Technology @lemmy.world Cloudless ☼ @lemmy.cafe 8 mo. ago

Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny

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

Microsoft (MSFT.O) will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.

39 comments

That will just make them more money as they can charge whatever they want for both
- From Teams plus office 10 euros a month per user to Office alone 9 euros a month per user and Teams alone 5 euros a month per user.
  
  Microsoft would never do that now, would they ?
  
  Never!!! 🤪
  
  Capitalism has a lot of problems, but the freedom given to a seller to set their prices to whatever they like and watch the buyer decide it is not a fair price and go buy from someone else is not one of them.
  
  This is a win for everyone.
- If we clearly have to pay for.something, instead of it being wrapped into a license of so many things, I will push for us to take Zoom.
  
  It just works better.
  
  Annotating on screen is worth it alone, instead of trying to talk the screen sharer to what part of the screen you want to talk about.
  
  I want:
  
  Zoom's...
  
  ...annotation
  
  ...richer reactions
  
  Teams's...
  
  sensible screen layout
  
  richer chat content
  
  chat continuity before/during/after meetings
  
  very granularly customizable avatars
  
  Some other tool's composition interface for chat text
  
  The annotation is a killer feature I don't why others haven't added it yet
- Pretty sure the only reason any org uses teams is because it's already bundled for free with office or Enterprise subscriptions.
  
  Agreed
  
  Teams also have great integration with SharePoint which simplified administration and usage.
…now that the marketplace has been altered.

Zoom was disruptive in the market because the other options SUCKED - Skype, GotomyPC, WebEx, etc all did a lot of rapid maturing during the pandemic to catch up to Zoom, and this ‘bundling’ of Teams with Office has built user lock-in via Office 365.

Well played Microsoft, once again ducking a well deserved anti-trust suit. ‘Historic injury’ should count equally as ‘current injury’ for prosecution, arguably especially so if that historic injury is what created your current market share
THEY ARE UNBUNDLING PRODUCTS?!!? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, APRIL FOOLS DAY?
- the two ways to increase profitability: bundling and unbundling
Maybe businesses will stop forcing “free” Teams on their workforces now. What a pile of shit.
- I fucking hate teams, I swear every single day it iritatea me, and at least once a week I find something new I hate about it. This week, it keeps pinning my self-chat. Which I don’t use. If it lets me unpin it, it’ll end up pinned again within a couple of days.
  
  It is a huge source of frustration for me at work as well. It is slow, it has too many weird and ill-defined features shoved in, it is difficult to search, the WYSIWIG markdown features are fuckulated, it crashes regularly, there is too much wasted/negative space in the UI, and worst of all, it makes me sad in my heart.
- What's a better alternative? I was a big fan of Teams back when I worked with an org that used it
  
  How? It can't even handle copy/pasting text without fucking up the formatting.
  
  Creating new SharePoint sites whenever you start a chat so that you have a whole new way to lose your documents?
  
  Better alternative? Pretty much any other chat app.
  
  Slack and Mattermost
  
  Slack is my modern go-to, but I still also use IRC. Slack has great support for technical chat, doesn’t slow my i7 with 32GB RAM to a crawl, has great multiple account support and even voice chat if you are into that. I prefer zoom for video when I need it, but slack’s isn’t nearly as shit as teams.
  
  Honestly? Even Discord, a game chat app. Teams just sucks.
They’ll still be rolled up in an E3 license so corporations won’t really notice the difference
- Would you happen to have a source that you could link on that please? I've been trying to see if it affects us since I read the Ars Technica story this morning. We have been getting Teams historically with the Office 365 E3 license that comes with our Action Pack sub.
  
  Oh, it wasn’t a verified response, just one of those “well this is most likely how Microsoft will deal with it” things.
  
  If this works like how they did it here in Europe, where this change happened last year, then this won't affect existing tenants, other than also getting a standalone teams sku available.
  
  On new tenants created after the change took effect however, there will be no sku with teams bundled available, only the standalone teams sku and teams less E3/E5 skus.
- Permanently Deleted
I get it... But man Microsoft licensing was already a slog before this 😭
So uh... April Fools?
When does google have to separate gmail (or is it workspace now) and hangouts, no, allo, no, duo, uh, I mean meet.

Maybe if ms just keeps changing the names of things all their woes will disappear!
As a side note, because I don't know how American antitrust laws work, maybe someone can explain:

They are "separating" the products, but it's still all owned by Microsoft. So what's the intended effect here? There is still the global megacorp you can't escape in control of both. How does this harm the "trust" that's supposed to be fought with "antitrust" laws?
- It's supposed to reduce how much a company can leverage their market dominance in one market to get an unfair advantage in another one.
  
  See how Amazon places their products (ex. Backpacks) in more prominent positions on their dominant market. Here the unfair advantage is that if a company is already using Microsoft Office and it comes bundled with Teams (for "free") what chance would Slack or other comm systems have?
  
  Teams sucks. I would gladly pay for ANYTHING else vs using it even for free.

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