8 ms·

Why don't they apply the laws universally and effectively make this kind of bundling illegal for mega corporations? For endusers, it feels like they are playin

by ssahoo 2y ago

Why don't they apply the laws universally and effectively make this kind of bundling illegal for mega corporations? For endusers, it feels like they are playing with different rules for Microsoft Apple Adobe and Google. Since EU waits until the damage is done and milks them, it barely helps the situation for consumers. For corps they just assume the penalty as cost of doing business.

petesergeant 2y ago
Because it’s expensive and complicated to bring civil suits against organizations with that many lawyers
gostsamo 2y ago
Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.
- falcor84 2y ago
  How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"? Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.
  - gostsamo 2y ago
    Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom. Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging this position to capture the colab software one. Google is not a market leader and in addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace, though this is less significant than the market dominance.
    - eindiran 2y ago
      I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the US not targeting Adobe with antitrust for bundling together tools for typesetters, marketers, video editors, animators, etc, etc?
      - yunohn 2y ago
        This is actually a great counter example to the previous post’s perspective on bundling vs markets.
      - jjoonathan 2y ago
        It should be. "Allowed in the US" is a bar so low that you can get oil out the end of it.
      - necovek 2y ago
        The only reason is that law enforcement is reactive. And usually requires the tactic to be effective before it does (yes, too late by then). Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.
      - gostsamo 2y ago
        Two questions: do Adobe uses their dominant position in one of those markets to influence the clients in another market to use their product? Second, does Adobe's competition wishes to complain? The second part will prioritize the case, I think.
    - xmprt 2y ago
      But where do you draw the line? In college, I used Word a lot and barely used Excel. At work I use Excel way more than Word (and often times I could easily just use a simple markdown editor instead of Word so I arguably wouldn't use that either). So they seem to be two different markets. I probably use the integrations between Excel and Teams more than I use the integrations between Word and Excel so bundling Teams makes more sense to me.
  - navane 2y ago
    For antitrust to work, all we have to do is break up the biggest players. There's no point in focusing on (in that market) smaller players. They'll get to them because recursion.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.
  - gostsamo 2y ago
    Because word and excel go together in the needs of a business and those who usually buy one use the other as well. All competition of MS in this space offer similar products bundled in a similar way. Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      I disagree. Excel is probably far more used than Word, and word could be dropped from many people’s computers and no one would notice. Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software? My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.
      - EasyMark 2y ago
        Wouldn’t it be that we have a fairly widely spread defecto definition of “office suite” as word processor, spread sheet, presentation, email as it’s been that way for decades? Not sure about “communications”however I think it is a serious argument to consider that a separate product, but not the others, they’re kind of like peanut butter and jelly or Bonnie & Clyde or the three stooges.
        lotsofpulp 2y ago
        I think that is a very un-serious argument with no consistency. Microsoft has always sold a cheaper "office suite" without outlook. What businesses have historically bundled and not bundled is irrelevant to what is best for society going forward. Surely there were many features that many software businesses add that weren't there before. What if Microsoft relabeled Teams to be part of Outlook? Like they made Calendars part of Outlook. It all feels like starting at the result and working backwards towards a justification.
- guerby 2y ago
  EU courts ruled that bundling an OS with a machine was ok. https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=191734&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=8756818 https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
- halfcat 2y ago
  Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.
- nilsbunger 2y ago
  The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1. By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s. If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!
  - DANmode 2y ago
    ...if your idea is to push the market so that Teams is an open standard and protocol, this might have relevance.
- chillfox 2y ago
  Word and Excel aren't really that related either. The only reason we think of them as part of an office suite is because they have been bundled for a long time. As far as I can tell most people don't really use both, they mostly using one or the other.
- daemin 2y ago
  (This is written as a thought exercise) Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software? Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup. This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together? Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more. How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?
stonemetal12 2y ago
Why is bundling Teams illegal, but bundling Word, Excel and the rest of the office bits totally cool?
- rockooooo 2y ago
  It shouldn't be! Forcing big companies to unbundle product pricing would give new entrants to the market a fighting change at success.
  - nickff 2y ago
    Should they have to un-bundle Windows Explorer, Notepad, Photo Viewer, Control Panel, and all the other utilities as well, under the same logic? If not, why?
    - rockooooo 2y ago
      1) technically? yes, absolutely- apps like explorer or photo viewer should only use public APIs so other companies can make comparable apps on the OS with 90% market share 2) these are all OS utilities, not workplace apps - there's a big difference between Adobe/Microsoft Office/Google bundling their apps where there's a very clear, very powerful disincentive to compete vs something like explorer.
      - tpmoney 2y ago
        > these are all OS utilities I think part of the problem is "what is an OS utility" and "what is an app". All your OS configuration could be done via a REST API, text files or some other well defined protocol. So you could have competing configuration apps that all help you manage your config in their own way and unbundle the control panel. Realistically looking at your average sparse linux distro shows just how "minimal" an OS can be, and even they bundle applications. Yet, I realistically don't thing consumers or the tech market at large would be assisted by a law mandating that all operating systems be as minimal as the linux kernel (no GNU/Linux, that's bundling!). And even if you did go that far, now we get into arguments over monolithic kernels and micro kernels.
pndy 2y ago
Endusers should have a total control over what is getting installed on their machines - just like we used to not so long ago or how some Linux distros allows you to select additional software. Each operating system coming from the biggest corporations should offer two paths: express/recommended setup and a fully customizable one for advanced users.
- throwAGIway 2y ago
  What if I want to buy a fully integrated, fully bundled install-and-forget OS? If the EU makes Apple unbundle all the good stuff from macOS I'll finally move to the US.
  - alphabeta2024 2y ago
    Just use the express setup.
  - palata 2y ago
    The EU wants to give you the choice. You will have the choice to use everything Apple makes. The only reason to move to the US would be because you really don't want to have a choice, but that would be weird.
    - kergonath 2y ago
      The probability that they are actually a EU resident and move to the US because of app bundling is close to zero. And yes, that would be completely ridiculous.
      - throwAGIway 2y ago
        I said finally, meaning it's the last straw, not that it's the sole reason.
        palata 2y ago
        "They used to sell exclusively hot-dogs, and now they sell hot-dogs and hamburgers. That's the last straw, I'm going back to the US where they only sell hot-dogs!" You have to admit it sounds slightly ridiculous, right?
stefan_ 2y ago
Well the logical conclusion of that is to break up the businesses. No other remedy or it's just going to happen again and again, in subtle and not so subtle ways (bundling Teams for free was so absurdly obviously anti-competitive no one has even doubted that in this thread so far..)
bee_rider 2y ago
I wonder if they’ll go after iMessage on iOS too.
- petre 2y ago
  They're going after Apple for other reasons. iMessage was deemed too small to go after.
- necovek 2y ago
  It's weird how many people misunderstands the intent behind anti-trust laws. In a nutshell, it's about abusing a dominant position in one market (which is ok) to enter and conquer another market by undercutting competition by providing your product in the new market with the existing dominant product at basically no cost to consumer (there are a lot more nuances). Having non-interoperable features (like charging ports or iMessage green bubbles) has nothing to do with it, and those are ok (at least for anti-trust laws).
surfingdino 2y ago
They cannot do it before damage is done, it would be like charging people with pre-crime. Nobody wants that.

by ssahoo 2y ago

petesergeant 2y ago

Because it’s expensive and complicated to bring civil suits against organizations with that many lawyers

gostsamo 2y ago

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

falcor84 2y ago
How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"? Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom. Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging this position to capture the colab software one. Google is not a market leader and in addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace, though this is less significant than the market dominance.
  - eindiran 2y ago
    I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the US not targeting Adobe with antitrust for bundling together tools for typesetters, marketers, video editors, animators, etc, etc?
    - yunohn 2y ago
      This is actually a great counter example to the previous post’s perspective on bundling vs markets.
    - jjoonathan 2y ago
      It should be. "Allowed in the US" is a bar so low that you can get oil out the end of it.
    - necovek 2y ago
      The only reason is that law enforcement is reactive. And usually requires the tactic to be effective before it does (yes, too late by then). Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.
    - gostsamo 2y ago
      Two questions: do Adobe uses their dominant position in one of those markets to influence the clients in another market to use their product? Second, does Adobe's competition wishes to complain? The second part will prioritize the case, I think.
  - xmprt 2y ago
    But where do you draw the line? In college, I used Word a lot and barely used Excel. At work I use Excel way more than Word (and often times I could easily just use a simple markdown editor instead of Word so I arguably wouldn't use that either). So they seem to be two different markets. I probably use the integrations between Excel and Teams more than I use the integrations between Word and Excel so bundling Teams makes more sense to me.
- navane 2y ago
  For antitrust to work, all we have to do is break up the biggest players. There's no point in focusing on (in that market) smaller players. They'll get to them because recursion.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
lotsofpulp 2y ago
Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  Because word and excel go together in the needs of a business and those who usually buy one use the other as well. All competition of MS in this space offer similar products bundled in a similar way. Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    I disagree. Excel is probably far more used than Word, and word could be dropped from many people’s computers and no one would notice. Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software? My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      Wouldn’t it be that we have a fairly widely spread defecto definition of “office suite” as word processor, spread sheet, presentation, email as it’s been that way for decades? Not sure about “communications”however I think it is a serious argument to consider that a separate product, but not the others, they’re kind of like peanut butter and jelly or Bonnie & Clyde or the three stooges.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        I think that is a very un-serious argument with no consistency. Microsoft has always sold a cheaper "office suite" without outlook. What businesses have historically bundled and not bundled is irrelevant to what is best for society going forward. Surely there were many features that many software businesses add that weren't there before. What if Microsoft relabeled Teams to be part of Outlook? Like they made Calendars part of Outlook. It all feels like starting at the result and working backwards towards a justification.
guerby 2y ago
EU courts ruled that bundling an OS with a machine was ok. https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=191734&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=8756818 https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
halfcat 2y ago
Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.
nilsbunger 2y ago
The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1. By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s. If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!
- DANmode 2y ago
  ...if your idea is to push the market so that Teams is an open standard and protocol, this might have relevance.
chillfox 2y ago
Word and Excel aren't really that related either. The only reason we think of them as part of an office suite is because they have been bundled for a long time. As far as I can tell most people don't really use both, they mostly using one or the other.
daemin 2y ago
(This is written as a thought exercise) Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software? Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup. This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together? Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more. How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?

stonemetal12 2y ago

Why is bundling Teams illegal, but bundling Word, Excel and the rest of the office bits totally cool?

rockooooo 2y ago
It shouldn't be! Forcing big companies to unbundle product pricing would give new entrants to the market a fighting change at success.
- nickff 2y ago
  Should they have to un-bundle Windows Explorer, Notepad, Photo Viewer, Control Panel, and all the other utilities as well, under the same logic? If not, why?
  - rockooooo 2y ago
    1) technically? yes, absolutely- apps like explorer or photo viewer should only use public APIs so other companies can make comparable apps on the OS with 90% market share 2) these are all OS utilities, not workplace apps - there's a big difference between Adobe/Microsoft Office/Google bundling their apps where there's a very clear, very powerful disincentive to compete vs something like explorer.
    - tpmoney 2y ago
      > these are all OS utilities I think part of the problem is "what is an OS utility" and "what is an app". All your OS configuration could be done via a REST API, text files or some other well defined protocol. So you could have competing configuration apps that all help you manage your config in their own way and unbundle the control panel. Realistically looking at your average sparse linux distro shows just how "minimal" an OS can be, and even they bundle applications. Yet, I realistically don't thing consumers or the tech market at large would be assisted by a law mandating that all operating systems be as minimal as the linux kernel (no GNU/Linux, that's bundling!). And even if you did go that far, now we get into arguments over monolithic kernels and micro kernels.

pndy 2y ago

Endusers should have a total control over what is getting installed on their machines - just like we used to not so long ago or how some Linux distros allows you to select additional software. Each operating system coming from the biggest corporations should offer two paths: express/recommended setup and a fully customizable one for advanced users.

throwAGIway 2y ago
What if I want to buy a fully integrated, fully bundled install-and-forget OS? If the EU makes Apple unbundle all the good stuff from macOS I'll finally move to the US.
- alphabeta2024 2y ago
  Just use the express setup.
- palata 2y ago
  The EU wants to give you the choice. You will have the choice to use everything Apple makes. The only reason to move to the US would be because you really don't want to have a choice, but that would be weird.
  - kergonath 2y ago
    The probability that they are actually a EU resident and move to the US because of app bundling is close to zero. And yes, that would be completely ridiculous.
    - throwAGIway 2y ago
      I said finally, meaning it's the last straw, not that it's the sole reason.
      - palata 2y ago
        "They used to sell exclusively hot-dogs, and now they sell hot-dogs and hamburgers. That's the last straw, I'm going back to the US where they only sell hot-dogs!" You have to admit it sounds slightly ridiculous, right?

stefan_ 2y ago

Well the logical conclusion of that is to break up the businesses. No other remedy or it's just going to happen again and again, in subtle and not so subtle ways (bundling Teams for free was so absurdly obviously anti-competitive no one has even doubted that in this thread so far..)

bee_rider 2y ago

I wonder if they’ll go after iMessage on iOS too.

petre 2y ago
They're going after Apple for other reasons. iMessage was deemed too small to go after.
necovek 2y ago
It's weird how many people misunderstands the intent behind anti-trust laws. In a nutshell, it's about abusing a dominant position in one market (which is ok) to enter and conquer another market by undercutting competition by providing your product in the new market with the existing dominant product at basically no cost to consumer (there are a lot more nuances). Having non-interoperable features (like charging ports or iMessage green bubbles) has nothing to do with it, and those are ok (at least for anti-trust laws).

surfingdino 2y ago

They cannot do it before damage is done, it would be like charging people with pre-crime. Nobody wants that.