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Why is it okay for Office to include Word, Excel, or PowerPoint but not a chat application? Does the EU get to decide what is reasonably considered part of a pr

Why is it okay for Office to include Word, Excel, or PowerPoint but not a chat application? Does the EU get to decide what is reasonably considered part of a productivity suite? Or is the only requirement that a competitor complains? This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it.

kevsamuel 2y ago
Legality is not science, most of the time, the definition of what's wrong is blurry and humans have to debate about it.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Laws shouldn't be written without clear lines - how can a person who wants to avoid breaking the law do that if we have an ever growing list of laws full of gray area and blurry lines?
  - snowpid 2y ago
    does this concern your everyday life?
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Blurry lines and gray areas in law? Absolutely, I'd rather not accidentally break a law that is only defined after the fact in court.
      - snowpid 2y ago
        No do you have real problems with blurry laws in your country? (If so is this country in the EU?)
        _heimdall 2y ago
        This is a really strange way to attempt to silence my opinion. Yes I do have issues with blurry laws. My current country is not in the EU, though until recently I was a resident of an EU country also with blurry laws. Am I allowed to have an opinion now?
        snowpid 2y ago
        For me it's sounds like a made up problem. Again, most laws are blurry in a mathematical sense. This is the case since laws existed. And so and to a surprise for some HN people, we usually don't break them all day. DMA is actually precise and rooted in competitions challenges all known. (E.g. the slack case was discussed very often) Complaining about the DMA is very strange. Also DMA targets big corpos, so needing a lawyer to understand all implications is again a none - issue.
        davidgerard 2y ago
        > This is a really strange way to attempt to silence my opinion. It's that your replies in this thread show a complete lack of understanding and a refusal to take in multiple people patiently explaining to you. Apart from your bizarre posture that calling out your low quality posting constitutes "silencing" you.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        The GP comment I was referring to asked where I live with no other context. The implication there is that my having an opinion, or at least sharing it, is somehow gated by whether I'm currently living in the EU. We may have different interpretations of the law, or different opinions on what we think the laws should be, but that doesn't mean I am bizarrely posturing with no understanding of the law.
      - immibis 2y ago
        In corporate antitrust law, specifically. Nobody is going to jail over this. They might just have to change the sales terms. Is this so terrible?
        _heimdall 2y ago
        That just depends on how you look at it and what your opinion is with regards to what the role of governments should be. I'd argue that its terrible from the angle of government overreach, this still seems well within the realm of a free market problem. I'd also argue its terrible that corporate law is almost entirely boiled down to fines with no person really having to live with the consequences of their actions. That effectively makes it an accounting game, you're totally fine breaking the law as long as (a) its just a corporate expense and (b) you believe that you'll make more money breaking the law than you will lose in court.
  - anon373839 2y ago
    You’re going to be very unhappy when you learn what common law is. The law that decides a case is written after the fact. (Yes, retroactively!)
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    You're not supposed to. The state is always supposed to have a treasure trove of possible crimes they can smack you with.
  - immibis 2y ago
    If you're a big company and the penalty is only a fine... there is not much need to be absolutely sure you don't break the law. It is just another risk, like the risk of a data center catching on fire, that is to be managed, not avoided at all costs. Law for you and me means someone might go to jail and that's worth avoiding all costs, but for a company it just means spending more money or receiving less. Cases are also more unique. People get murdered "routinely" so everyone has figured out the clear lines. Antitrust doesn't happen as often and each case is unique. Are you hoping for a world where corporations can find loopholes and it's impossible to punish them for exploiting the loopholes because we can only execute the law strictly like a computer program? Even ethereum smart contracts can be overturned - it happened once.
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      No I'd actually rather see the opposite. If we really think its imperative that the government defines corporate laws then I'd want to see companies and those making decisions held legally liable. Corporate law as it stands today is more of a game of accounting, trying to figure out what laws you break and how you make more profit from it then you may lose in court. Is it really so important that our governments define these laws only to chase companies for legal cases that either amount to nothing or a fraction of the profits gained? Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law? > Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law? Yes to this part though. We shouldn't be writing laws enforcible in perpetuity when we can't even define what the law covers. How are citizens meant to stay on the right side of the law when the laws are purposely gray get still punishable after clarifying the details later?
gklitz 2y ago
Don’t know what’s hard to understand there? Microsoft didn’t have a chat product (worth anything, Skype was a mountain of crap). Slack comes along and builds a great product, Microsoft goes “oh, the office suite now includes teams!” So everyone gets it “for free” if they have the office suite, murdering slack in the market. And of cause everyone will have to pay for Teams as the price of the office package rises to I cover the costs, no free lunch and all that. It had been a different story if Teams had always been a part of office, and slack came along and tried to compete. But come on this is a 100% clear cut abuse of a monopoly on windows office programs by Microsoft abused to outcompete a competitor that they couldn’t fight honestly.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  So the legal line is that once a company is successful in bundling and selling products the bundle is locked and can never be added to? That seems unreasonable to me, and I generally am pretty hard on monopolistic issues. Edit: wouldn't this mean that Apple could never have added a preinstalled app to the iPhone after the phones became successful?
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    If success is near total domination then yes?
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    No, it's just that you can't use dominance in one market to privilege yourself in another. Basically cross promotion and bundling are looked at very sceptically once you get large enough.
- chucke1992 2y ago
  slack murdered itself from the market by not delivering good video conferencing solution. Zoom succeeded immensely and it was not bundled with any office suite. And the hilarious part is that Slack is still crap in regards of video calls.
rlpb 2y ago
A friend told me about how his workplace have switched from Zoom to Teams for video calls because they use Office and Teams is now bundled with Office so they don't have to pay extra for Zoom. > This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it. It's not bundling itself that's the issue. The use of one market to encroach on another is what's considered unfair competition. The fact that a competitor exists that just does one part of it is what makes the case that the two markets are separate.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  Once car manufacturers started including bluetooth support they were incroaching on the aftermarket headunit market in a similar way. Was that actually illegal?
  - rlpb 2y ago
    This is far from a novel question. There is extensive statute and case law in this area across many jurisdictions. You could start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law
    - _heimdall 2y ago
      Sure, I'm well aware of antitrust laws, the Sherman Act, etc. If you want to look at it from that angle, what are the consumer concerns being violates by Teams being bundled and potentially replacing Zoom that was previously used? Teams isn't forced on Office users and Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose.
      - rlpb 2y ago
        Again, the answer to your question is well established. Linked from the page I linked you previously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) """ The company doing this bundling may have a significantly large market share so that it may impose the tie on consumers, despite the forces of market competition. The tie may also harm other companies in the market for the tied good, or who sell only single components. One effect of tying can be that low quality products achieve a higher market share than would otherwise be the case. """ > ...Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose. Only until Zoom fails because consumers who would have otherwise used Zoom were forced to pay for Teams instead because the price for Teams was bundled into the price for Office. At least, that's the argument. To be clear, I'm not myself arguing either way. But the reason for the case is clear and it is disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't exist.
255kb 2y ago
Law is not working like that. We are talking about antitrust laws which have specific criterias to evaluate if a company is dominant on a market and is abusing this position or not. All these criterias must be evaluated for each case. There are many steps involved: - identifying the relevant markets, probably something like office applications market and chat applications market. - whether the company has a dominant position on one (likely MS being dominant on the office apps market) - checking if a specific action could be considered as a abuse of dominant position, restricting the competition. Here it would be MS bundling the app, giving them an unfair advantage on the chat apps market. They would likely be to assess the real damages to the market, whether or not competitors were able to do business or not, etc. It's not all black or white, like any legal subject.
olivierduval 2y ago
Teams is deeply integrated with Office (including OneDrive for file storage/sharing, Outlook for meetings), more than any other Chat App... I guess it's a good thing in general but it's also an unfair competitive advantage (using "priviledged API" I think)

kevsamuel 2y ago

Legality is not science, most of the time, the definition of what's wrong is blurry and humans have to debate about it.

_heimdall 2y ago
Laws shouldn't be written without clear lines - how can a person who wants to avoid breaking the law do that if we have an ever growing list of laws full of gray area and blurry lines?
- snowpid 2y ago
  does this concern your everyday life?
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Blurry lines and gray areas in law? Absolutely, I'd rather not accidentally break a law that is only defined after the fact in court.
    - snowpid 2y ago
      No do you have real problems with blurry laws in your country? (If so is this country in the EU?)
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        This is a really strange way to attempt to silence my opinion. Yes I do have issues with blurry laws. My current country is not in the EU, though until recently I was a resident of an EU country also with blurry laws. Am I allowed to have an opinion now?
        snowpid 2y ago
        For me it's sounds like a made up problem. Again, most laws are blurry in a mathematical sense. This is the case since laws existed. And so and to a surprise for some HN people, we usually don't break them all day. DMA is actually precise and rooted in competitions challenges all known. (E.g. the slack case was discussed very often) Complaining about the DMA is very strange. Also DMA targets big corpos, so needing a lawyer to understand all implications is again a none - issue.
        davidgerard 2y ago
        > This is a really strange way to attempt to silence my opinion. It's that your replies in this thread show a complete lack of understanding and a refusal to take in multiple people patiently explaining to you. Apart from your bizarre posture that calling out your low quality posting constitutes "silencing" you.
        _heimdall 2y ago
        The GP comment I was referring to asked where I live with no other context. The implication there is that my having an opinion, or at least sharing it, is somehow gated by whether I'm currently living in the EU. We may have different interpretations of the law, or different opinions on what we think the laws should be, but that doesn't mean I am bizarrely posturing with no understanding of the law.
    - immibis 2y ago
      In corporate antitrust law, specifically. Nobody is going to jail over this. They might just have to change the sales terms. Is this so terrible?
      - _heimdall 2y ago
        That just depends on how you look at it and what your opinion is with regards to what the role of governments should be. I'd argue that its terrible from the angle of government overreach, this still seems well within the realm of a free market problem. I'd also argue its terrible that corporate law is almost entirely boiled down to fines with no person really having to live with the consequences of their actions. That effectively makes it an accounting game, you're totally fine breaking the law as long as (a) its just a corporate expense and (b) you believe that you'll make more money breaking the law than you will lose in court.
- anon373839 2y ago
  You’re going to be very unhappy when you learn what common law is. The law that decides a case is written after the fact. (Yes, retroactively!)
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  You're not supposed to. The state is always supposed to have a treasure trove of possible crimes they can smack you with.
- immibis 2y ago
  If you're a big company and the penalty is only a fine... there is not much need to be absolutely sure you don't break the law. It is just another risk, like the risk of a data center catching on fire, that is to be managed, not avoided at all costs. Law for you and me means someone might go to jail and that's worth avoiding all costs, but for a company it just means spending more money or receiving less. Cases are also more unique. People get murdered "routinely" so everyone has figured out the clear lines. Antitrust doesn't happen as often and each case is unique. Are you hoping for a world where corporations can find loopholes and it's impossible to punish them for exploiting the loopholes because we can only execute the law strictly like a computer program? Even ethereum smart contracts can be overturned - it happened once.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    No I'd actually rather see the opposite. If we really think its imperative that the government defines corporate laws then I'd want to see companies and those making decisions held legally liable. Corporate law as it stands today is more of a game of accounting, trying to figure out what laws you break and how you make more profit from it then you may lose in court. Is it really so important that our governments define these laws only to chase companies for legal cases that either amount to nothing or a fraction of the profits gained? Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law? > Would we be better off either not having the laws at all, or by enforcing those laws with criminal penalty to those people shown to have knowingly made decisions to break the law? Yes to this part though. We shouldn't be writing laws enforcible in perpetuity when we can't even define what the law covers. How are citizens meant to stay on the right side of the law when the laws are purposely gray get still punishable after clarifying the details later?

gklitz 2y ago

Don’t know what’s hard to understand there? Microsoft didn’t have a chat product (worth anything, Skype was a mountain of crap). Slack comes along and builds a great product, Microsoft goes “oh, the office suite now includes teams!” So everyone gets it “for free” if they have the office suite, murdering slack in the market. And of cause everyone will have to pay for Teams as the price of the office package rises to I cover the costs, no free lunch and all that. It had been a different story if Teams had always been a part of office, and slack came along and tried to compete. But come on this is a 100% clear cut abuse of a monopoly on windows office programs by Microsoft abused to outcompete a competitor that they couldn’t fight honestly.

_heimdall 2y ago
So the legal line is that once a company is successful in bundling and selling products the bundle is locked and can never be added to? That seems unreasonable to me, and I generally am pretty hard on monopolistic issues. Edit: wouldn't this mean that Apple could never have added a preinstalled app to the iPhone after the phones became successful?
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  If success is near total domination then yes?
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  No, it's just that you can't use dominance in one market to privilege yourself in another. Basically cross promotion and bundling are looked at very sceptically once you get large enough.
chucke1992 2y ago
slack murdered itself from the market by not delivering good video conferencing solution. Zoom succeeded immensely and it was not bundled with any office suite. And the hilarious part is that Slack is still crap in regards of video calls.

rlpb 2y ago

A friend told me about how his workplace have switched from Zoom to Teams for video calls because they use Office and Teams is now bundled with Office so they don't have to pay extra for Zoom. > This sure seems to say it's illegal to bundle any products together if a competitor for one of the products complains about it. It's not bundling itself that's the issue. The use of one market to encroach on another is what's considered unfair competition. The fact that a competitor exists that just does one part of it is what makes the case that the two markets are separate.

_heimdall 2y ago
Once car manufacturers started including bluetooth support they were incroaching on the aftermarket headunit market in a similar way. Was that actually illegal?
- rlpb 2y ago
  This is far from a novel question. There is extensive statute and case law in this area across many jurisdictions. You could start at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    Sure, I'm well aware of antitrust laws, the Sherman Act, etc. If you want to look at it from that angle, what are the consumer concerns being violates by Teams being bundled and potentially replacing Zoom that was previously used? Teams isn't forced on Office users and Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose.
    - rlpb 2y ago
      Again, the answer to your question is well established. Linked from the page I linked you previously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce) """ The company doing this bundling may have a significantly large market share so that it may impose the tie on consumers, despite the forces of market competition. The tie may also harm other companies in the market for the tied good, or who sell only single components. One effect of tying can be that low quality products achieve a higher market share than would otherwise be the case. """ > ...Zoom isn't prevented, consumers still can choose. Only until Zoom fails because consumers who would have otherwise used Zoom were forced to pay for Teams instead because the price for Teams was bundled into the price for Office. At least, that's the argument. To be clear, I'm not myself arguing either way. But the reason for the case is clear and it is disingenuous to pretend that it doesn't exist.

255kb 2y ago

Law is not working like that. We are talking about antitrust laws which have specific criterias to evaluate if a company is dominant on a market and is abusing this position or not. All these criterias must be evaluated for each case. There are many steps involved: - identifying the relevant markets, probably something like office applications market and chat applications market. - whether the company has a dominant position on one (likely MS being dominant on the office apps market) - checking if a specific action could be considered as a abuse of dominant position, restricting the competition. Here it would be MS bundling the app, giving them an unfair advantage on the chat apps market. They would likely be to assess the real damages to the market, whether or not competitors were able to do business or not, etc. It's not all black or white, like any legal subject.

olivierduval 2y ago

Teams is deeply integrated with Office (including OneDrive for file storage/sharing, Outlook for meetings), more than any other Chat App... I guess it's a good thing in general but it's also an unfair competitive advantage (using "priviledged API" I think)