No, this is legit. Teams is arguably worse than Slack, yet Slack has gotten basically crushed in terms of MAU by Teams, basically because Teams is free. That's definitely colorably dumping.
So what will satisfy the EU, adopting Slack's pricing model for Teams?
I expect something more than that. Not sure what though. Pricing is no longer the problem, Teams is now entrenched. My guess is gatekeeper designation, allowing interoperability and possibly 3rd party clients.
It's not legit. If slack was so much better, it would have won. It didn't, hence the pushing of the EU to go after someone slack can't compete with.
It wasn't "so much better", it was/is (arguably) somewhat better, but not say $10 of value over what Teams offers for "free". On an even playing field, or hell, on an uneven playing field where there was any friction to using Teams, Slack might have won.
Which emans it's not better. In computing if it's not better then it's a dud
I know that uneven playing field really screws thinsg up. It's why we are all using internet explorer after all and none of this silly niche "webkit" based broweser someone talked about. We also all use Bing, since IE defaults to it
Recall that Slack was available first and when Teams came out it was super barebones and insanely buggy. By your logic, it was a dud, and it probably was, but free is pretty compelling and it gained enough usage and traction to become dominant untill just now when it's feature comparable. For most of it's run to dominance it was worse. Much worse.
Now imagine a world where installing an alternate browser requires $10/user/mo and a purchase agreement with the browser vendor. That's what we're talking about here - not individual users making individual decisions.
We are talking about business messaging in this thread. Please stay on topic.
I think the fact you didn't even know there was a business version of skype further proves my point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
The fact that you seem not to know that S4B Online was dissolved and merged into Teams completely undermines your point.
What do you mean by "for all practical purposes."? Its two different programs. Its not just a rename or something. S4B and Teams even both co-existed for a bit of time. Skype was failing, so they made something new, Teams. Skype failed, dispite having massive market share and being pushed heavily by Microsoft. Why did Microsoft's power and influence get everyone to use Teams, but not Skype for Business? It had to be more to it than just that.
I used it from cradle to grave. From OCS thru Lync thru S4B. It wasn't free.
Yes. From the very basics like directory integration through security and legal retention and whatnot. They are often built on the same platforms, but the features and services offered can be radically different. The one that's closest in features is Facebook WorkChat and Messenger, since they're built on the same backend, with the enterprise version beefed up with enterprise features - but I can't name a company outside of Meta that uses it.
Free. Free is the secret sauce. Well, ok, S4B was also IIRC on prem, so had significant startup costs as well
Well right now people will spend $$$ a month for office instead of using Libre/OpenOffice that;s been pushed by multiple governments over the years. There is no file format lock in. There's no OS lock in either. Office is simply better then Libre/OpenOffice for a large portion of people and they show that by spending money on something you can do for free.
Right - it was superior, but not that superior - it should have led the market, but it couldn't, because it couldn't compete on price and therefore on ease of acquisition. Teams was just there, like if people at a company wanted to do IMs, and they hadn't previously, they could just go to teams.microsoft.com, and boom, they had Teams, with full directory integration, with their existing security policies in place, and just start working immediately. Contrast that to a Slack deployment which involves getting buy in from some IT decision maker, contracts drawn up, approvals, several days of work from some IT drone getting SSO and directory integration working, ensuring security is sync'd, etc. Arguably, those are things that made Slack worse (i.e. not being the incumbent), but I don't think we should be in a world where new, upcoming players are not allowed to displace incumbents, or one where incumbents should be allowed to leverage their position to preclude players in new markets.
Can you maybe think of another reason or reasons why IE is no longer dominant? It's not just because the competition was better - it's because it was legally prevented from crushing them. US vs. Microsoft from early in the BF's history, for example, and similar antitrust rulings in Europe. Without them, no doubt we'd still be on IE and the world would be poorer off for it.
Yes, it is simply better, but again, imagine there was an even better thing out there that cost say $10/mo/user more than O365 costs the company now that would deliver say $8/mo/user in value over O365, but users just like it more. Should the company switch? Incumbency is an enormous advantage that I think you're discounting. Just having Teams available unused, in a lot of instances is enough to preclude a Slack rollout at a company, let alone if someone discovers it exists and just starts using it on the side. MS did a lot of things to growth-hack Teams, and its success is representative of that, but free is the secret sauce.
If that was the case then the makretshare numbers would coincide with the big decisions. i.e. after US vs Microsoft, IE marketshare share would drop. It actually got higher afterwards and peaked 2004 . The browser ballot was in 2010 but by that time IE share was around under 60%.
Office is the incumbent being leveraged, not Teams - it's like in the US vs. Microsoft, where Windows was being leveraged against Netscape. Netscape came first, but Microsoft used Windows to push IE. And again, you seem to be ignoring the tremendous structural advantage MS has here in terms of ease of deployment - no additional purchase required, full Office/AAD/SSO integration by default, employee self-service deployment amongst others.
This does not necessarily follow. After the US vs. MS, MS was prevented from doing things like not selling Windows OEM licenses to OEM PC vendors (Dell, HP, et al) who bundled Netscape. Without such a ruling, it's entirely plausible that Netscape would have ceased to exist, and Firefox would never have come to be. Dunno on Chrome, but it's possible that Windows could just have straight up locked it out using some sort of argument that the browser is a critical system component or other such nonsense.
So for this free user, how was office being leveraged exatcly? Can you use word and pull up teams? Was there a special office addin to save files just for team usage? Did office only work with teams and not slack?
I'm not ignoring anything. You keep dancing around this notion that a Microsoft product that in your words integrated with other Microsoft products is evidence of wrong doing
Lets poke a lot of holes into your theory here:
It's been years since I used Word seriously, but for Outlook there is built in integration - if you create a meeting for someone, it will create a Teams meeting by default. I assume you can do this with Slack too, but it requires an installation (which for many corp users requires IT involvment). Other ways Office is being leveraged is as I said above - by having O365 in your org, your org just gets Teams at no additional charge, and your employees can just start using it right away, even without an "official" rollout from IT or whoever it is at your company that normally does it. It's just there, ready to go.
Yeah, that's pretty much what business messaging is, and it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Having your realtime employee communications in one place integrated with your IT environment (security, directory, etc.) is valuable - I see you trying to dismiss it here, but it's a huge deal to the level where companies are moving away from email as the primary way employees communicate with each other on to these platforms.
No. What I am saying is wrong is using a dominant position in one market (productivity software, i.e. Office) to crush a competitor in another market (business messaging, i.e. Slack). I don't think companies should be allowed to do that. Clearly you disagree.
IE was really good back then - it was arguably the best browser up through IE6 when they declared victory and took their eye off the ball. You seem to be saying that US vs. MS didn't have any meaningful effect on the browser market. I don't have a time machine, but I think the computing landscape would be different if dominant companies could leverage their positions in one market to gain dominance in others. Again, just speculating, but Safari might not have existed without it, despite being built on open source code - IE could have been dominant enough to warp HTML to be IE as default (along the lines of the --webkit quirks modes), and since Windows and Mac users were on IE, no one would really care.
We moved from Lync to Teams but we had some early Slack advocates between those two, and I couldn't see the advantage.
So I'm sensitive to the concern, but... what is the proposal to prevent it? Would MS not be allowed to play at all in the business messaging space? Would they prohibited from making a "good" program? Can only build something with public APIs that they document and publish?
The final appeal for the US vs Microsoft case was in 2001. From 2001 until 2004 IE marketshare increased. Can you explain to me how the decision effected that?
To deploy Slack with AAD integration requires someone with (at least) Cloud Application Administrator permissions to deploy. Teams is pre-deployed, and requires nothing more than a user going to teams.microsoft.com.
This is a good question - Teams is built on public APIs that are documented - there's no secret APIs or anything. I think, philosophically, this is the problem with the retrospective nature of antitrust laws - by the time they come into force, the damage is done. MS used its Office position to dominate a new market. MS should not have been allowed to do that, but there was no law that stopped them before it happened. I think the DMA could help in the future, now that past a certain size companies get new restrictions applied, but I don't think it would have applied here, since the EU did not consider productivity software as a category.
I don't know Slack's features well, but it does have a lot of certifications. As for a OneNote competitor, Slack is owned by Salesforce which has Quip, which I prefer to OneNote for largely the same use cases.
No, I'm not against bundling or addons, and I do recognize that I can see where MS, in good faith, could see the decision to make Teams free was not an anticompetitive thing, but rather just an expected feature add, but I don't know where the line should be drawn. I guess at a bare minimum, an entirely new app should have at least a nominal price, and be opt-in, e.g for Teams, had it cost $1/user/mo and required a Cloud Application Administrator to activate it, ok. That makes for a still uneven playing field, but at least a less uneven one.
Years and years of anti trust shows us whenever a verdict is handed down, the service or product that was in violation has some sort of noticeable negative effect on it. In this particular case Microsoft was never broken up as a company, windows still had IE in the base install, Microsoft still didn't update IE6 in any real fashion becasue it had such a dominant position, Trident was still used to render system level things which would break badly if completely removed, and IE's Marketshare went up.
I think you're threading a pretty fine and rather arbitrary needle. What if instead of Teams they'd called it Messenger, Skype (for Business), or any number of other names to tie it to an existing product or imply it is a new expanded version of an existing product? What if they'd integrated it more directly with Outlook? Would that be enough to not require a separate fee?
Yeah, those are good points, and in part why I said I could see an argument for MS having done what it did in good faith. Like what happened is probably and certainly arguably good for customers, but it did so by essentially zeroing out the value of business messaging as a separate product category. Still it feels fishy that they saw a new product that could threaten their business messaging (Exchange/S4B) business and then they basically create a barebones MVP clone and release it for free and growth hack it to victory.
Yeah, I know - one remedy I suggested was to make the opt-in the default setting.
Yeah, this is another interesting one - we have seen a lot of instances of this over the years, and it does just make sense for the OS to absorb features that have been established in the market for a long time. PDF is a good example, and Adobe hasn't been hurt because they sell Acrobat XD, which is still (to my understanding) the only practical way to edit PDFs, rather than just view them. DroidCam on the other hand is going to end up out of business. It sucks to have built something so clearly useful that the OS maker picks it up and to be left with nothing and no recourse. Maybe there should be some recompense required? But for whom? Just the most popular one or all similar apps? It feels unsatisfying.
I think I mostly agree with you with one exception. Specifically I don't have a problem with them reacting to a changing market.
I'm saying IE's marketshare numbers had nothing to do with the antitust cases,. The US case in particular was so toothless that it in no way curbed microsoft from bundling IE in windows.
So then do you believe that Teams' dominance in the business messaging market is entirely unrelated to leveraging O365's existing established position?
