
Apple is the worst of the bunch imo. My personal ranking for worst antitrust offenders would be:
1) Apple
2) Amazon
3) Google
4) Microsoft
Internationally that may be slightly different though. I’d also maybe include meta for their oculus purchase but I think they’ve tied it into their core, “social” business well enough that I’m not very concerned at the moment when there are bigger fish to fry.
Nope. Google. They are on their way to corner the browser market. They've already killed Operas Presto and about every other engine except research engines and Firefox.
Chrome and the way they pushed it with ads on the front page of Google [1]. The way Calendar and YouTube again and again has issues with Firefox.
Or how some things just doesn't work in anything except Chrome - but hey, if you change how the browser identifies itself, suddenly other browsers work too.
[1]: no one else, even disaster relief I thinkhas been allowed a spot there. The market value of weeks in that spot must be billions.
Seeing that they already nerfed ad blocking possibilities in Chromium before completely killing Firefox, what do you think they will do once it is completely gone?
Those who use Chromium - either end users or browser creators who build on Chromium - are dependent on the whims of Google.
What really irritates me is that they are the worst in most cases yet they PR themselves out of this. They sell themselves as the customer-privacy focused, environmentally conscious, smart and young company except that in reality it's exactly the opposite and they apply the most vile corporate tactics ever know to man. Hell, they even invented some.
But that's not the case in the EU. They are more likely to come after Google.
And the US government has issues coming after monopolies that are US based and bring a lot of money in (for obvious reasons).
If the US starts regulating these companies more it would harm the US GDP. At least in the short term. There is an argument to be had that it could make the markets more competitive in the long term but without a lot of credible threats from outside of the US why take the hit and the risk?
So the only competition left in tech is about which one of the monopolies is the worst? :)
It was kind of bizarre realizing all the promises from Silicon Valley about a better world materialized into a monopolistic rent seeking surveillance adtech, basically. Personally, 10 years ago I was still breathing the "let's change the world" -ethos. The world got changed alright, for much worse.
Let's hope EU brings some sanity back into the market.
The offense is using market control in one section to control another market.
Windows being tied to AD only was the offense.
Windows being tied to IE was the offense.
Google being the place you buy ad services from, and the auction house that places them and the service a website owner sells ad space to. is the offense.
> Slack filed a complaint with the EU in 2020, claiming that Microsoft was "force installing [Teams] for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers."
I'm pretty sure force installing even more software and blocking removal isn't what they are going for.
Well I never said Apple was better, and in fact I think there have been a number of antitrust charges against Apple as well, maybe not directly related to "messaging software" but at least one of them was about opening iMessage to interoperability as far as I remember.
That's the basis of modern anti-trust: bigger companies (by market share) are held to a higher standard to prevent monopolies.
Unregulated monopolies are even more anti-competitive. And it's more competitive to only regulate potential monopolies than entire markets. It's the best of no perfect option.
That's good for you, but you are aware there are many, many Microsoft shops? And those people are often forced to use Teams because Microsoft sold to the VP/C*?
For MS to stop using it's overwhelmingly dominant position on desktops (Office) to take out it's competitors in online communications (Slack, Zoom, etc).
What seems to happen in enterprises is they install Office 365... and Teams comes along.
A few months later the repeated suggestion of "Why don't you all switch to Teams?" from the MS account rep seems to sink in.
At that point the $0 price tag (when bundled with Enterprise 365) gets compared to Slack's fairly expensive per-user pricing... and it's Goodbye Slack.
So, the bundle gets it in the door (where no other competitor could) and the free pricing / sales channel gets it adopted.
The problem is that Slack wants to charge for a Chat app the same amount that Microsoft or Google charge for Spreadsheet, Documents, Slides, Chat, Drive, etc.
The problem is that Slack is too expensive for what they do. If Slacks value proposition was as good as their price ask, that wouldn't happen, or would be much lesser.
You said it yourself: Slack is fairly expensive for what they do.
Basically, yes. The fact that Apple and Google are still reasonably evenly fighting in the mobile market means that the rules are laxer for them than they are for MS who has far more dominant position in office suites.
That is why MS got under fire for IE but Safari got free pass. The degree of market control is critical aspect here.
Honestly, it just works so well. I get the argument, I’ve also seen the decline of Slack as Teams became the default, and normally I’d be pissed. But MS365 is just incredible value for money.
Even on Linux in Edge mostly it feels like a no brainer for any company.
Maybe short term, but long term I am really not that convinced any longer. Forcing the UI approach everywhere has a cost, these tools are terrible for operations. You can automate code testing, deployment and ops and have really good operations as a consequence. You will never be able to do that with spreadsheets or more horrible stuff like Power Apps. Just see how many millions of people are hired to manage all these UI clicky things offshore and how much mess it creates for business ops.
I would like to see the fines used to develop good open protocols. Each chat flavor tries to be different, making them interoperable sounds like it would take some doing.
The players could vote on topics deemed worthy with 1 vote per 100k users. Fines could be expressed as losing votes. With 300m users ms would have a lot of influence. Losing 1000 votes could me more impressive than large fines?
Just like they faced scrutiny when bundling IE. Microsoft has been at the monopoly game again forever since the restrictions expired, with bundling and pumping up their inferior OneDrive, HyperV, Teams, Edge and Bing products.
They don’t care and the EU will not impress either them or me unless instead of shaking fists they actually act: break up Windows, Office, browser, hardware and services, forced opening of any API used by another part, permanent bans on any kind of bundling, permanent vigilance and enforcement with mega fines and product bans.
But that is just never going to happen. The EU only actually acts against parties that don’t talk back and Microsoft will drag this out until they slither out underneath and the EU will find an excuse why they ‘let this one slip’. Because they are totally dependent on and addicted to Microsoft.
"In April, it was reported that Microsoft was considering allowing users to install Office without installing Teams in an effort to appease regulators and avoid additional scrutiny or official investigations by the EC. Similarly, Microsoft was also set to charge different prices for Office with and without Teams integration."
Ummm, we have 365 without a teams subscription and I've pushed it out to users without the teams install as well. Is this not an option in the EU or something?
I don't see Microsoft broke any rules. They didn't buy some competitor, but built and marketed Teams from scratch on it's own. Slack has absolute market dominance in the past, but then they lost more and more to Microsoft, because they just asked too much for what it does. Who want to pay 11$ per month just for a single product if I can get many products from Microsoft at the same price?
I’m still salty because no one cared enough about Outlook getting bundled in Office back in the day.
If it wasn’t enough with all the proprietary stuff that only works between Outlook clients, it now defaults to adding Teams links to any call scheduled through its calendar.
Teams is such a bad piece of software. I'm a developer myself and ask myself all the time "how do they get away with this". I know many people from a verity of professions... really no one is liking it...
The funny thing is that no one did more to increase Microsoft usage than the EU! They introduced GDPR laws and now companies have to investigate each company in regard of privacy policy. So companies are tired of doing that and just start using only Microsoft products to reduce headache caused by EU-own regulations!!!
Through 3 employers over 5 years, all have switched from Slack to Teams partially or entirely because someone in upper management thought they were equivalent enough to cut the extra expense of Slack. It doesn't even make Microsoft any money (yet), it's just there to kill competitors.
And then we use Teams simply because it's already included in the package anyway, even though many employees hate it, but it's hard to argue for another solution because why pay for Slack when we already have Teams "for free"?
And since Teams doesn't really need to compete on functionality it's extremely slow and with a borderline unusable group chat.