49 ms·

Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft

256 points by mattmarcus 6y ago

fasicle 6y ago
"Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers" Is teams auto installed with the Office suite and can it not be uninstalled?
- microcolonel 6y ago
  I think the application proper can be disabled, but it's built into basically every Office application at this point, as far as I know. It's like wondering if you can uninstall ffmpeg from an Electron app.
- ndespres 6y ago
  Yes it is auto-installed and auto starts and is very annoying to get rid of, as a sysadmin. It also installs itself per-user, so non-admins get prompted constantly to install it themselves and can do so even with limited privileges. It is persistent.
  - nojito 6y ago
    You can disable teams entirely from your deployment.
    - ndespres 6y ago
      Good luck doing that when it was automatically enabled and deployed, so now users have data on it already.
      - jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
        If you're deploying office anyway you simply remove teams from the config XML for the installer. Pretty simple really.
      - threeseed 6y ago
        So then give users time to migrate to an alternative and shut it down.
  - jedieaston 6y ago
    What's the annoyance? It's an MSI. Use msiexec /x to remove it (probably via PDQ Deploy or SCCM or a PowerShell Script), and then block the installer from running again during an Office install with GPO [0]. It's definitely easier than cleaning up some of the other garbageware in Pro. 0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#use-group-policy-to-control-the-installation-of-microsoft-teams https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...
- freehunter 6y ago
  I’m not sure on Teams specifically but years ago (last time I tried to install the Office suite) you had to install basically all or nothing. I just wanted OneNote but the installer forced me to add Word and Excel and Powerpoint, similar to this forum post: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_install-mso_win10/installing-only-particular-office-365-programs/9ebb27d4-1084-42e7-b84a-c5dd76e9232c https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_... If they’ve added Teams to that installer, I’m not surprised.
  - gruez 6y ago
    >you had to install basically all or nothing. but from the link you gave: >BUT, if you are willing to invest a little effort, there is a business specific tool you can use. It is called the "Office Deployment Tool". You will have to edit a simple text only "XML" file that tells the tool what you want it to do.
    - freehunter 6y ago
      When I had this issue 6 or 7 years ago that thread didn’t exist to explain that to me.
- kevingadd 6y ago
  Under normal circumstances Teams can trivially be uninstalled - it's just an Electron app. I have Office and Teams installed on my PC and can freely uninstall or install either of them, and I had to install Teams manually. The android and iOS Teams apps are definitely manually uninstallable. My guess is they may be referring to enterprise setups or perhaps an enterprise office 365 installer. I'm using 365 but not an enterprise 365 account so I can't speak for how it would behave there. Bundling Teams in with the other stuff that gets installed might be an option individual companies can opt into.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  Certainly wasn't in our case (EU E3 or E5 licenses). You can also disable the license for all users. Now, the practice of enabling licenses for new apps by default could be improved...
  - corty 6y ago
    You can disable the license, but it keeps nagging all your users to ask IT for a MSTeams account/license... "btw, teams is installed, try here" "login failed, maybe you are not allowed by your admins, nag them about it" repeat every 2 weeks
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      True, that may be the case. There is config.office.com where you can adjust a lot of behavior (you need an admin account I believe). If teams gets installed with office on default settings, you can certainly change it there. However, I don't think we have changed anything there and it didn't get installed automatically.
microcolonel 6y ago
> Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. I feel like it's bad for a society to place no weight on agreements. “Force installing” is a pretty bold claim, given that Office is a piece of self-updating software that adds new components on a regular basis, and which says as much when you install it. Teams is a component of the Office suite in the same way that Microsoft's SSO system is. If this point is considered to contribute to a successful claim, I think it says something sad about the EC.
- hkt 6y ago
  European approaches to antitrust differ to the American approach. It is much more about fairness to market participants and the result is that we avoid Microsoft having an unchallenged avenue to dominance in yet another market. Optimising markets is a vital role of the state in any country where inhabitants don't want to see regulatory capture or market dysfunction (as with say, the American broadband and mobile data markets). It is likely to preserve choice, encourage innovation, and allow new market participants if Slack's case is accepted.
- untog 6y ago
  "force installing" in this context means "you want X? you're getting Y too, whether you like it or not". No, you're not forced to install both X and Y. But it's pretty clearly taking advantage of a dominant market position.
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    “I want to install Discord, but without FFMPEG” is not grounds for a complaint. I don't like Microsoft's software, nor do I use it, but if this is illegal and the Apple App Store isn't, the EC is none but a lawfare weapon for many-billionaire companies.
- Kliment 6y ago
  Adding a new component that is really difficult to disable or uninstall, auto-starts on boot and gets put in place without asking for everyone who uses your office suite, which you basically have a monopoly on, is bullshit. Teams is a component of the Office suite but it doesn't behave like the other components (staying out of the way until you ask for it).
ndespres 6y ago
It's about time. I don't know exactly what Prince means by "gateways vs gatekeepers" in this context as Slack is itself a pretty closed system, isn't it? It's not using open protocols or interpretable with competing chat systems as far as I know. However I do find their allegations that Microsoft forces a subpar uninstallable copycat product to be accurate and credible. Teams is a bottom tier application and they are so aggressive about forcing it on users, it's a little silly.
- paweladamczuk 6y ago
  Came here to comment on the gateways vs gatekeepers as well. Ironically enough, it wasn't so long ago that Slack decided to stop supporting their IRC and XMPP gateways.
  - nullc 6y ago
    They served their purposes of drawing users from those places into slack's walled gardens.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
skc 6y ago
This is so strange. I seem to remember Slack somewhat mockingly welcoming the competition in this space when Teams launched.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  Honestly, Slack has become so baffling to me. As somebody who used it every day for a couple of years at work, then not for a year or so, it is completely unrecognizable today and (in my opinion) a lot more complex to use. I have a hard time reading and understanding the layouts in Slack as it stands today.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    The (newish) mobile app on iOS is really confusing layout wise, I thought I'd get used to it but it confuses me every time. It's also weirdly slow for a native app, I'm not sure how they managed that.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  It hit them where it hurts - profit. /shrugs Consider open source alternative such as zulip or matrix. Zulip is used by rust team :) and has a pretty good threading model. 1) https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com 2) https://element.io https://element.io 3) https://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com
- rpdillon 6y ago
  Right. I think the issue here, based on the title, is that this behavior is anti-competitive.
Arathorn 6y ago
On one hand, the playbook of exploiting Office's dominance to push Teams is very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE. On the other hand, Slack's walled garden is also effectively anti-competitive; trying to create a monopoly via vendor lock-in to the Slack product & ecosystem. It feels like a better bet would be for both of them to adopt and support open interoperability standards, so users can avoid being locked into any single vendor, and have full sovereignty over their conversation data. (Disclaimer: as project lead for Matrix I may be biased :)
- Arathorn 6y ago
  actually, come to think of it, an excellent way for Microsoft to fend off this anti-competition accusation would be to go embrace Matrix for use in Teams and demonstrate they support data portability, and are serious about not locking users in. On the Matrix side we'd be happy to help them do so (we have a few big undisclosed projects already on the go to expose existing chat systems natively into Matrix :)
  - jnsaff2 6y ago
    "for Microsoft to <snip> go embrace Matrix" This may not have come off as you intended ...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Arathorn 6y ago
      heh; i'm thinking of embrace in the same way that MS have embraced Linux (which hopefully isn't a run-up to the other two Es ;P)
      - mikro2nd 6y ago
        This is the "new" Microsoft. Just like the old Microsoft. The other two Es will follow just as soon as the optics permit. eta: (Sorry to sound old and curmudgeonly, but... I am old and curmudgeonly. I do not believe for one little instant that any corporate culture is capable of reversing its lifelong ingrained habits and postures.)
suifbwish 6y ago
I have used slack at 3 different jobs and they seem to have lost touch with what the user wants and struggles with in their environment. Before launching some anticompetitive tirade they should focus on becoming a better product. There is no way I’m going to side with them while they auto hide contacts that I talk to throughout the day just because I have a list of several hundred. Also what’s up with not allowing multiple tabs open to view multiple conversations at the same time? Even Facebook has that feature. If anyone at slack is listening.. get off your antitrust high horse and get back to coding, you’ve let your product become inferior and this just sounds pathetic asking for the government to step in and help you do what your design/dev team cannot do for you.
Dwolb 6y ago
Good for Slack. Filing a major lawsuit against one of the biggest tech companies is an incredible decision to make. Microsoft has been doing this for years with basically all of its products and hasn’t really changed its behavior [1]. They continue to get fined for not abiding by earlier EU judgements and rulings. Curious to see what regulators end up doing to force compliance since these fines don’t seem to do so. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-antitrust-tech-stocks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-anti...
kodablah 6y ago
Can I be against MS bundling Teams and against Slack using the government to unbundle it? I know that public companies attack for growth at all angles, including litigious ones, but this turns me off of Slack's general business strategy (if I wasn't already). I yearn for the company that accepts modest growth, applies its principles to itself only, and remains technically focused no matter how large.
- hkt 6y ago
  There are two main conceptions of antitrust: making markets fairer, and controlling price for consumers. The latter is the American approach, the former the European. It is worth considering the fact that without adequate competition prices will rise and quality will fall. Slack are essentially asking for a market optimisation to allow them to continue improving their product without Microsoft maneuvering to reduce its effective price to zero. This, I would say, is a net gain for everybody.
  - kodablah 6y ago
    That's the point, they don't need market optimization to continue improving their product. They are just leveraging it because it's a weapon provided to them. There is no lack of adequate competition in the chat space and no need for the government to make MS stop including the products it wants to in its office suite. While this individual action may appear on the surface a net gain for everybody (though you surely meant everybody but Microsoft), the net negatives of continued unnecessary government interference in tech are harder to recognize since each just increases legislative momentum. Then we get surprised we weren't stauncher and more principled when the heavier hand is shown.
qwe098cube 6y ago
So this is another reboot of the browser wars but with messengers? Is this the new era of messenger wars?
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  Yes it seems so! But it's different to the browser wars because the browsers used to used sensible amounts of RAM, and these "modern" chat systems seem to like ballooning quantities of RAM for displaying text and pictures, eg. Slack on my Mac is using 365MB of RAM via its 5 processes. If only the wars was about efficient applications then we would all win. I recall using MSN Messenger on a machine with 64 MB of RAM I think and it did approximately the same - instant messaging.
  - qwe098cube 6y ago
    well chrome has won the browser wars in the long run and chrome is notorious for its memory hunger. So maybe RAM hogging is the key to success. Interestingly Teams uses >1.2GB of RAM via its 6 processes on my mac, same as Outlook.
toyg 6y ago
Sounds like a pretty desperate move to me. Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products. Office products these days don't even need to be installed (in fact, I bet MS would rather prefer that you did not). Imho it's a very, very weak complaint.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  Office 365 is more of a monopoly than Windows now. This kind of bundling and cross-subsidy is classic monopoly abuse, and is almost identical to the IE case.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    What about Google G Suite - a lot of people claim that it is comparable with Office 365?
    - ascorbic 6y ago
      It's certainly comparable, and does compete with O365. Legally, a monopoly doesn't mean it has no competitors, just that it dominates the market.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        Some reports suggest that G Suite has more users than Office 365? https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billion-vs-microsoft-office-2020-3?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi... NB I don't know how credible these reports are but I'm not sure that Office 365 "dominates the market" to the same extent as Windows used to.
        true_religion 6y ago
        Users aren’t customers. If you give something away for free, you will always have people clamoring for it rather than the paid product. However people take what is free for granted and don’t consider it a part of the market. For instance, many hold that iOS is a monopoly despite being a minority of the market because you pay Apple for it, where as Android is just free and Google does not get your money for its use.
jpalomaki 6y ago
I've been using Slack for a while and quite much like the basic functionality (chat) when you working in single organization context. However recently I've been playing around with Teams quite a bit and I'm feeling this integrated experience with all the tools is the future. Even when running just in browser it is already pretty good. You have chat, calls, mail, can collaborate on documents etc. Having everything in one package feels convenient. Not saying it's perfect. There are bugs and for example different file storage backends (Sharepoint vs Onedrive) are a bit confusing. It will be challenging to for these "best of breed" apps (Dropbox, Slack, Zoom) to compete with the integrated offering from Microsoft. It's just so easy to get everything from single vendor. One user/group management, one invoice etc.
- toyg 6y ago
  >It will be challenging to for these "best of breed" apps (Dropbox, Slack, Zoom) to compete with the integrated offering from Microsoft. It has always been. Windows has had Dropbox-like features all the way back to 1998; but they sucked (and there wasn't enough bandwidth...), so people didn't use them. We've had corporate IM offerings since forever, and Skype existed waaay before Zoom. The likes of Dropbox have thrived by focusing on building better products, more powerful and easier to use. There is space for everyone in the market, if they have the best product and/or the best timing.
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
Slack's "Dear Microsoft" [0] letter in 2016 looks even sillier now. > Dear Microsoft, > Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition. Uh yeah, I don't think you are.. [0] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft# https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft#
- rpdillon 6y ago
  I think they're making a distinction between 'competition' and 'anti-competitive behavior'.
  - SaltyLemonZest 6y ago
    Sure, but their distinction seems kinda silly. They're arguing that because the Microsoft Office suite has been so successful, adding any new product to it is anti-competitive.
    - tremon 6y ago
      No, they're arguing that since Microsoft has a monopoly on office productivity software[0], adding new features to it that are in direction competition with other products is anti-competitive behaviour. And they are right about that. Microsoft has been repeatedly convicted for this behaviour (Windows Desktop -> Internet Explorer, and Windows Desktop -> Windows Media Player). Trying to argue otherwise would, IMNSHO, be silly. The only valid question remains, does Slack's offering itself (corporate IM) fall under the office productivity umbrella or not? [0] and no, you do not have to own 100% of the market before being considered a monopoly
      - TulliusCicero 6y ago
        This reasoning seems weird to me, and your examples aren't helping things. Like, sending off an OS in 2020 that had no browser or media player would obviously be extremely silly, and would present a terrible user experience for people. I just can't see including a browser in an OS as some evil practice. It just seems like obvious good sense. > adding new features to it that are in direction competition with other products is anti-competitive behaviour. Probably any new feature you could think to add to Office exists somewhere on the internet already, in some form. Is MS just not allowed to add new things now? Or what if MS manages to add something first, then an upstart competitor appears right after? Does it not count as anti-competitive then?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
It’s definitely monopolistic to include Teams into Office(Excel,Word,PPT) only after slack shows value. As a user though, Teams is working out well for us. This is MS’s version of sherlocking. Every big Tech company does this. I think one work around would be to have an independent council that recognizes these events, and forces the big players to pay out $100M per incident. This might satisfy most parties involved.
- hkt 6y ago
  Most regulators play pretty much that role, and the EC has that sort of power. Doesn't seem to actually achieve much though - they stop short of breaking up companies which is probably the issue.
samfisher83 6y ago
Teams from what I understand is pretty much free with office. Slack is going to have a hard team competing with free. It also doesn't have the same video desktop sharing capabilities as teams from when I last used it.
- hyperdimension 6y ago
  Well, without a strong opinion either way, I'd just point out that IE was free with Windows (where their competitors were not,) and that point didn't work out all that well for Microsoft in the end.
  - FDSGSG 6y ago
    > that point didn't work out all that well for Microsoft in the end. But in the end it worked perfectly well for Microsoft. The settlement was essentially a slap on the wrist.
tedk-42 6y ago
Sounds like a typical corporate move by Microsoft. I side with slack on this one in that Microsoft is using its position with Office as a dominant productivity tool and wedging their Teams product in there. Vox had an article about it a year ago: https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government-antitrust-investigation-apple-amazon-google-facebook https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government... It's the long game they can play because they have the resources for it. If they bankrupt slack by offering an alternative that's free and almost at feature parity, then it's an easy win for them to absorb the short term running costs of their own chat product Teams.
- k__ 6y ago
  Is this as big of a problem as with IE6 back in the days? I haven't been using MSO for years now and most companies I work with use Google Docs.
  - lou1306 6y ago
    I don't think so. IE6 was bundled with Windows, a software that came bundled with nearly every retail PC and that was basically essential for said PC to be used (in the eyes of the layman, at least). Teams is bundled with Office, which is neither bundled by so many hardware vendors, nor essential for operating a PC, nor free of competitors.
- minhazm 6y ago
  What about Microsoft bundling OneDrive? Or One Note? Should they be forced to remove those too? I don't understand how Microsoft is in the wrong here. This isn't like them bundling it into Windows. O365 is a paid product and users are specifically paying for a productivity bundle, where Teams makes perfect sense as a product. They previously bundled Skype here IIRC, which was also a chatting app, they just replaced it with Teams. If you want to argue that Teams ripped off of Slack, I won't disagree with you there. But Slack was just an evolution of IRC + plugins also. So it isn't a novel idea that they came up with, it was just well executed. I don't even like Teams, I much prefer using Slack. But Microsoft having a productivity suite where they're offering a productivity app seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google is doing the same thing with Google Meet/Chat, it's going to get bundled in Google Apps for Business.
goguy 6y ago
I personally see this as a weak move. Surely a bundle of software can include whatever they desire to include. What next a law suit for bundling Access? Don't get any ideas Oracle...
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  Yes, I am personally disgusted that installing Office FORCES a word processor and spreadsheet to be installed when all I wanted was WMF clip art!
- ndespres 6y ago
  One funny thing about it is that it's not bundled with the Office suite the way Word, Excel, Powerpoint and sometimes Access are. Teams is part of your "Microsoft 365" subscription, which could include your rights to the Office suite, Exchange Online email service, etc. So within the ecosystem Teams isn't part of the Office package, it just works with it, sort of. That's part of what makes the anti-competition claim hold true to me. If Teams were pushed as a first-class component of Office to paying users (maybe the way Groove was at one point) but not forced upon every user regardless, it might be different.
- ascorbic 6y ago
  > Surely a bundle of software can include whatever they desire to include. Not when the bundle is a monopoly. This was established with the rulings on MS bundling IE with Windows.
spians 6y ago
Not exactly related but how is Microsoft's approach to Teams any different than Google's approach to Google Chat (or Hangouts Chat) that also is component of G-suite?
- ascorbic 6y ago
  G-Suite isn't a monopoly, but Office is.
  - whereistimbo 6y ago
    According to https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 Google holds more marketshare with G Suite with 59.91%, compared to Microsoft Office 365 with 39.96%
    - dang 6y ago
      You posted this 5 times. Please don't post duplicate comments to HN. It strictly lowers the signal/noise ratio. If you want to refer to what you posted elsewhere, a link is fine.
physicsguy 6y ago
Find it odd that so many people hate Teams so much. For me, it works considerably better than using Slack did in my previous position; the only downside for me personally was the lack of a Linux client initially, which is now present. It's also considerably better than Slack for mixing other communications in, which is widely used in corporates: video calling, screen sharing, and the fact that you can hook it in with phone systems. Given it's effectively replaced Skype, that's not really surprising. Prior to teams being introduced at my current company, we were using a mix of Jabber, Cisco WebEx, and other ad-hoc tools in various teams. Now we can use Teams to do all of that.
gruez 6y ago
>Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. So what's the core issue here? That Microsoft bundles Teams with Office 365, or that it gets auto-installed and can't be removed? If that's considered anti-competitive, is it possible for eg. Evernote to go after them as well, because OneNote is also bundled? What about Dropbox, because Onedrive is bundled?
- simion314 6y ago
  Not OC, IMO MS should be forced to offer 2 different products, Office without Teams and Teams should be an independent product you would have to opt-in and buy. Then if Teams and Office communicate then this protocol should be open so anyone could use it.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    but what makes teams different from the rest of the suite? to me it sound like arguing that bundles should not exist.
    - simion314 6y ago
      Yes, I think we need to investigate if bundles is a good thing for the world. I have an old memory from my childhood, in Romania during communism I went with my grandma to buy oil(or something like that) and if we wanted to buy that we were also forced to buy some other crap like pencils so the shop would get rid of old stock(I apologize if my memory is tricking me , maybe someone can confirm this I can't find anything on google with my search terms). So bundling feels to me dirty, I get forced into something I might not like. Maybe the actual problem is that big companies have a lot of money that they can spend on this products and offer them for free then make it impossible to create a fair competition. Would MS get the same Windows installs if the computers would come with the choice of different OSs )from what I read in most shops in the world options with alternatives are not present)
albertzeyer 6y ago
I really think we need some laws which require companies to open their protocols to allow seamless integration with other companies or open source implementations. There is no real reason why this should not be possible. E.g. take chat protocols. WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Hangout, and all the others. It would be easy to have some way that they could communicate with each other. But companies don't want that, because they want the vendor lock-in. This is bad for everyone in the end. The only real way to solve this is if this is enforced by some law. I'm not really seeing that some law like this would be possible in the US, though. But maybe in EU...
- sputr 6y ago
  That's why EU is so important. Its the only institution with even a chance. The US is far to captured to ever start thinking about basic anti-monopoly regulation. Because that's all you are describing is: basic antimonopoly regulation.
- chirau 6y ago
  You can't force someone to use open protocols. What if their value preposition is exactly that, superiority to open protocols?
  - albertzeyer 6y ago
    You can't enforce that, but you can enforce that they open their own protocol, and also that the API is open to be used by anyone else, i.e. anyone can develop an own client.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      How does that work with top-down moderation? E.g. some user X is harassing other users, so the company running the platform wants to ban them. If the protocol is open, isn't banning basically impossible, since they could just change to a client not controlled by said company? edit: hmm, I guess this depends on what it means for the protocol to be open vs the platform itself...
withinboredom 6y ago
Can someone explain to me how the “leading channel-based messaging platform” can complain about a smaller competitor bundling with a large product?
- searchableguy 6y ago
  Team is already bigger than slack. > Slack previously revealed it has 12 million daily active users back in October, but the company has not publicly updated this number since. Microsoft Teams usage has soared over the past year, reaching 44 million daily active users during a big increase in demand earlier this month. Slack has instead been trying to steer the conversation to how many actions are taken in Slack compared to its competitors, and how much people love to use its app. 0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-records-coronavirus-pandemic-remote-working-growth-concurrent-users https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-r...
jedieaston 6y ago
Blocking it's removal? How? Teams was installed with Office on my current system, and it pops up in Add/Remove Programs. IT Admins can prevent it from being installed with Office (and remove it from all of their machines if it has already been installed)[0]. It's not included with Windows either (just as Office isn't). And Slack isn't blocked from being installed either. What's the anti-competitive angle here, other than the OS is created by Microsoft, the IM system is created by Microsoft, the Office suite is created by Microsoft, and the licenses are often bundled? Apple would be guilty of a similar thing by shipping Messages.app and iWork with macOS, no? 0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#how-to-exclude-microsoft-teams-from-new-installations-of-microsoft-365-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Microsoft has basically a monopoly on enterprise tools such as word/excel/etc. Apple does not.
  - jm4 6y ago
    There are so many more choices than there were 20 years ago. Microsoft makes a kick ass office suite. There's nothing monopolistic about it. They've been in this game longer than anyone and that's reflected in the feature set. Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office. Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
      > Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing. In what areas? I see an industry with more and more consolidation. There is no longer the serious competition there once was in the field of office suites or certain kinds of creative software, which is really sad.
msoad 6y ago
Messaging is big and Slack is too small to compete in this space. The only viable way out for Slack is to join Google. Because we all know Google can't build messaging apps!
echelon 6y ago
Dear Slack, You're selling something that isn't a product. Standalone chat is a feature, and you won't win against a full product offering unless you drastically reduce your prices. You need to get acquired (by Google or Facebook), because I don't think you can innovate an office productivity suite fast enough to compete. And that's clearly the enterprise puzzle piece where chat fits into nicely. Microsoft isn't being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they're the one that least resembles a monopoly. You're struggling because you are selling chat as a service. Something that has been free since IRC and AOL Instant Messenger. Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets. You built a pretty (through opinions vary) version with access controls. You had a chance to build a moat and make acquisitions to fortify your position, but you didn't do it. You invited competition from Microsoft and instead of doing something, you rewrote your Electron layout six times and made a WYSIWYG that everyone hated. You had four or five years to do something. You had a chance most startup companies dream of. But here we are. You squandered that chance while you reveled in hubris. You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.
- thinkingkong 6y ago
  Slack is in a tough position but they don't really sell "chat as a service" as much as they sell an incredibly convenient workplace experience. They're like the netflix / amazon of enterprise; convenience and ease of use is their product more than anything else. From everything I've read, heard, and experienced, Teams is way worse of an experience. What MS _can_ do that Slack can't is append Teams as a line-item it to an existing invoice, or shift spend within a contract. It happens; Salesforces does this with Heroku.
  - nickpeterson 6y ago
    Slack has created the blueprint of what to make. It’s much easier for MS to copy those features until the difference between the two products is small. I think Slack is hoping their focus will save them, but in the end they’re going to lose most of their MS oriented customers
    - 6y ago
runevault 6y ago
The thing this has me thinking about is, assuming Slack wins this lawsuit, can MS no longer add any more fully featured products to Office? Not saying that is good vs bad, it just becomes interesting if their position suddenly means they must create new bundles for new offerings and cannot ever leverage existing offerings to get into a market. Perhaps that would be fair, being such a massive company. I just don't know.
bearjaws 6y ago
Slack needed to learn 4 years ago that it takes more than a decent chat app to make a company fully remote. It's a critical piece of it, but your wiki, knowledge base, and business planning software are all part of it too. Microsoft bundles all of these into one package, I fail to see how they are anti-competitive when they aren't even selling the same products. Slack failed to see how fragile their product was and now needs to be acquired or make their own productivity suite.
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  You can tell they didn't truly consider the full working remote scenario because their video/voice call and screen sharing functionality is below average. Slack on its own isn't usable for remote work, it has to be Slack + Google Meet or Slack + Zoom. Slack's tech in that area just isn't up to industry standards.
llimos 6y ago
The thing is, Teams integrates with the rest of Office 365 much more than IE did with Windows. It's very easy to argue that it's a core part of the product. In general, Microsoft has really nailed how if things work well together, they become more than the sum of their parts. That's why each individual part doesn't need to be the best in class in order to win. Which is bad news for Slack, but it's hard to argue that it's bad for consumers.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Well, I use Ubuntu. No problem with my two customers using Slack (one is Mac basede, the other one is more or less BYOD). All of us install the desktop app and it's done. If they switch to a more integrated system like Team maybe (and only maybe) it could be difficult for me to keep using Ubuntu when working with them. So too much can be bad for some consumer. Btw, people consume t-shirts, but office suits?
  - pnt12 6y ago
    Teams has a browser app that works just like the desktop client, which is probably just a thin wrapper around a web app. The only thing ive missed there is the ability to take control of someone else's pc.
- anoncake 6y ago
  Does Teams integrate with the rest of Office using only public APIs or does Microsoft behave anticompetitively in that regard?
  - llimos 6y ago
    Pretty much all of Office 365 is available through a single unified API. Whether they use that API for their internal integrations, I couldn't say. But I would guess any integration they're doing could also be done by a third-party who was that way inclined, yes.
artpi 6y ago
There was previous discussion around written asynchronous communication being a superpower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228 I feel that Slack dominance is hurting the productivity, because: - It's impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki, google doc or an internal blog - Slack is incentivized to keep you IN Slack, for engagement. They don't have their own permanent-knowledge-base-software, so they pretend it's not needed. It's a different case with Teams, because they offer quite a roster of software to write things up permanently - like sharepoint or office365 and will likely pursue integrating tighter and tighter. Because Slack is a standalone product, they will push for using chat in the workplaces MORE. Microsoft can offer chat as a "when needed" basis. The logistics of trying to be productive on a company group chat led me to create a free "Win at Slack" mini-course: https://deliber.at/chat/ https://deliber.at/chat/
- brightball 6y ago
  The company wiki/internal blog depends on people reading it though. The perk of group chats is usually smaller messages that can spark interest in discussions. Zulip honestly seems like they've solved this problem better than Slack though.
- lukethomas 6y ago
  This is right on. Slack's pricing is based on regular usage, so they have an incentive to keep you distracted (to put it bluntly). Microsoft sees chat as a piece of an overall communication "puzzle". They have Sharepoint for more persistent information and Yammer for "outer-loop" communication. My startup (https://www.friday.app/ https://www.friday.app/) is based around the idea that there needs to be a "home" for the most important stuff at work that complements workplace chat. It's somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki (which most people don't use regularly). Workplace chat tools like Slack are wonderful for quick collaboration, but if you over-index here you will run into trouble. That's why Zapier, Automattic, and Stripe have all built their own internal tooling to help.
- basch 6y ago
  >impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki Every Team, by default, has a Posts, Files, and Wiki tab. Designing a way to roll up those Wiki pages, like they do with Sharepoint hubs, would be a good move.
s0m1 6y ago
Slack(November 2, 2016): You cant make good chat for work! https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft Microsoft: Thanks for the warm welcome. We think we can. Slack(22 july 2020): You are using your office suite super power to crush us. Microsoft: We thought we we're welcome? ---------------- Slack, stop the complaint and just make better products.
luka-birsa 6y ago
It is quite amusing to see Slack filing competition complaint after being so brash in bashing MS at the launch of MS Teams. Remember the full page ad they ran in NYT? https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-teams-new-york-times-ad https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-... My oh my how the tables have turned. There is something to be said about Microsoft and their ability to execute in the office space. Even my Dad, an architect at 70yrs old, is using MS Teams, while he never heard about Slack or any other collaboration tools. And looking at their product portfolio around MS Teams, if there is a company I'd be willing to bet that they win the workplace transformation race is Microsoft. It's easy to forget when you're working comfortably in the Silicon Valley tech scene, that there is a real business world out there and MS is the ruler.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Playing devil's advocate, Slack is just asking to compete on a level field. When Apple Music launched, it was preloaded on iOS. It's now the second largest streaming player. Amazon's offering comes in third. First-mover advantage seems to be best, but bundling in your platform five years late looks like a solid path to #2.
  - addicted 6y ago
    I’m failing to understand the playing field Slack is wanting to compete in. Is it the Office 365 playing field? Like do they want to be an optional add on into O365?
  - whereistimbo 6y ago
    Well Slack needs more than an enterprise chat app when Google G Suite which hold 59.91% marketshare [1] also bundling a chat app. [1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370
    - gundmc 6y ago
      You've posted almost this same exact comment 6 times already for this submission. I appreciate wanting to make a point, but the shotgun spam approach is just annoying for other users.
LoSboccacc 6y ago
> its market-dominant Office productivity suite is it really that dominant nowadays? I think it was around late 2000s when I last saw a 'use MS Word format' in any personal/corporate document exchange
deleted 6y ago
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skywritergr 6y ago
The additional problem I see with Slack is that their calls/video chat option is really inadequate and almost everyone is opting for Zoom. Zoom + Slack is a very steep price point for a lot of companies, especially in an era of cost saving and insecurity about the future. My company opted to move to MS Teams because the experience is better as it integrates calls + chats and we were already using office365 for emails and documents anyway, so it was "free". As someone said already, it's hard to compete with free. I can't see Slack getting out of this in one piece. I see Amazon being the obvious choice here.
tweetle_beetle 6y ago
I'm no Microsoft fan, but this press release is a bit embarassing. For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence. Slack could be accused of creating a "weak, copycat product" in their file hosting, document editing, video calling and workflow automation features. I think this is a long continuation of the awkward brand strategy Slack has had for some time. "...an open platform is essential" [1] just doesn't ring true from a closed source SaaS, but it's a good marketing message - so vague that you can't really disagree. And weirdly it's gone from being a poorly conceived guerilla marketing strategy (almost complete with bespoke emoji [2]) to a legal case. It maybe explains how Slack has been racing to embrace Microsoft recently - in a bid to show how "open" they are, and therefore how much they have been damaged by "closed" Microsoft? But wouldn't that swing both ways - if they integrate so easily, then where is the monopoly? Nov 2016 - Slack declares how thoughtful, craftmanship-y, open, loving, long term-y and un-Microsoft-y they are [1] Jan 2018 - Teams launches app store Aug 2018 - Teams offers free tier to compete with Slack [3] Mar 2020 - Slack starts integrating Teams calls [4] Apr 2020 - Slack launches Outlook and One Drive apps [5] [1] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft [2] https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257 [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-free-version-slack-competitor https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-teams-integration-calling-features https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-... [5] https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-office-365-apps-for-slack https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-offi...
- pwinnski 6y ago
  > For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence. I think that's exactly the complaint: that Microsoft is hiding the true cost of Teams, using anti-competitive "bundling" to make Slack seem more expensive by comparison. Not saying I agree, but that does seem to be exactly the complaint.
  - 6y ago
dzonga 6y ago
one of those times, where I will say the big co isn't in the wrong. slack, has suffered the hand of the market. that the deck, the market dealt wasn't in your favor. is slack a product, could be ? but what are the advantages ? strategy 101. real business don't ride on fashion, but utility. teams is good enough.
Jaruzel 6y ago
Slightly off topic, but when you share this article via social media, the page title becomes: "Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft - Several People Are Typing" [1] Due to the og:title tag being different. --- [1] Emphasis mine.
bkor 6y ago
Something I didn't see someone mentioning: Microsoft is moving everyone from Skype for Business over to Teams. Any enterprise customer will have to migrate. Skype for Business is quite different from Skype itself, basically a marketing thing. Moving enterprise customers over from a chat&screen sharing app to teams is quite a change. There's loads more functionality, options, etc. I don't think if you had Skype for Business before you'd ever consider anything such as Slack or similar. From what I noticed Skype for Business is used often within enterprise companies.
- discordance 6y ago
  Skype for Business was a horrible horrible product and i'm glad we were switched to Teams
benlumen 6y ago
I've been thinking about antitrust a lot recently. Years ago, Microsoft were losing in court over the right to ship their browser with their operating system. Now, you get reminded how great Edge is when you try to change your default browser, you get the new one in a forced Windows update that launches the browser itself on startup, places shortcuts back in your task bar, etc.
shay_ker 6y ago
i do love one walled-garden suing another
mothsonasloth 6y ago
If someone could make a JIRA/Confluence/Slack for devs it would make my current life* very easy. * life consists of Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Confluence and Sharepoint....
- mnkypete 6y ago
  If you are on Jira Cloud ping me, we have something very interesting launching soon ;)
perfectstorm 6y ago
Didn’t their CEO say that Teams is not a competitor. Looks like he said it in May 2020. So i wonder what happened since then. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewart-butterfield-microsoft-teams-competition https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewar...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pedrocx486 6y ago
  If I'm not mistaken their CEO (Stewart) is known for saying some... Weird things. And then changing his mind right after. (My experience is from as an user on early Flickr days and his game, Glitch.)
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
Same guys that on November 2nd, 2016, run a full page ad on the NYT [0], titled "Welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution", and signed "your friends at Slack". How ironic. [0]: https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft
- aw1621107 6y ago
  Wrong thread?
  - dang 6y ago
    We'll move it.
- magneticnorth 6y ago
  I think you commented on the wrong article?
  - dang 6y ago
    We moved it.
replyifuagree 6y ago
Slack has a quality problem that they really need to get on solving. Their desktop client has way too many weird quirks, and I just plain refuse to run their android client anymore. That said,it sucks less than teams.
blntechie 6y ago
Can’t really shed tears for a company which wanted to kill email and wall off content into their own proprietary product. They have ridiculed email so many times that itself is ridiculous. They are still trying to figure out interoperability of one org’s chat spaces with other orgs when it was a solved problem 40 years back.
deleted 6y ago
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youeseh 6y ago
There are laws and companies will use those laws to their advantage as much as possible. Not doing so is stupid. Just as Slack is trying to get Microsoft in trouble over antitrust, Microsoft is currently trying to get the US to investigate Apple over their App Store. Everyone is looking for an edge. It is better to use that edge while you're competitive than when its too late. Except in Microsoft's complaint about the App Store, the train left the station a long time ago.
outside1234 6y ago
But Google and Apple do exactly the same thing? Why no competition complain for them?
trekrich 6y ago
They are trying the sco business model, look how that turned out for them!
rydre 6y ago
The best move now would be for Slack, Zoom to merge, buy Airtable and Webflow, quickly try to build a moat. No one will get this opportunity again. But they might just build the next Google/Facebook/Apple this way.
gigel82 6y ago
I'm surprised Discord isn't showing up in the comments. We moved from Slack to Discord (even though we get Teams "for free" it doesn't get as much usage and setting it up to work with outside-the-org collaborators is painful), and I know of a lot of other companies / open-source projects moving to Discord too. The only thing we're really missing from Slack is threads.
- gverrilla 6y ago
  yeah, I agree. Also, gamers and teenagers are using it and not Teams or Slack.
simonkafan 6y ago
> We want to be the 2% of your software budget that makes the other 98% more valuable; they want 100% of your budget every time. Please. You are a company in a capitalistic system, it's your goal to make money. If you'd have the chance, you'd also take 100% of your customers money every time.
6c696e7578 6y ago
Don't worry. Teams is terrible, you don't need to worry.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rosywoozlechan 6y ago
Idea: find some feature that's part of a software suite, like the ability to zoom on Windows. Build a business around just that feature, like sell a zoom tool for Windows. If the business flounders start an anti-trust lawsuit because Microsoft includes that feature for free in Windows.
betimsl 6y ago
IRC files a law suit against slack.
- nullc 6y ago
  Next step is for microsoft to start running gateways into slack, leaving users on slack as second class citizens, and then shutting down the gateways when enough users have been pulled into their walled gardens to give them critical mass.
fblp 6y ago
Hey i am wondering if someone within knowledge of EU competition law can give their analysis on this. The thing that stands out to me is that this is a private competition law action - it is not a government agency/commission taking action. This indicates that the government agencies in the jurisdiction don't currently see this as a priority. Many of the prominent anti trust actions in tech have been taken by regulators (eg EU commission vs Google). From my brief understanding of competition law barriers to entry and consumer detriment are issues the court considers. As others have stated, Microsoft is far less dominant with cloud office products than they were with windows pcs in the 90s. They are also not the incumbent in the chat market trying to block competition out.
blackoil 6y ago
As a layman, it seems link companies looking to cut costs in current environment are finding Teams (free) more sensible option than paying millions to Slack. So while the WFH push is doing wonders for other communication platforms like Zoom, Slack is not seeing that benefit. Otherwise, it looks a bad time for a company to be distracted by political games.
shafyy 6y ago
I think there needs to be a law that forces companies that benefit from network effects to open their standards once they reach a certain market power (similar to antitrust and monopoly laws). For example, Twitter would be forced to open their standard and then anyone can build clients (and host servers), just like IMAP and POP3 works for email. I think this even will have a bigger effect than breaking up these companies, and it will be easier to push through politically. Edit: Typo
gitowiec 6y ago
Stupid slack, I wish they fail. Teams is great and for free for many companies if they just subscribe to office 365.
markshepard 6y ago
I think Slack's case against MS has legs. I work for a company that makes a competitive product (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io) to Teams/Slack. It gives a bit of insight on what is happening here. Teams comes free with office 365 (now microsoft 365). For just 5$ per user/per month one can get email/one drive/office web apps and teams. There is no way slack can compete with the pricing. Slack's pricing starts at 6.67$. For businesses, office apps are a must have. When Teams is bundled with office apps, there is really not a reason for businesses to go and pay for Slack. So one can argue MS is using its dominant position in office suite to undercut the competition. The fair thing to do is charge some money for Teams. Personally I feel we need to have more diversity and choices in the IT systems we use. Increasingly the tools we use are controlled by 2/3 dominant platforms (4 companies account for 49% value of Nasdaq 100). It is not good for customers in the long term. Once you obliterate the competition by bundling it free, one can always come back and raise the price. There is some serious blood between MS and Slack (It all goes back to the time when MS tried to acquire Slack). FWIW, Slack's posture during that time was also not really good (Cocky). I am guessing - It hurt somebody's ego very badly in MS. So the leadership team in MS made it as a personal mission to obliterate Slack. The whole game is playing out now.
heapslip 6y ago
The battle of the glorified IRCs is on! Sure, Microsoft is shady as usual (not all of it, but a good part), but once Teams get stable and everything actually works, it should smoke Slack. At least Teams offers more than chat, and it has a justified need for running in a browser.

256 points by mattmarcus 6y ago

"Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers" Is teams auto installed with the Office suite and can it not be uninstalled?

microcolonel 6y ago
I think the application proper can be disabled, but it's built into basically every Office application at this point, as far as I know. It's like wondering if you can uninstall ffmpeg from an Electron app.
ndespres 6y ago
Yes it is auto-installed and auto starts and is very annoying to get rid of, as a sysadmin. It also installs itself per-user, so non-admins get prompted constantly to install it themselves and can do so even with limited privileges. It is persistent.
- nojito 6y ago
  You can disable teams entirely from your deployment.
  - ndespres 6y ago
    Good luck doing that when it was automatically enabled and deployed, so now users have data on it already.
    - jankiehodgpodge 6y ago
      If you're deploying office anyway you simply remove teams from the config XML for the installer. Pretty simple really.
    - threeseed 6y ago
      So then give users time to migrate to an alternative and shut it down.
- jedieaston 6y ago
  What's the annoyance? It's an MSI. Use msiexec /x to remove it (probably via PDQ Deploy or SCCM or a PowerShell Script), and then block the installer from running again during an Office install with GPO [0]. It's definitely easier than cleaning up some of the other garbageware in Pro. 0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#use-group-policy-to-control-the-installation-of-microsoft-teams https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...
freehunter 6y ago
I’m not sure on Teams specifically but years ago (last time I tried to install the Office suite) you had to install basically all or nothing. I just wanted OneNote but the installer forced me to add Word and Excel and Powerpoint, similar to this forum post: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_install-mso_win10/installing-only-particular-office-365-programs/9ebb27d4-1084-42e7-b84a-c5dd76e9232c https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_... If they’ve added Teams to that installer, I’m not surprised.
- gruez 6y ago
  >you had to install basically all or nothing. but from the link you gave: >BUT, if you are willing to invest a little effort, there is a business specific tool you can use. It is called the "Office Deployment Tool". You will have to edit a simple text only "XML" file that tells the tool what you want it to do.
  - freehunter 6y ago
    When I had this issue 6 or 7 years ago that thread didn’t exist to explain that to me.
kevingadd 6y ago
Under normal circumstances Teams can trivially be uninstalled - it's just an Electron app. I have Office and Teams installed on my PC and can freely uninstall or install either of them, and I had to install Teams manually. The android and iOS Teams apps are definitely manually uninstallable. My guess is they may be referring to enterprise setups or perhaps an enterprise office 365 installer. I'm using 365 but not an enterprise 365 account so I can't speak for how it would behave there. Bundling Teams in with the other stuff that gets installed might be an option individual companies can opt into.
raxxorrax 6y ago
Certainly wasn't in our case (EU E3 or E5 licenses). You can also disable the license for all users. Now, the practice of enabling licenses for new apps by default could be improved...
- corty 6y ago
  You can disable the license, but it keeps nagging all your users to ask IT for a MSTeams account/license... "btw, teams is installed, try here" "login failed, maybe you are not allowed by your admins, nag them about it" repeat every 2 weeks
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    True, that may be the case. There is config.office.com where you can adjust a lot of behavior (you need an admin account I believe). If teams gets installed with office on default settings, you can certainly change it there. However, I don't think we have changed anything there and it didn't get installed automatically.

microcolonel 6y ago

> Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. I feel like it's bad for a society to place no weight on agreements. “Force installing” is a pretty bold claim, given that Office is a piece of self-updating software that adds new components on a regular basis, and which says as much when you install it. Teams is a component of the Office suite in the same way that Microsoft's SSO system is. If this point is considered to contribute to a successful claim, I think it says something sad about the EC.

hkt 6y ago
European approaches to antitrust differ to the American approach. It is much more about fairness to market participants and the result is that we avoid Microsoft having an unchallenged avenue to dominance in yet another market. Optimising markets is a vital role of the state in any country where inhabitants don't want to see regulatory capture or market dysfunction (as with say, the American broadband and mobile data markets). It is likely to preserve choice, encourage innovation, and allow new market participants if Slack's case is accepted.
untog 6y ago
"force installing" in this context means "you want X? you're getting Y too, whether you like it or not". No, you're not forced to install both X and Y. But it's pretty clearly taking advantage of a dominant market position.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  “I want to install Discord, but without FFMPEG” is not grounds for a complaint. I don't like Microsoft's software, nor do I use it, but if this is illegal and the Apple App Store isn't, the EC is none but a lawfare weapon for many-billionaire companies.
Kliment 6y ago
Adding a new component that is really difficult to disable or uninstall, auto-starts on boot and gets put in place without asking for everyone who uses your office suite, which you basically have a monopoly on, is bullshit. Teams is a component of the Office suite but it doesn't behave like the other components (staying out of the way until you ask for it).

ndespres 6y ago

It's about time. I don't know exactly what Prince means by "gateways vs gatekeepers" in this context as Slack is itself a pretty closed system, isn't it? It's not using open protocols or interpretable with competing chat systems as far as I know. However I do find their allegations that Microsoft forces a subpar uninstallable copycat product to be accurate and credible. Teams is a bottom tier application and they are so aggressive about forcing it on users, it's a little silly.

paweladamczuk 6y ago
Came here to comment on the gateways vs gatekeepers as well. Ironically enough, it wasn't so long ago that Slack decided to stop supporting their IRC and XMPP gateways.
- nullc 6y ago
  They served their purposes of drawing users from those places into slack's walled gardens.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

skc 6y ago

This is so strange. I seem to remember Slack somewhat mockingly welcoming the competition in this space when Teams launched.

microcolonel 6y ago
Honestly, Slack has become so baffling to me. As somebody who used it every day for a couple of years at work, then not for a year or so, it is completely unrecognizable today and (in my opinion) a lot more complex to use. I have a hard time reading and understanding the layouts in Slack as it stands today.
- jamil7 6y ago
  The (newish) mobile app on iOS is really confusing layout wise, I thought I'd get used to it but it confuses me every time. It's also weirdly slow for a native app, I'm not sure how they managed that.
searchableguy 6y ago
It hit them where it hurts - profit. /shrugs Consider open source alternative such as zulip or matrix. Zulip is used by rust team :) and has a pretty good threading model. 1) https://zulipchat.com https://zulipchat.com 2) https://element.io https://element.io 3) https://mattermost.com https://mattermost.com
rpdillon 6y ago
Right. I think the issue here, based on the title, is that this behavior is anti-competitive.

Arathorn 6y ago

On one hand, the playbook of exploiting Office's dominance to push Teams is very very reminiscent of exploiting Windows' dominance to push IE. On the other hand, Slack's walled garden is also effectively anti-competitive; trying to create a monopoly via vendor lock-in to the Slack product & ecosystem. It feels like a better bet would be for both of them to adopt and support open interoperability standards, so users can avoid being locked into any single vendor, and have full sovereignty over their conversation data. (Disclaimer: as project lead for Matrix I may be biased :)

Arathorn 6y ago
actually, come to think of it, an excellent way for Microsoft to fend off this anti-competition accusation would be to go embrace Matrix for use in Teams and demonstrate they support data portability, and are serious about not locking users in. On the Matrix side we'd be happy to help them do so (we have a few big undisclosed projects already on the go to expose existing chat systems natively into Matrix :)
- jnsaff2 6y ago
  "for Microsoft to <snip> go embrace Matrix" This may not have come off as you intended ...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arathorn 6y ago
    heh; i'm thinking of embrace in the same way that MS have embraced Linux (which hopefully isn't a run-up to the other two Es ;P)
    - mikro2nd 6y ago
      This is the "new" Microsoft. Just like the old Microsoft. The other two Es will follow just as soon as the optics permit. eta: (Sorry to sound old and curmudgeonly, but... I am old and curmudgeonly. I do not believe for one little instant that any corporate culture is capable of reversing its lifelong ingrained habits and postures.)

suifbwish 6y ago

I have used slack at 3 different jobs and they seem to have lost touch with what the user wants and struggles with in their environment. Before launching some anticompetitive tirade they should focus on becoming a better product. There is no way I’m going to side with them while they auto hide contacts that I talk to throughout the day just because I have a list of several hundred. Also what’s up with not allowing multiple tabs open to view multiple conversations at the same time? Even Facebook has that feature. If anyone at slack is listening.. get off your antitrust high horse and get back to coding, you’ve let your product become inferior and this just sounds pathetic asking for the government to step in and help you do what your design/dev team cannot do for you.

Dwolb 6y ago

Good for Slack. Filing a major lawsuit against one of the biggest tech companies is an incredible decision to make. Microsoft has been doing this for years with basically all of its products and hasn’t really changed its behavior [1]. They continue to get fined for not abiding by earlier EU judgements and rulings. Curious to see what regulators end up doing to force compliance since these fines don’t seem to do so. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-antitrust-tech-stocks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/business/dealbook/eu-anti...

kodablah 6y ago

Can I be against MS bundling Teams and against Slack using the government to unbundle it? I know that public companies attack for growth at all angles, including litigious ones, but this turns me off of Slack's general business strategy (if I wasn't already). I yearn for the company that accepts modest growth, applies its principles to itself only, and remains technically focused no matter how large.

hkt 6y ago
There are two main conceptions of antitrust: making markets fairer, and controlling price for consumers. The latter is the American approach, the former the European. It is worth considering the fact that without adequate competition prices will rise and quality will fall. Slack are essentially asking for a market optimisation to allow them to continue improving their product without Microsoft maneuvering to reduce its effective price to zero. This, I would say, is a net gain for everybody.
- kodablah 6y ago
  That's the point, they don't need market optimization to continue improving their product. They are just leveraging it because it's a weapon provided to them. There is no lack of adequate competition in the chat space and no need for the government to make MS stop including the products it wants to in its office suite. While this individual action may appear on the surface a net gain for everybody (though you surely meant everybody but Microsoft), the net negatives of continued unnecessary government interference in tech are harder to recognize since each just increases legislative momentum. Then we get surprised we weren't stauncher and more principled when the heavier hand is shown.

qwe098cube 6y ago

So this is another reboot of the browser wars but with messengers? Is this the new era of messenger wars?

72deluxe 6y ago
Yes it seems so! But it's different to the browser wars because the browsers used to used sensible amounts of RAM, and these "modern" chat systems seem to like ballooning quantities of RAM for displaying text and pictures, eg. Slack on my Mac is using 365MB of RAM via its 5 processes. If only the wars was about efficient applications then we would all win. I recall using MSN Messenger on a machine with 64 MB of RAM I think and it did approximately the same - instant messaging.
- qwe098cube 6y ago
  well chrome has won the browser wars in the long run and chrome is notorious for its memory hunger. So maybe RAM hogging is the key to success. Interestingly Teams uses >1.2GB of RAM via its 6 processes on my mac, same as Outlook.

toyg 6y ago

Sounds like a pretty desperate move to me. Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products. Office products these days don't even need to be installed (in fact, I bet MS would rather prefer that you did not). Imho it's a very, very weak complaint.

ascorbic 6y ago
Office 365 is more of a monopoly than Windows now. This kind of bundling and cross-subsidy is classic monopoly abuse, and is almost identical to the IE case.
- arethuza 6y ago
  What about Google G Suite - a lot of people claim that it is comparable with Office 365?
  - ascorbic 6y ago
    It's certainly comparable, and does compete with O365. Legally, a monopoly doesn't mean it has no competitors, just that it dominates the market.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      Some reports suggest that G Suite has more users than Office 365? https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billion-vs-microsoft-office-2020-3?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi... NB I don't know how credible these reports are but I'm not sure that Office 365 "dominates the market" to the same extent as Windows used to.
      - true_religion 6y ago
        Users aren’t customers. If you give something away for free, you will always have people clamoring for it rather than the paid product. However people take what is free for granted and don’t consider it a part of the market. For instance, many hold that iOS is a monopoly despite being a minority of the market because you pay Apple for it, where as Android is just free and Google does not get your money for its use.

jpalomaki 6y ago

I've been using Slack for a while and quite much like the basic functionality (chat) when you working in single organization context. However recently I've been playing around with Teams quite a bit and I'm feeling this integrated experience with all the tools is the future. Even when running just in browser it is already pretty good. You have chat, calls, mail, can collaborate on documents etc. Having everything in one package feels convenient. Not saying it's perfect. There are bugs and for example different file storage backends (Sharepoint vs Onedrive) are a bit confusing. It will be challenging to for these "best of breed" apps (Dropbox, Slack, Zoom) to compete with the integrated offering from Microsoft. It's just so easy to get everything from single vendor. One user/group management, one invoice etc.

toyg 6y ago
>It will be challenging to for these "best of breed" apps (Dropbox, Slack, Zoom) to compete with the integrated offering from Microsoft. It has always been. Windows has had Dropbox-like features all the way back to 1998; but they sucked (and there wasn't enough bandwidth...), so people didn't use them. We've had corporate IM offerings since forever, and Skype existed waaay before Zoom. The likes of Dropbox have thrived by focusing on building better products, more powerful and easier to use. There is space for everyone in the market, if they have the best product and/or the best timing.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

Slack's "Dear Microsoft" [0] letter in 2016 looks even sillier now. > Dear Microsoft, > Wow. Big news! Congratulations on today’s announcements. We’re genuinely excited to have some competition. Uh yeah, I don't think you are.. [0] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft# https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft#

rpdillon 6y ago
I think they're making a distinction between 'competition' and 'anti-competitive behavior'.
- SaltyLemonZest 6y ago
  Sure, but their distinction seems kinda silly. They're arguing that because the Microsoft Office suite has been so successful, adding any new product to it is anti-competitive.
  - tremon 6y ago
    No, they're arguing that since Microsoft has a monopoly on office productivity software[0], adding new features to it that are in direction competition with other products is anti-competitive behaviour. And they are right about that. Microsoft has been repeatedly convicted for this behaviour (Windows Desktop -> Internet Explorer, and Windows Desktop -> Windows Media Player). Trying to argue otherwise would, IMNSHO, be silly. The only valid question remains, does Slack's offering itself (corporate IM) fall under the office productivity umbrella or not? [0] and no, you do not have to own 100% of the market before being considered a monopoly
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      This reasoning seems weird to me, and your examples aren't helping things. Like, sending off an OS in 2020 that had no browser or media player would obviously be extremely silly, and would present a terrible user experience for people. I just can't see including a browser in an OS as some evil practice. It just seems like obvious good sense. > adding new features to it that are in direction competition with other products is anti-competitive behaviour. Probably any new feature you could think to add to Office exists somewhere on the internet already, in some form. Is MS just not allowed to add new things now? Or what if MS manages to add something first, then an upstart competitor appears right after? Does it not count as anti-competitive then?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

It’s definitely monopolistic to include Teams into Office(Excel,Word,PPT) only after slack shows value. As a user though, Teams is working out well for us. This is MS’s version of sherlocking. Every big Tech company does this. I think one work around would be to have an independent council that recognizes these events, and forces the big players to pay out $100M per incident. This might satisfy most parties involved.

hkt 6y ago
Most regulators play pretty much that role, and the EC has that sort of power. Doesn't seem to actually achieve much though - they stop short of breaking up companies which is probably the issue.

samfisher83 6y ago

Teams from what I understand is pretty much free with office. Slack is going to have a hard team competing with free. It also doesn't have the same video desktop sharing capabilities as teams from when I last used it.

hyperdimension 6y ago
Well, without a strong opinion either way, I'd just point out that IE was free with Windows (where their competitors were not,) and that point didn't work out all that well for Microsoft in the end.
- FDSGSG 6y ago
  > that point didn't work out all that well for Microsoft in the end. But in the end it worked perfectly well for Microsoft. The settlement was essentially a slap on the wrist.

tedk-42 6y ago

Sounds like a typical corporate move by Microsoft. I side with slack on this one in that Microsoft is using its position with Office as a dominant productivity tool and wedging their Teams product in there. Vox had an article about it a year ago: https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government-antitrust-investigation-apple-amazon-google-facebook https://www.vox.com/2019/10/14/20910510/microsoft-government... It's the long game they can play because they have the resources for it. If they bankrupt slack by offering an alternative that's free and almost at feature parity, then it's an easy win for them to absorb the short term running costs of their own chat product Teams.

k__ 6y ago
Is this as big of a problem as with IE6 back in the days? I haven't been using MSO for years now and most companies I work with use Google Docs.
- lou1306 6y ago
  I don't think so. IE6 was bundled with Windows, a software that came bundled with nearly every retail PC and that was basically essential for said PC to be used (in the eyes of the layman, at least). Teams is bundled with Office, which is neither bundled by so many hardware vendors, nor essential for operating a PC, nor free of competitors.
minhazm 6y ago
What about Microsoft bundling OneDrive? Or One Note? Should they be forced to remove those too? I don't understand how Microsoft is in the wrong here. This isn't like them bundling it into Windows. O365 is a paid product and users are specifically paying for a productivity bundle, where Teams makes perfect sense as a product. They previously bundled Skype here IIRC, which was also a chatting app, they just replaced it with Teams. If you want to argue that Teams ripped off of Slack, I won't disagree with you there. But Slack was just an evolution of IRC + plugins also. So it isn't a novel idea that they came up with, it was just well executed. I don't even like Teams, I much prefer using Slack. But Microsoft having a productivity suite where they're offering a productivity app seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google is doing the same thing with Google Meet/Chat, it's going to get bundled in Google Apps for Business.

goguy 6y ago

I personally see this as a weak move. Surely a bundle of software can include whatever they desire to include. What next a law suit for bundling Access? Don't get any ideas Oracle...

72deluxe 6y ago
Yes, I am personally disgusted that installing Office FORCES a word processor and spreadsheet to be installed when all I wanted was WMF clip art!
ndespres 6y ago
One funny thing about it is that it's not bundled with the Office suite the way Word, Excel, Powerpoint and sometimes Access are. Teams is part of your "Microsoft 365" subscription, which could include your rights to the Office suite, Exchange Online email service, etc. So within the ecosystem Teams isn't part of the Office package, it just works with it, sort of. That's part of what makes the anti-competition claim hold true to me. If Teams were pushed as a first-class component of Office to paying users (maybe the way Groove was at one point) but not forced upon every user regardless, it might be different.
ascorbic 6y ago
> Surely a bundle of software can include whatever they desire to include. Not when the bundle is a monopoly. This was established with the rulings on MS bundling IE with Windows.

spians 6y ago

Not exactly related but how is Microsoft's approach to Teams any different than Google's approach to Google Chat (or Hangouts Chat) that also is component of G-suite?

ascorbic 6y ago
G-Suite isn't a monopoly, but Office is.
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  According to https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 Google holds more marketshare with G Suite with 59.91%, compared to Microsoft Office 365 with 39.96%
  - dang 6y ago
    You posted this 5 times. Please don't post duplicate comments to HN. It strictly lowers the signal/noise ratio. If you want to refer to what you posted elsewhere, a link is fine.

physicsguy 6y ago

Find it odd that so many people hate Teams so much. For me, it works considerably better than using Slack did in my previous position; the only downside for me personally was the lack of a Linux client initially, which is now present. It's also considerably better than Slack for mixing other communications in, which is widely used in corporates: video calling, screen sharing, and the fact that you can hook it in with phone systems. Given it's effectively replaced Skype, that's not really surprising. Prior to teams being introduced at my current company, we were using a mix of Jabber, Cisco WebEx, and other ad-hoc tools in various teams. Now we can use Teams to do all of that.

gruez 6y ago

>Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. So what's the core issue here? That Microsoft bundles Teams with Office 365, or that it gets auto-installed and can't be removed? If that's considered anti-competitive, is it possible for eg. Evernote to go after them as well, because OneNote is also bundled? What about Dropbox, because Onedrive is bundled?

simion314 6y ago
Not OC, IMO MS should be forced to offer 2 different products, Office without Teams and Teams should be an independent product you would have to opt-in and buy. Then if Teams and Office communicate then this protocol should be open so anyone could use it.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  but what makes teams different from the rest of the suite? to me it sound like arguing that bundles should not exist.
  - simion314 6y ago
    Yes, I think we need to investigate if bundles is a good thing for the world. I have an old memory from my childhood, in Romania during communism I went with my grandma to buy oil(or something like that) and if we wanted to buy that we were also forced to buy some other crap like pencils so the shop would get rid of old stock(I apologize if my memory is tricking me , maybe someone can confirm this I can't find anything on google with my search terms). So bundling feels to me dirty, I get forced into something I might not like. Maybe the actual problem is that big companies have a lot of money that they can spend on this products and offer them for free then make it impossible to create a fair competition. Would MS get the same Windows installs if the computers would come with the choice of different OSs )from what I read in most shops in the world options with alternatives are not present)

albertzeyer 6y ago

I really think we need some laws which require companies to open their protocols to allow seamless integration with other companies or open source implementations. There is no real reason why this should not be possible. E.g. take chat protocols. WhatsApp, Facebook messenger, Hangout, and all the others. It would be easy to have some way that they could communicate with each other. But companies don't want that, because they want the vendor lock-in. This is bad for everyone in the end. The only real way to solve this is if this is enforced by some law. I'm not really seeing that some law like this would be possible in the US, though. But maybe in EU...

sputr 6y ago
That's why EU is so important. Its the only institution with even a chance. The US is far to captured to ever start thinking about basic anti-monopoly regulation. Because that's all you are describing is: basic antimonopoly regulation.
chirau 6y ago
You can't force someone to use open protocols. What if their value preposition is exactly that, superiority to open protocols?
- albertzeyer 6y ago
  You can't enforce that, but you can enforce that they open their own protocol, and also that the API is open to be used by anyone else, i.e. anyone can develop an own client.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    How does that work with top-down moderation? E.g. some user X is harassing other users, so the company running the platform wants to ban them. If the protocol is open, isn't banning basically impossible, since they could just change to a client not controlled by said company? edit: hmm, I guess this depends on what it means for the protocol to be open vs the platform itself...

withinboredom 6y ago

Can someone explain to me how the “leading channel-based messaging platform” can complain about a smaller competitor bundling with a large product?

searchableguy 6y ago
Team is already bigger than slack. > Slack previously revealed it has 12 million daily active users back in October, but the company has not publicly updated this number since. Microsoft Teams usage has soared over the past year, reaching 44 million daily active users during a big increase in demand earlier this month. Slack has instead been trying to steer the conversation to how many actions are taken in Slack compared to its competitors, and how much people love to use its app. 0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-records-coronavirus-pandemic-remote-working-growth-concurrent-users https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/26/21195092/slack-new-user-r...

jedieaston 6y ago

Blocking it's removal? How? Teams was installed with Office on my current system, and it pops up in Add/Remove Programs. IT Admins can prevent it from being installed with Office (and remove it from all of their machines if it has already been installed)[0]. It's not included with Windows either (just as Office isn't). And Slack isn't blocked from being installed either. What's the anti-competitive angle here, other than the OS is created by Microsoft, the IM system is created by Microsoft, the Office suite is created by Microsoft, and the licenses are often bundled? Apple would be guilty of a similar thing by shipping Messages.app and iWork with macOS, no? 0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#how-to-exclude-microsoft-teams-from-new-installations-of-microsoft-365-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...

marcinzm 6y ago
Microsoft has basically a monopoly on enterprise tools such as word/excel/etc. Apple does not.
- jm4 6y ago
  There are so many more choices than there were 20 years ago. Microsoft makes a kick ass office suite. There's nothing monopolistic about it. They've been in this game longer than anyone and that's reflected in the feature set. Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office. Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    > Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing. In what areas? I see an industry with more and more consolidation. There is no longer the serious competition there once was in the field of office suites or certain kinds of creative software, which is really sad.

msoad 6y ago

Messaging is big and Slack is too small to compete in this space. The only viable way out for Slack is to join Google. Because we all know Google can't build messaging apps!

echelon 6y ago

Dear Slack, You're selling something that isn't a product. Standalone chat is a feature, and you won't win against a full product offering unless you drastically reduce your prices. You need to get acquired (by Google or Facebook), because I don't think you can innovate an office productivity suite fast enough to compete. And that's clearly the enterprise puzzle piece where chat fits into nicely. Microsoft isn't being anti-competitive here. Out of all the FAAMG, they're the one that least resembles a monopoly. You're struggling because you are selling chat as a service. Something that has been free since IRC and AOL Instant Messenger. Something any fifteen year old can write with web sockets. You built a pretty (through opinions vary) version with access controls. You had a chance to build a moat and make acquisitions to fortify your position, but you didn't do it. You invited competition from Microsoft and instead of doing something, you rewrote your Electron layout six times and made a WYSIWYG that everyone hated. You had four or five years to do something. You had a chance most startup companies dream of. But here we are. You squandered that chance while you reveled in hubris. You're going to get eaten, and there's not much you can do about it now.

thinkingkong 6y ago
Slack is in a tough position but they don't really sell "chat as a service" as much as they sell an incredibly convenient workplace experience. They're like the netflix / amazon of enterprise; convenience and ease of use is their product more than anything else. From everything I've read, heard, and experienced, Teams is way worse of an experience. What MS _can_ do that Slack can't is append Teams as a line-item it to an existing invoice, or shift spend within a contract. It happens; Salesforces does this with Heroku.
- nickpeterson 6y ago
  Slack has created the blueprint of what to make. It’s much easier for MS to copy those features until the difference between the two products is small. I think Slack is hoping their focus will save them, but in the end they’re going to lose most of their MS oriented customers
  - 6y ago

runevault 6y ago

The thing this has me thinking about is, assuming Slack wins this lawsuit, can MS no longer add any more fully featured products to Office? Not saying that is good vs bad, it just becomes interesting if their position suddenly means they must create new bundles for new offerings and cannot ever leverage existing offerings to get into a market. Perhaps that would be fair, being such a massive company. I just don't know.

bearjaws 6y ago

Slack needed to learn 4 years ago that it takes more than a decent chat app to make a company fully remote. It's a critical piece of it, but your wiki, knowledge base, and business planning software are all part of it too. Microsoft bundles all of these into one package, I fail to see how they are anti-competitive when they aren't even selling the same products. Slack failed to see how fragile their product was and now needs to be acquired or make their own productivity suite.

whywhywhywhy 6y ago
You can tell they didn't truly consider the full working remote scenario because their video/voice call and screen sharing functionality is below average. Slack on its own isn't usable for remote work, it has to be Slack + Google Meet or Slack + Zoom. Slack's tech in that area just isn't up to industry standards.

llimos 6y ago

The thing is, Teams integrates with the rest of Office 365 much more than IE did with Windows. It's very easy to argue that it's a core part of the product. In general, Microsoft has really nailed how if things work well together, they become more than the sum of their parts. That's why each individual part doesn't need to be the best in class in order to win. Which is bad news for Slack, but it's hard to argue that it's bad for consumers.

pmontra 6y ago
Well, I use Ubuntu. No problem with my two customers using Slack (one is Mac basede, the other one is more or less BYOD). All of us install the desktop app and it's done. If they switch to a more integrated system like Team maybe (and only maybe) it could be difficult for me to keep using Ubuntu when working with them. So too much can be bad for some consumer. Btw, people consume t-shirts, but office suits?
- pnt12 6y ago
  Teams has a browser app that works just like the desktop client, which is probably just a thin wrapper around a web app. The only thing ive missed there is the ability to take control of someone else's pc.
anoncake 6y ago
Does Teams integrate with the rest of Office using only public APIs or does Microsoft behave anticompetitively in that regard?
- llimos 6y ago
  Pretty much all of Office 365 is available through a single unified API. Whether they use that API for their internal integrations, I couldn't say. But I would guess any integration they're doing could also be done by a third-party who was that way inclined, yes.

artpi 6y ago

There was previous discussion around written asynchronous communication being a superpower. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23577228 I feel that Slack dominance is hurting the productivity, because: - It's impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki, google doc or an internal blog - Slack is incentivized to keep you IN Slack, for engagement. They don't have their own permanent-knowledge-base-software, so they pretend it's not needed. It's a different case with Teams, because they offer quite a roster of software to write things up permanently - like sharepoint or office365 and will likely pursue integrating tighter and tighter. Because Slack is a standalone product, they will push for using chat in the workplaces MORE. Microsoft can offer chat as a "when needed" basis. The logistics of trying to be productive on a company group chat led me to create a free "Win at Slack" mini-course: https://deliber.at/chat/ https://deliber.at/chat/

brightball 6y ago
The company wiki/internal blog depends on people reading it though. The perk of group chats is usually smaller messages that can spark interest in discussions. Zulip honestly seems like they've solved this problem better than Slack though.
lukethomas 6y ago
This is right on. Slack's pricing is based on regular usage, so they have an incentive to keep you distracted (to put it bluntly). Microsoft sees chat as a piece of an overall communication "puzzle". They have Sharepoint for more persistent information and Yammer for "outer-loop" communication. My startup (https://www.friday.app/ https://www.friday.app/) is based around the idea that there needs to be a "home" for the most important stuff at work that complements workplace chat. It's somewhere in-between Slack and a wiki (which most people don't use regularly). Workplace chat tools like Slack are wonderful for quick collaboration, but if you over-index here you will run into trouble. That's why Zapier, Automattic, and Stripe have all built their own internal tooling to help.
basch 6y ago
>impossible to be productive using Slack or Teams alone. The ultimate power move is to write things up in a company wiki Every Team, by default, has a Posts, Files, and Wiki tab. Designing a way to roll up those Wiki pages, like they do with Sharepoint hubs, would be a good move.

s0m1 6y ago

Slack(November 2, 2016): You cant make good chat for work! https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft Microsoft: Thanks for the warm welcome. We think we can. Slack(22 july 2020): You are using your office suite super power to crush us. Microsoft: We thought we we're welcome? ---------------- Slack, stop the complaint and just make better products.

luka-birsa 6y ago

It is quite amusing to see Slack filing competition complaint after being so brash in bashing MS at the launch of MS Teams. Remember the full page ad they ran in NYT? https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-teams-new-york-times-ad https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/2/13497766/slack-microsoft-... My oh my how the tables have turned. There is something to be said about Microsoft and their ability to execute in the office space. Even my Dad, an architect at 70yrs old, is using MS Teams, while he never heard about Slack or any other collaboration tools. And looking at their product portfolio around MS Teams, if there is a company I'd be willing to bet that they win the workplace transformation race is Microsoft. It's easy to forget when you're working comfortably in the Silicon Valley tech scene, that there is a real business world out there and MS is the ruler.

dehrmann 6y ago
Playing devil's advocate, Slack is just asking to compete on a level field. When Apple Music launched, it was preloaded on iOS. It's now the second largest streaming player. Amazon's offering comes in third. First-mover advantage seems to be best, but bundling in your platform five years late looks like a solid path to #2.
- addicted 6y ago
  I’m failing to understand the playing field Slack is wanting to compete in. Is it the Office 365 playing field? Like do they want to be an optional add on into O365?
- whereistimbo 6y ago
  Well Slack needs more than an enterprise chat app when Google G Suite which hold 59.91% marketshare [1] also bundling a chat app. [1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370
  - gundmc 6y ago
    You've posted almost this same exact comment 6 times already for this submission. I appreciate wanting to make a point, but the shotgun spam approach is just annoying for other users.

LoSboccacc 6y ago

> its market-dominant Office productivity suite is it really that dominant nowadays? I think it was around late 2000s when I last saw a 'use MS Word format' in any personal/corporate document exchange

deleted 6y ago

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skywritergr 6y ago

The additional problem I see with Slack is that their calls/video chat option is really inadequate and almost everyone is opting for Zoom. Zoom + Slack is a very steep price point for a lot of companies, especially in an era of cost saving and insecurity about the future. My company opted to move to MS Teams because the experience is better as it integrates calls + chats and we were already using office365 for emails and documents anyway, so it was "free". As someone said already, it's hard to compete with free. I can't see Slack getting out of this in one piece. I see Amazon being the obvious choice here.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago

I'm no Microsoft fan, but this press release is a bit embarassing. For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence. Slack could be accused of creating a "weak, copycat product" in their file hosting, document editing, video calling and workflow automation features. I think this is a long continuation of the awkward brand strategy Slack has had for some time. "...an open platform is essential" [1] just doesn't ring true from a closed source SaaS, but it's a good marketing message - so vague that you can't really disagree. And weirdly it's gone from being a poorly conceived guerilla marketing strategy (almost complete with bespoke emoji [2]) to a legal case. It maybe explains how Slack has been racing to embrace Microsoft recently - in a bid to show how "open" they are, and therefore how much they have been damaged by "closed" Microsoft? But wouldn't that swing both ways - if they integrate so easily, then where is the monopoly? Nov 2016 - Slack declares how thoughtful, craftmanship-y, open, loving, long term-y and un-Microsoft-y they are [1] Jan 2018 - Teams launches app store Aug 2018 - Teams offers free tier to compete with Slack [3] Mar 2020 - Slack starts integrating Teams calls [4] Apr 2020 - Slack launches Outlook and One Drive apps [5] [1] https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft [2] https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/793870058955104257 [3] https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-free-version-slack-competitor https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17563710/microsoft-teams-... [4] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-teams-integration-calling-features https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/27/21197091/slack-microsoft-... [5] https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-office-365-apps-for-slack https://slackhq.com/increase-everyday-productivity-with-offi...

pwinnski 6y ago
> For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence. I think that's exactly the complaint: that Microsoft is hiding the true cost of Teams, using anti-competitive "bundling" to make Slack seem more expensive by comparison. Not saying I agree, but that does seem to be exactly the complaint.
- 6y ago

dzonga 6y ago

one of those times, where I will say the big co isn't in the wrong. slack, has suffered the hand of the market. that the deck, the market dealt wasn't in your favor. is slack a product, could be ? but what are the advantages ? strategy 101. real business don't ride on fashion, but utility. teams is good enough.

Jaruzel 6y ago

Slightly off topic, but when you share this article via social media, the page title becomes: "Slack Files EU Competition Complaint Against Microsoft - Several People Are Typing" [1] Due to the og:title tag being different. --- [1] Emphasis mine.

bkor 6y ago

Something I didn't see someone mentioning: Microsoft is moving everyone from Skype for Business over to Teams. Any enterprise customer will have to migrate. Skype for Business is quite different from Skype itself, basically a marketing thing. Moving enterprise customers over from a chat&screen sharing app to teams is quite a change. There's loads more functionality, options, etc. I don't think if you had Skype for Business before you'd ever consider anything such as Slack or similar. From what I noticed Skype for Business is used often within enterprise companies.

discordance 6y ago
Skype for Business was a horrible horrible product and i'm glad we were switched to Teams

benlumen 6y ago

I've been thinking about antitrust a lot recently. Years ago, Microsoft were losing in court over the right to ship their browser with their operating system. Now, you get reminded how great Edge is when you try to change your default browser, you get the new one in a forced Windows update that launches the browser itself on startup, places shortcuts back in your task bar, etc.

shay_ker 6y ago

i do love one walled-garden suing another

mothsonasloth 6y ago

If someone could make a JIRA/Confluence/Slack for devs it would make my current life* very easy. * life consists of Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Confluence and Sharepoint....

mnkypete 6y ago
If you are on Jira Cloud ping me, we have something very interesting launching soon ;)

perfectstorm 6y ago

Didn’t their CEO say that Teams is not a competitor. Looks like he said it in May 2020. So i wonder what happened since then. https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewart-butterfield-microsoft-teams-competition https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270421/slack-ceo-stewar...

deleted 6y ago
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pedrocx486 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken their CEO (Stewart) is known for saying some... Weird things. And then changing his mind right after. (My experience is from as an user on early Flickr days and his game, Glitch.)

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

Same guys that on November 2nd, 2016, run a full page ad on the NYT [0], titled "Welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution", and signed "your friends at Slack". How ironic. [0]: https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft https://slackhq.com/dear-microsoft

aw1621107 6y ago
Wrong thread?
- dang 6y ago
  We'll move it.
magneticnorth 6y ago
I think you commented on the wrong article?
- dang 6y ago
  We moved it.

replyifuagree 6y ago

Slack has a quality problem that they really need to get on solving. Their desktop client has way too many weird quirks, and I just plain refuse to run their android client anymore. That said,it sucks less than teams.

blntechie 6y ago

Can’t really shed tears for a company which wanted to kill email and wall off content into their own proprietary product. They have ridiculed email so many times that itself is ridiculous. They are still trying to figure out interoperability of one org’s chat spaces with other orgs when it was a solved problem 40 years back.

deleted 6y ago

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youeseh 6y ago

There are laws and companies will use those laws to their advantage as much as possible. Not doing so is stupid. Just as Slack is trying to get Microsoft in trouble over antitrust, Microsoft is currently trying to get the US to investigate Apple over their App Store. Everyone is looking for an edge. It is better to use that edge while you're competitive than when its too late. Except in Microsoft's complaint about the App Store, the train left the station a long time ago.

outside1234 6y ago

But Google and Apple do exactly the same thing? Why no competition complain for them?

trekrich 6y ago

They are trying the sco business model, look how that turned out for them!

rydre 6y ago

The best move now would be for Slack, Zoom to merge, buy Airtable and Webflow, quickly try to build a moat. No one will get this opportunity again. But they might just build the next Google/Facebook/Apple this way.

gigel82 6y ago

I'm surprised Discord isn't showing up in the comments. We moved from Slack to Discord (even though we get Teams "for free" it doesn't get as much usage and setting it up to work with outside-the-org collaborators is painful), and I know of a lot of other companies / open-source projects moving to Discord too. The only thing we're really missing from Slack is threads.

gverrilla 6y ago
yeah, I agree. Also, gamers and teenagers are using it and not Teams or Slack.

simonkafan 6y ago

> We want to be the 2% of your software budget that makes the other 98% more valuable; they want 100% of your budget every time. Please. You are a company in a capitalistic system, it's your goal to make money. If you'd have the chance, you'd also take 100% of your customers money every time.

6c696e7578 6y ago

Don't worry. Teams is terrible, you don't need to worry.

deleted 6y ago

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rosywoozlechan 6y ago

Idea: find some feature that's part of a software suite, like the ability to zoom on Windows. Build a business around just that feature, like sell a zoom tool for Windows. If the business flounders start an anti-trust lawsuit because Microsoft includes that feature for free in Windows.

betimsl 6y ago

IRC files a law suit against slack.

nullc 6y ago
Next step is for microsoft to start running gateways into slack, leaving users on slack as second class citizens, and then shutting down the gateways when enough users have been pulled into their walled gardens to give them critical mass.

fblp 6y ago

Hey i am wondering if someone within knowledge of EU competition law can give their analysis on this. The thing that stands out to me is that this is a private competition law action - it is not a government agency/commission taking action. This indicates that the government agencies in the jurisdiction don't currently see this as a priority. Many of the prominent anti trust actions in tech have been taken by regulators (eg EU commission vs Google). From my brief understanding of competition law barriers to entry and consumer detriment are issues the court considers. As others have stated, Microsoft is far less dominant with cloud office products than they were with windows pcs in the 90s. They are also not the incumbent in the chat market trying to block competition out.

blackoil 6y ago

As a layman, it seems link companies looking to cut costs in current environment are finding Teams (free) more sensible option than paying millions to Slack. So while the WFH push is doing wonders for other communication platforms like Zoom, Slack is not seeing that benefit. Otherwise, it looks a bad time for a company to be distracted by political games.

shafyy 6y ago

I think there needs to be a law that forces companies that benefit from network effects to open their standards once they reach a certain market power (similar to antitrust and monopoly laws). For example, Twitter would be forced to open their standard and then anyone can build clients (and host servers), just like IMAP and POP3 works for email. I think this even will have a bigger effect than breaking up these companies, and it will be easier to push through politically. Edit: Typo

gitowiec 6y ago

Stupid slack, I wish they fail. Teams is great and for free for many companies if they just subscribe to office 365.

markshepard 6y ago

I think Slack's case against MS has legs. I work for a company that makes a competitive product (https://www.airsend.io https://www.airsend.io) to Teams/Slack. It gives a bit of insight on what is happening here. Teams comes free with office 365 (now microsoft 365). For just 5$ per user/per month one can get email/one drive/office web apps and teams. There is no way slack can compete with the pricing. Slack's pricing starts at 6.67$. For businesses, office apps are a must have. When Teams is bundled with office apps, there is really not a reason for businesses to go and pay for Slack. So one can argue MS is using its dominant position in office suite to undercut the competition. The fair thing to do is charge some money for Teams. Personally I feel we need to have more diversity and choices in the IT systems we use. Increasingly the tools we use are controlled by 2/3 dominant platforms (4 companies account for 49% value of Nasdaq 100). It is not good for customers in the long term. Once you obliterate the competition by bundling it free, one can always come back and raise the price. There is some serious blood between MS and Slack (It all goes back to the time when MS tried to acquire Slack). FWIW, Slack's posture during that time was also not really good (Cocky). I am guessing - It hurt somebody's ego very badly in MS. So the leadership team in MS made it as a personal mission to obliterate Slack. The whole game is playing out now.

heapslip 6y ago

The battle of the glorified IRCs is on! Sure, Microsoft is shady as usual (not all of it, but a good part), but once Teams get stable and everything actually works, it should smoke Slack. At least Teams offers more than chat, and it has a justified need for running in a browser.