Submitted by A coalition of EU software and cloud businesses joined Nextcloud GmbH in respect of their formal complaint to the European Commission about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior in respect of its OneDrive (cloud) offering. In a repeat from earlier monopolistic actions, Microsoft is bundling its OneDrive, Teams and other services with Windows and aggressively pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft. This limits consumer choice and creates a barrier for other companies offering competing services.
I mean, anything to reign in the power of these massive technology companies, but I’m not sure browser choice screens and versions without Windows Media Player are the way to go. I want a more permanent solution – just like we’ve done countless times in the past, break these massive companies up into various smaller pieces that have to compete on merit, instead of being propped up by one or two deeply entrenched money-printing products.
In general i can agree that OneDrive, iCloud, NextCloud … should compete on equal merits.
Some side notes:
SkyDrive used to be “Windows Live FolderShare” or “Windows Live Sync” before becoming a cloud hosted platform. Initially, it would allow synchronization of your own folders across your own devices. Then they introduced their 5GB cloud storage, and the rest is history.
Similarly, Crashplan (an online backup system) was designed to back up to your or your friends’ machines remotely. It was still encrypted, so you and your friend could offer each other some quota, and have mutual redundancy. Then like others they started offering their own cloud, and peer-to-peer version was dropped.
Okay, if we go further, before forced Microsoft logins, there were local “home networks”. Before Google Hangouts, there was Google Talk, which would talk to self hosted XMPP networks. Before all closed messengers, there was SIP VoIP, which was admittedly a pain to manage.
Where am I going with this? The industry is moving away from self hosted and peer to peer setups to arguably easier online solutions. However that comes with a major cost.
While I agree that Microsoft are using their OS to bundle the apps, those Apps Can be removed. And to my mind is no different to Ubuntu including UbuntuOne or other Linux distros having a default chat app pre-installed.
On the flip side Apple (iPhone and Mac) and Google (on android) have bundled their apps with 0 mechanisms of removing or uninstalling them. It feels like this is attacking Microsoft for being Microsoft rather than the principle of the matter where they are acting in a Less monopolistic way than their competitors.
Unlike Microsoft, Ubuntu is not a monopolist. The regulations are simple: you can’t use your monopolist position in one market to block competition in another market.
It doesn’t help Nextcloud is a pile of buggy, slow and hard to maintain garbage. The idea is great, the execution – not so much. I’ve been using it for about a year and came to realisation it is worth paying someone just to keep it running, which greatly reduces privacy gains.