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> Slack alleges that the way Microsoft bundles Teams into its distribution of Office—widely used enterprise software such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Exce

> Slack alleges that the way Microsoft bundles Teams into its distribution of Office—widely used enterprise software such as Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel—gives Microsoft an unfair advantage against the competition. I'm _all_ for antitrust, but this seems like a dumb complaint to me. Shipping IE with Windows gave them a dominance in the browser world of something like 80-90% maybe more? It was a lot. And they were using it to slowly bring a non-proprietary technology (the web) in-house by breaking compatibility with non-IE browsers. This situation seems more like saying if you make a printer and a fax machine you can't combine the two into a single product because it provides an anticompetitive advantage against companies that only sell a fax machine. Maybe that is an anti-trust issue, that's up to your viewpoint, but it's not like slack isn't doing the same thing with shipping video and audio chat built into slack. Zoom might very well argue that it's anti-competitive of slack to do that.

Shared404 6y ago
This is exactly what I thought. I'm all for m$ getting hit with whatever legislation is related, but this isn't it.
toper-centage 6y ago
It's definitely not as serious as Windows+IE back in the day, but MS Office is the defacto office suite. MS managed to make a proprietary standard The Standard and constantly break compatibility with other suites. And now they are extending that dominance to the conference software world with Teams. It's a fair parallel to draw, IMO.
kedean 6y ago
My interpretation was that the issue is the use of Microsoft Office's dominant position to (allegedly) push Slack out of the market. They aren't providing one product that does two things (fax/phone), but rather they are providing multiple disparate products in a package together to take advantage of the fact that everyone wants one of them already. I think a better comparison is if Verizon were to decide they want to make a smart watch, so they start bundling them with every cell phone they sell. Sure, users can go out and buy a Fitbit if they want to, but Verizon would be taking advantage of their position as cell phone gatekeeper to get them into everyone's hands before they even have the chance to make a market decision. Users could come into a contract with a phone they got independently (analogous to windows users who don't use MSOffice), but the vast majority are just buying a phone from the Verizon store. Admittedly, the analogy would work better if Verizon was more dominant in the market, but as it stands the big three US cell providers seem to be on pretty equal footing.

Shared404 6y ago

This is exactly what I thought. I'm all for m$ getting hit with whatever legislation is related, but this isn't it.

toper-centage 6y ago

It's definitely not as serious as Windows+IE back in the day, but MS Office is the defacto office suite. MS managed to make a proprietary standard The Standard and constantly break compatibility with other suites. And now they are extending that dominance to the conference software world with Teams. It's a fair parallel to draw, IMO.

kedean 6y ago

My interpretation was that the issue is the use of Microsoft Office's dominant position to (allegedly) push Slack out of the market. They aren't providing one product that does two things (fax/phone), but rather they are providing multiple disparate products in a package together to take advantage of the fact that everyone wants one of them already. I think a better comparison is if Verizon were to decide they want to make a smart watch, so they start bundling them with every cell phone they sell. Sure, users can go out and buy a Fitbit if they want to, but Verizon would be taking advantage of their position as cell phone gatekeeper to get them into everyone's hands before they even have the chance to make a market decision. Users could come into a contract with a phone they got independently (analogous to windows users who don't use MSOffice), but the vast majority are just buying a phone from the Verizon store. Admittedly, the analogy would work better if Verizon was more dominant in the market, but as it stands the big three US cell providers seem to be on pretty equal footing.