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.
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.