Slack says it has filed an anti-competitive complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission. “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,” says Slack in a statement. Slack alleges that Microsoft has “illegally tied” its Microsoft Teams product to Office and is “force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.”
“Microsoft is reverting to past behavior,” claims David Schellhase, general counsel at Slack. “They created a weak, copycat product and tied it to their dominant Office product, force installing it and blocking its removal, a carbon copy of their illegal behavior during the ‘browser wars.’ Slack is asking the European Commission to take swift action to ensure Microsoft cannot continue to illegally leverage its power from one market to another by bundling or tying products.”
It’s what platform vendors do. Google, Apple, Microsoft – they all do this, and it only serves to hurt consumers and competition.
In other news, Microsoft’s game streaming service is shutting down today: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/07/22/microsofts-livestreaming-service-mixer-shuts-down-today/
It does not matter how tight your integration is, unless your product is actually good. As far as I know, this might be the fifth iteration of an office “communication” attempt by Microsoft, and they keep failing. (There was Microsoft Lync, Skype, Skype for Business, Sharepoint, and maybe a few more).
MS netmeeting was pretty cool. video conferencing and desktop sharing in windows 98.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wjd7sJKDrEo
Back then I even used it successfully over dialup!
It wouldn’t work as well today with the internet suffering from nat translation and firewalls. But back when everyone had an IP and could connect to one another directly it was actually a nice capable program. Not only was it free, but there was no need to rely on 3rd parties like skype, zoom, webex, etc today. We’re regressing in terms of dependencies…
personally, i see Teams being very widely adopted where i live. This is a product that may actually succeed.
In this lockdown times i have to use Teams at work, i used it on my language course, and i have also heard that universities use the app as well.
I see the same, but it seems to be more due to the bundling. I do not think that there was ever a proper evaluation of different products and see which one works the best.
Note that the integration with parts of Office 365 is only a start. They did PowerPoint, Excel (and Word) which got the managers onboard. The next steps are already visible with integration of GitHub (also Microsoft), which is popular in the developer community. This might be followed with Azure for deployments (which I guess is being integrated with GitHub as well).
Another big missing piece is e-mail integration, which I’m sure they are tackling as well, as they already have the calendar in there.
Feature-wise Teams does not stand out and half a year ago their desktop client was still regularly crashing or suffering from failed logons. They fixed this however. The software is at least usable. The remaining main issue is that on Windows notification windows get stuck when you plug in a second screen. They don’t redraw so it’s not obvious that the rectangle that doesn’t get redrawn anymore is from Teams, but with Process Hacker you can easily find the offending window process and close its window. It’s surprising how badly the Windows version works for a Microsoft product.
One thing they will probably never take care of is proper multi-tenant interaction. Recently I had to open a session with a third Teams account, so I suspect they count me as three users now.
Using third-party software with Teams is impossible. Pidgin at least enabled Business Skype connectivity via the SIPE plug-in. The very latest version of Thunderbird supports the O365 dialect of OAuth2 so you can access O365 mailboxes with it. There’s nothing like that for Teams.
The JavaScript Trap is effective here.
Z_God,
So it wasn’t just me then, haha. I have to use teams with certain clients and and even once with a telework doctor. The linux version works on my kids computer, but not on mine. I have no idea why. Whatever, I’ve stuck to using it on windows, but even there I was appalled to see javascript errors during the login process. I haven’t seen that this year, but man sometimes MS is just incompetent at testing.
There’s bits of Lync/SkypeForBusiness that seem to have been “borrowed” for the backend of the Teams telephony system apparently. Sharepoint was persevered with to the point that it now underpins a fair bit of Office 365 (eg OneDrive, and Teams itself).
Kind of horrifying in a way, but MS don’t usually give up easily is the point.
Mixer specifically though looks more like they just didn’t want to be in that business. Odds are the underlying tech will be parted out and find its way into things like Stream (their business YouTube clone) and Teams video stuff.
Teams is being adopted heavily where I am though. Mostly because people gave up fighting it. When it’s installed by everything, and integrations are everywhere, eventually people just start using it.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Slack have a case. But I’m still somewhat baffled by the real differentiation between all the different chat and videoconferencing products available. I would be much happier if there was greater interoperability, so that products were competing on features and price rather than access to walled communities.
flypig,
I completely agree. However that ship has sailed. Companies know that vendorlocked users that they control are worth a whole lot more than federated users. Walled communities are more profitable for companies, and that’s why they’ll remain the future. There isn’t much we can do about it. Sure, I can abstain from walled communities, but in practice the result is isolation from friends and family rather than a meaningful migration to open platforms.
I was a user of both products and Teams is a much better product than Slack. Calling it a weak copycat is really baffling considering they don’t even have a useful video chat feature (15 participants? what kind of business would find it even remotely useful?). Nevertheless, they probably still have a point. Someone mentioned failures of Lync and Skype for business as a proof that if you don’t have a good product you won’t be able to make it. I think otherwise – Lync and Skype might have been failures, but were still used by hundreds of thousands of users due to being bundled with MS Office. And of course MS Teams integrates beautifully into the entire Office suite. So I believe it’s not a question whether bundling helped Teams achieve its popularity, but how big impact did it have.
Teams is like a combination of Zoom and Slack. It’s not as good at video conferencing (but it catching up) as Zoom and is not as good as collaborating as Slack (our engineers still use Slack despite Teams so I assume they know something). However, as a multi-tool internal organisation remote working enabler with no need for new accounts or identities, Teams is awesome saved our functionality during the shutdown. And the phone Teams app is excellent. Very seamless, like making a phone call … duuhh. MS will probably have to change the one stop Office installer somehow so you opt in vs out of Teams. Although my memory is it is not automatically installed with Office, but Slack alleges differently. And Teams has bugs. Excel synced with OneDrive and with remote links will freeze if you share view on Teams,
…. and it looks like you can run Teams on Linux!!! https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-install-microsoft-teams-on-linux/
Iapx432,
I’ve had mixed results with the linux version myself. A few months ago I was unable to get it running on my computer, it crashes right away. The linux version works on the family computer though. Actually my wife couldn’t figure out how to get the audio working and they missed half a class, the wrong audio device was selected. It should have been an easy fix if the teams UI weren’t so janky and awkward, but this is a problem on the windows side as well. I absolutely hate microsoft butchering desktop software with metroisms. Menus are useful and good things when done well and their elimination in the name of UI minimalism has been detrimental for usability. Now things are things less consistent/less obvious and much harder to find.
It’s just part of the bigger trend where mobile UI are taking over on the desktop too. Teams is emblematic of this: develop for mobile, desktop is a lazy afterthought where they just let us use the mobile version.
Yeah the audio device selection is confusing. You need to use the PulseAudio UI and looking for a process with ‘Skype’ in its name but with a Teams icon.
People use Microsoft Office enough that it’s a way to push other software??? Weird. I’ve never seen anyone use Office in the wild since college (20 years ago); I guess I’m in a Google-centric industry (which is just as evil in terms of bundling/promotion, obvs).
brion,
Yeah I would say ms office is by far the most common software used just about everywhere I go for business documents and spreadsheets. From big shops to small shops, office is extremely popular and I can definitely see how MS could use that popularity to push other services.
In all of my work I’ve only seen one client integrating google docs into their workflow. They were a mac shop (I don’t know if this is coincidental or a broader trend). YMMV.