Microsoft Escapes EU Competition Probe by Unbundling Teams for Seven Years, Opening API (techcrunch.com) 31
TechCrunch reports:
Thanks to a pledge to unbundle its corporate messaging app Teams from its productivity suites, Microsoft has managed to slip unscathed through a major antitrust investigation by the European Commission that could have resulted in massive fines for the tech giant.
The Commission on Friday okayed Microsoft's concessions to address the EU's competition concerns over the company including Teams along with the rest of its Office productivity suite for free, concluding a multi-year investigation that was sparked by complaints from rival office messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft has promised that for the next seven years, it will provide Microsoft 365 and Office 365 without Teams at a lower price and will let customers choose whether they want to pay more to add the collaboration app to the suites...
Microsoft is voluntarily offering some versions of both its productivity suites without Teams at a 50% lower price compared to versions that bundle the app, worldwide. And Microsoft dodged punitive measures and a big fine, as the Commission's penalties for breaching competition rules can reach up to 10% of annual global revenue — which, considering the tech giant last year recorded $245 billion in revenue, would have been truckloads of money.
The article adds one more interesting detail. "The Commission has also managed to get Microsoft to agree to open up its APIs to enable interoperability for key features between its suite and third-party messaging and collaboration tools, as well as let them export their data out of teams for the next five years..." The Commission's official announcement says this will "open up the market for other providers of communication and collaboration tools in Europe."
And Microsoft will also allow customers with long-term licenses the option of switching to a suite switch without Teams...
The Commission on Friday okayed Microsoft's concessions to address the EU's competition concerns over the company including Teams along with the rest of its Office productivity suite for free, concluding a multi-year investigation that was sparked by complaints from rival office messaging app Slack in 2020. Microsoft has promised that for the next seven years, it will provide Microsoft 365 and Office 365 without Teams at a lower price and will let customers choose whether they want to pay more to add the collaboration app to the suites...
Microsoft is voluntarily offering some versions of both its productivity suites without Teams at a 50% lower price compared to versions that bundle the app, worldwide. And Microsoft dodged punitive measures and a big fine, as the Commission's penalties for breaching competition rules can reach up to 10% of annual global revenue — which, considering the tech giant last year recorded $245 billion in revenue, would have been truckloads of money.
The article adds one more interesting detail. "The Commission has also managed to get Microsoft to agree to open up its APIs to enable interoperability for key features between its suite and third-party messaging and collaboration tools, as well as let them export their data out of teams for the next five years..." The Commission's official announcement says this will "open up the market for other providers of communication and collaboration tools in Europe."
And Microsoft will also allow customers with long-term licenses the option of switching to a suite switch without Teams...
One nice Teams feature (Score:2)
I really liked the fact that you can share a PowerPoint presentation as an object rather than an image of the screen. This allows the presenter to see their notes and future slides, while the viewers can flip back and forth between slides and maybe zoom in on details.
But this has aspects of monopolist behavior (using the Office monopoly to support entry into videoconferencing). I wonder if the EU will require Microsoft to create free libraries or APIs for other video conferencing software to do this?
Shifting sands (Score:2)
Microsoft will most likely replace Teams with something else in a few years.
The and other tech companies have shortened the production life span of many major technologies to less than 3 years, since it only needs to defer users finding blocking bugs for 1.5 years until an 'upgrade to the new version' answer is the only answer from the tech company.
Re:Shifting sands (Score:4, Funny)
Re: One nice Teams feature (Score:3)
I've always struggled with PowerPoint but was able to quickly put together decent looking presentation with Keynote.
When we were forced to switch from Slack to Teams we also struggled to adapt to the new model. The only benefit being the better integration with the overall Office suite from Microsoft but Sharepoint was horrendous 20y ago, while GSuite is actually more intuitive to use.
Part of the problem that Microsoft has is that the look and feel is stuck 30y back. When they try to modernize things their
Keynote vs PowerPoint (Score:2)
I haven't used Keynote in years, so things may have changed, but back when I did use it, I found it was a lot quicker for doing simpler things, but fell over when you needed to do more complex stuff. PowerPoint had a far steeper learning curve and required you to do a bunch more work to get your templates set up, etc. or you'd end up with a mess that was difficult to edit. But it had more fl
Remember OLE? (Score:2)
OLE allowed applications to register servers that allowed embedding interactive objects like that. It worked pretty well back in the Windows 3.1 days. I remember embedding ABC Flowcharter diagrams in my Word documents, etc. Now it seems to only be used within the Office suite. LibreOffice has an OLE clone of its own, but it only seems to work within the suite as well.
Apple tried to copy OLE a couple of times, first with the publish/subscribe mechanism (which wasn't very good), and then teaming up with I
I think they missed the mark. (Score:5, Insightful)
While this is good, the concessions missed the mark because it doesn't enforce any API stability or mandate that the public API be the one that Microsoft uses. As a result, Microsoft's pledge has been made entirely in bad faith. Some things they will likely do is put out a half-assed public API that is technically compatible but keeps out the "Microsoft Exclusive" features that make it useful. Furthermore, they may "update" the API and break everyone's client that isn't use the Microsoft API every six months.
Let's hope this EU commission roasts them when they (invariably) act in bad faith.
Re: (Score:3)
Perhaps, but I don't think they'll act in bad faith here. I'll bet they try to breadcrumb people in a positive fashion.
They are making major concessions here - ones with real negative consequences and compliance costs. And while MS has a checkered past in some areas (to put it mildly) I doubt they will sabotage API stability in this case.
Sure, watch closely, and stay on it as the long term expiration of this agreement approaches. But celebrate the win. MS really did move a long way here
Re: (Score:2)
People often make this mistake about EU rules. It's not like the US where everything has to be watertight legalese or they will exploit some loophole. Here it works on the basis that there was a negotiation with the people looking at the anti-trust issues, and they agreed but will monitor for compliance and look again if Microsoft acts in bad faith.
It's the same with fines. Just because they didn't open with a trillion Euro fine doesn't mean that the company will consider it the cost of doing business and i
Re: (Score:2)
Totally disagree. All that will do is add inconvenience and complication and cost.
So glad I don't live in the EU.
Dumb (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate Teams with a passion just as much as the next guy. It's the one piece of software that I have issues with: camera stops working, headphones stop working, mic stops working, freezes up, requires reboot, etc. No other software on my machine gives me any trouble.
But if the EU thinks that forcing MS to unbundle is is going to cause even a remotely significant amount of people to switch to something else, they're on crack.
I would love to use Slack. My org doesn't use it. It's not GOING to use it. A shop that's a MS shop is going to keep using Teams. That's how it works. All crap like forced unbundling does it add inconvenience and complication and cost, totally unnecessarily.
Re:Dumb (Score:4, Informative)
My Organization was a Microsoft shop with a corporate Zoom account. One team was using Slack. That was until Teams came around for "free". The Zoom account was closed, and the team using Slack was told to stop. In our Org, the damage is done. But unbundling can avoid such market damage in future Orgs.
Re: (Score:2)
API access might do the opposite. A lot of what locks organizations is the history. My previous company used Slack AND Teams. The engineering teams all used Slack, the corporate side used Teams. An attempt was
Re: (Score:2)
Well, to be fair, and this is just my opinion, it is generally easier to get data into ANY system, than it is back out of that system.
Re: (Score:2)
I had to use it once for a job interview and there was no volume control to be found. Like literally they forgot to add it during the build process.
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Re: (Score:2)
Be aware that the "Enterprise" version of Teams vs. the consumer version (that replaced Skype) is apparently completely different product.
I had been using Skype since before they were acquired by Microsoft, and still used it to talk to my parents and a few other folks, and It Just Worked (why change when nothing is wrong). So I figured that ok, I can work just fine with Teams at my workplace, shouldn't be a problem migrating...
Except the consumer version of Teams is ridiculously bad. It does not even allow
Re: (Score:2)
Be aware that the "Enterprise" version of Teams vs. the consumer version (that replaced Skype) is apparently completely different product.
Well, of course it is. Because Microsoft somehow just can't stop itself from inflicting that sort of confusing, overlapping branding crap on their products and acquisitions.
Re: (Score:2)
Like Skype != Skype
Skype for business is actually not Skype at all, it is Microsoft Lync rebranded. Well, it was, because Teams replaced it.
I remember I had a Skype (for business) meeting once, tried installing the other Skype, and got all confused about why it didn't work.
Also, (GitHub) Copilot is not (Microsoft) Copilot.
What's wrong with Microsoft branding?
Re: (Score:2)
A shop that's a MS shop is going to keep using Teams. That's how it works.
You don't even have to be an MS shop... you just need someone in authority to be a gung-ho Microsoftie. My boss (who, overall, I get along with pretty well) is unfortunately fully onboard the MS train. I think it's got a lot to do with all the free trainings and seminars MS offers to people, they're great tools for indoctrination. Anyway, he keeps trying to move our whole department over 100% to Microsoft-platform products, even though the department has been using Google's mail and calendar tools for as lo
Re: (Score:3)
it will provide Microsoft 365 and Office 365 without Teams at a lower price
Can we also have it without OneDrive, and Outlook, and OneNote, and SharePoint, and Places, and CoPilot, and ...? Please?
Re: (Score:2)
Why not just ban Teams altogether?
Hell, just ban Microsoft from doing anything at all, except...what? Selling copies of an operating system?
But not bundling with the OS anything "extras" like a window manager, a file manager, a web browser, calculator app, weather app or anything else. Limit it strictly to the middleware required to interface the keyboard and monitor and motherboard (and its components and ports). Anything else one has to shop around for and install themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
If the API is available then hopefully someone will build a better Teams app.
Seven Years (Score:3)
Sounds ominously biblical.
7 years? (Score:2)
Pricing (Score:1)
The thing I don't see anyone talking about is, afaik, when they unbundled teams from their licenses they raised their rates. So now having teams + office is more expensive than when it was bundled.
People that have the original license with teams included in office is cheaper, so they'll never switch, since you can't get those licenses again if you cancel them.
And the price of a teams license was probably carefully calculated to be less than any of their competitors.