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This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and c

This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover...

zelphirkalt 2y ago
In a just world, they will of course have to pay for all the damages ... In a just world I said.
- Supermancho 2y ago
  > This move by the EU is good, but too little too late Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.
  - zelphirkalt 2y ago
    I mean, if someone is physically harmed it is also too late, but still the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.
    - Supermancho 2y ago
      > the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives. As long as the law already existed Either a law is inherently useful, or it is not. No need to cry about abuses in the 1800 regarding laws being passed today. The proposal is to fix a situational problem, not a physical one.
znpy 2y ago
> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late You should be thankful at all this is happening. On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams is still perfectly legal. I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all. Gee, I wonder...
  - DANmode 2y ago
    For the reader: https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsoft-problem/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...
- yazzku 2y ago
  The US is too invested (literally) in Big Tech right now, as it gives them a geopolitical advantage. That's why they have not broken up anything for real lately. But this feed-the-giant policy is already, though slowly, starting to crack. Look at how Congress is caught by the balls by Microsoft (“The US government’s dependence on Microsoft poses a serious threat to US national security,” says US senator Ron Wyden. [1]), and yet they cannot do anything about it because they have no alternative; a self-inflicted wound from decades of inaction. Like the other comment here, it's ironic that it is the EU pulling from the market/capitalism playbook now. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsoft-problem/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams So is bundling office and PowerPoint which killed a massive number of presentation apps before they were even born. How is this particularly different? Should bundling any apps/sofware/services together be illegal? Should that only apply to specific companies?
  - 2y ago
DaoVeles 2y ago
It is an unfortunate state of the world is that those can use unethical moves to quickly crush others will live to fight another day. By the time the law catches up, they have made their billions.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? .. a raiding action by a quasi-legal gang can actually kill your business, and all parties involved know it.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  Which is why the fines must depend on the company and be much higher, to threaten their own business.
  - tacocataco 2y ago
    Haven't we been trying fines? Revoke their corporate charter, the survivors will take notice and behave. Or else.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  Is Microsoft making billions from Teams? I assume they only made it to enhance the value of their office suite/subscription. It's a bit like saying that that them bundling PowerPoint together with their other apps is unfair towards any startup potentially wanting to enter that market. Which very well might be true but what's so special about Teams? MS and other companies have been bundling apps together since forever...
nextos 2y ago
Last time I checked, they also arbitrarily excluded Firefox, which works fine on other WebRTC platforms such as Google Hangouts or Zoom. Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem. Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during simple audiocalls.
- djbusby 2y ago
  I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.
  - nextos 2y ago
    "Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-teams-meeting-on-an-unsupported-browser-daafdd3c-ac7a-4855-871b-9113bad15907 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...
    - berkut 2y ago
      That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
      - cess11 2y ago
        Yes, they broke this somewhat recently. Video &c. doesn't work in Chromium either. So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.
throwaway2037 2y ago
I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".
- nemomarx 2y ago
  Anecdotally, Teams has a lot more penetration compared to Lync and co, since it kinda took over Slacks marketshare once that was an established thing to use.
- caminante 2y ago
  Every entrepreneur wants to assume the counterfactual that but for their startup dying for reason #6354, it would've lived!
  - dmix 2y ago
    Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp. Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense. Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets). Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.
    - jollofricepeas 2y ago
      Nah. My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true. The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce. But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub). The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office. Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
I am amazed the EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies. WE should be doing that. This is how capitalism thrives. Break up large companies in different markets. Also break up Amazon and AWS already.
- petre 2y ago
  What monopolies have they broken up? The EU has only issued fines to enforce compliance.
- boxed 2y ago
  Your idea is flawed. If you split off AWS from Amazon, you have TWO monopolies. That's a useless move. What you need to do is split it down the middle: create Amazon 1 and Amazon 2 each with half the people, hardware, and 100% of the IP.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - intended 2y ago
    Split them into 4 then ? 2 amazons, 2 Aws
- dantheman 2y ago
  These are not monopolies.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies Has that ever actually happened? Or do you have any reason to believe it might in the future?
Rinzler89 2y ago
Can you mention which startup was it?
- constantcrying 2y ago
  Obviously not him, but it is trivial to find out. His profile links to his current company, which has his real name, which Google links to https://taskulu.com/ https://taskulu.com/ unless he has another startup doing communications.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    That doesn't look like a failed startup to me since it's still active and the poster has several startups under his belt seemingly being a "serial founder" so I was curious to know which of his startups was the one that he claims got killed by Teams to see if it holds water.
kwanbix 2y ago
As a product manager myself, it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product. And I mean free as in if you are already paying for a subscription, and it gets added without aditional cost. I have worked at companies that payed for either Google Workspace or Office 365, and they also payed for Slack.
- teitoklien 2y ago
  That’s how monopolies get formed, make it unsustainable for competition to exist, and then jack up prices when they all die. That lower cost people pay upfront thanks to monopolies, is then drained back with interest, using higher prices, reduction in social mobility (of new founders/startups), reduction in innovation & increase in rent-seeking behaviour. Breaking up monopolies has been long overdue, it’s a good thing its starting now.
  - kwanbix 2y ago
    You can choose to also use slack, or the OP app, if you think the beneffit you get by using the app is greater than the value of paying for it. Nobody is preventing you. Since MS included it for free, is not like you can not pay for the other app because you used the money to pay for teams. I personally don't see the value on slack, but like I said before, I have worked at companies where we had both, office/slack or gw/slack.
    - jadengeller 2y ago
      it's not a great market for consumers if we allow big business to undercut pricing and kill competition government should help us coordinate to prevent this Nash equilibria
      - Wytwwww 2y ago
        > undercut pricing and kill competition Yeah but nobody minded not having to pay for web browsers, file manager, antivirus software and bunch of other stuff. Companies have been bundling their different software products together since almost forever and while there are some disadvantages arguable this has benefited consumers overall. At least I wouldn't be too glad about having to buy separate licenses (or pay separate subscriptions) for Excel, Word and PowerPoint (or any other product bundle like Jetbrains IDEs for every language etc. etc.). Most people would also not rather get a non-functional barebones OS whenever they get a new PC and have to chose and install all the basic apps themselves.
vasco 2y ago
My company switched half the development from Gitlab to Github after many years of being happy customers because they bundle Github pricing also with the rest. I'm not even talking about azure and the anti-competitive shit they do there. Teams is but a drop in the ocean.
constantcrying 2y ago
Microsoft Teams inclusion did not kill your product. If a single customer dropped you because he now has Teams for free your product was a failure for that customer anyway and he just suddenly realized you offered him no value. Just look at https://taskulu.com/ https://taskulu.com/ and tell me how Teams even competes with you. Your real competition was Jira and customers dropped you because Jira was a superior product and integration with Teams gave them everything you offered and a chat application separate from project management is an all around better option as there is a single chat for all employees, regardless of them using the project management tools.
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  Yeah the truth is those project management SAS companies are a dime a dozen, I see ads for at least 3 of them on my daily commute to work. Failure to innovate kills those companies. Just look at the latest "innovation" of the OP: a wrapper around SES (5x more expensive!), like thoudand others exist.
wordofx 2y ago
Your product failed because there’s better products.
Wytwwww 2y ago
That's am understandable perspective but wouldn't this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle? e.g. selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want to enter the document processing/spreadsheet/etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc. Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be only allowed to sell subscriptions/licenses for individual apps? At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.
- swores 2y ago
  > At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors. On the one hand that's a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both prevents consumers from having choice, and also therefore in the longer term allows the monopolistic company to raise prices without consumers having any option other than to pay more or go without. So in reality the harming or competitors can be considered the harming of consumers.
  - ThunderSizzle 2y ago
    However, this is an interesting problem. By nature of competition, every customer a competitor takes is a customer missed. So when is competition anti-competive? In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?
    - linuxandrew 2y ago
      > In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers? Well, they should at very least make Teams interoperable like every other goddamn service should be - or be forced to do so.
lofaszvanitt 2y ago
EU should do this the following way: Too big company must announce what it tries to do, then EU replies: - You are too big, you glutton. We don't allow this. Slim yourself down, now gtfo.
osigurdson 2y ago
Pivot maybe? Direct, undifferentiated competition with a giant company is never a good idea.
throwAGIway 2y ago
Basically, users got a good enough product at no additional charge, greatly reduced costs and operational overhead, and you want the government to force users to pay more?
nova22033 2y ago
What did you project management startup do that dozens of other non-MS companies don't already do?
jbluepolarbear 2y ago
What was the product? How did teams bundle kill your growth? Office already bundled Skype and teams was a natural progression for Microsoft in response to slacks and zooms growth in taking Skypes market share. I don’t think Microsoft is innocent in this, but still think it made sense from a business point and from what companies wanted from Microsoft.

zelphirkalt 2y ago

In a just world, they will of course have to pay for all the damages ... In a just world I said.

Supermancho 2y ago
> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.
- zelphirkalt 2y ago
  I mean, if someone is physically harmed it is also too late, but still the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.
  - Supermancho 2y ago
    > the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives. As long as the law already existed Either a law is inherently useful, or it is not. No need to cry about abuses in the 1800 regarding laws being passed today. The proposal is to fix a situational problem, not a physical one.

znpy 2y ago

> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late You should be thankful at all this is happening. On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams is still perfectly legal. I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all. Gee, I wonder...
- DANmode 2y ago
  For the reader: https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsoft-problem/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...
yazzku 2y ago
The US is too invested (literally) in Big Tech right now, as it gives them a geopolitical advantage. That's why they have not broken up anything for real lately. But this feed-the-giant policy is already, though slowly, starting to crack. Look at how Congress is caught by the balls by Microsoft (“The US government’s dependence on Microsoft poses a serious threat to US national security,” says US senator Ron Wyden. [1]), and yet they cannot do anything about it because they have no alternative; a self-inflicted wound from decades of inaction. Like the other comment here, it's ironic that it is the EU pulling from the market/capitalism playbook now. [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsoft-problem/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...
Wytwwww 2y ago
> On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams So is bundling office and PowerPoint which killed a massive number of presentation apps before they were even born. How is this particularly different? Should bundling any apps/sofware/services together be illegal? Should that only apply to specific companies?
- 2y ago

DaoVeles 2y ago

It is an unfortunate state of the world is that those can use unethical moves to quickly crush others will live to fight another day. By the time the law catches up, they have made their billions.

mistrial9 2y ago
Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? .. a raiding action by a quasi-legal gang can actually kill your business, and all parties involved know it.
zelphirkalt 2y ago
Which is why the fines must depend on the company and be much higher, to threaten their own business.
- tacocataco 2y ago
  Haven't we been trying fines? Revoke their corporate charter, the survivors will take notice and behave. Or else.
Wytwwww 2y ago
Is Microsoft making billions from Teams? I assume they only made it to enhance the value of their office suite/subscription. It's a bit like saying that that them bundling PowerPoint together with their other apps is unfair towards any startup potentially wanting to enter that market. Which very well might be true but what's so special about Teams? MS and other companies have been bundling apps together since forever...

nextos 2y ago

Last time I checked, they also arbitrarily excluded Firefox, which works fine on other WebRTC platforms such as Google Hangouts or Zoom. Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem. Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during simple audiocalls.

djbusby 2y ago
I use Teams from Chrome&Firefox on Linux without a teams account. I've attended 100s of US State government agency meetings this way, for many years.
- nextos 2y ago
  "Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing." https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-teams-meeting-on-an-unsupported-browser-daafdd3c-ac7a-4855-871b-9113bad15907 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...
  - berkut 2y ago
    That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
    - cess11 2y ago
      Yes, they broke this somewhat recently. Video &c. doesn't work in Chromium either. So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.

throwaway2037 2y ago

I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".

nemomarx 2y ago
Anecdotally, Teams has a lot more penetration compared to Lync and co, since it kinda took over Slacks marketshare once that was an established thing to use.
caminante 2y ago
Every entrepreneur wants to assume the counterfactual that but for their startup dying for reason #6354, it would've lived!
- dmix 2y ago
  Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp. Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense. Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets). Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.
  - jollofricepeas 2y ago
    Nah. My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true. The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce. But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub). The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office. Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

I am amazed the EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies. WE should be doing that. This is how capitalism thrives. Break up large companies in different markets. Also break up Amazon and AWS already.

petre 2y ago
What monopolies have they broken up? The EU has only issued fines to enforce compliance.
boxed 2y ago
Your idea is flawed. If you split off AWS from Amazon, you have TWO monopolies. That's a useless move. What you need to do is split it down the middle: create Amazon 1 and Amazon 2 each with half the people, hardware, and 100% of the IP.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- intended 2y ago
  Split them into 4 then ? 2 amazons, 2 Aws
dantheman 2y ago
These are not monopolies.
Wytwwww 2y ago
> EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies Has that ever actually happened? Or do you have any reason to believe it might in the future?

Rinzler89 2y ago

Can you mention which startup was it?

constantcrying 2y ago
Obviously not him, but it is trivial to find out. His profile links to his current company, which has his real name, which Google links to https://taskulu.com/ https://taskulu.com/ unless he has another startup doing communications.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  That doesn't look like a failed startup to me since it's still active and the poster has several startups under his belt seemingly being a "serial founder" so I was curious to know which of his startups was the one that he claims got killed by Teams to see if it holds water.

kwanbix 2y ago

As a product manager myself, it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product. And I mean free as in if you are already paying for a subscription, and it gets added without aditional cost. I have worked at companies that payed for either Google Workspace or Office 365, and they also payed for Slack.

teitoklien 2y ago
That’s how monopolies get formed, make it unsustainable for competition to exist, and then jack up prices when they all die. That lower cost people pay upfront thanks to monopolies, is then drained back with interest, using higher prices, reduction in social mobility (of new founders/startups), reduction in innovation & increase in rent-seeking behaviour. Breaking up monopolies has been long overdue, it’s a good thing its starting now.
- kwanbix 2y ago
  You can choose to also use slack, or the OP app, if you think the beneffit you get by using the app is greater than the value of paying for it. Nobody is preventing you. Since MS included it for free, is not like you can not pay for the other app because you used the money to pay for teams. I personally don't see the value on slack, but like I said before, I have worked at companies where we had both, office/slack or gw/slack.
  - jadengeller 2y ago
    it's not a great market for consumers if we allow big business to undercut pricing and kill competition government should help us coordinate to prevent this Nash equilibria
    - Wytwwww 2y ago
      > undercut pricing and kill competition Yeah but nobody minded not having to pay for web browsers, file manager, antivirus software and bunch of other stuff. Companies have been bundling their different software products together since almost forever and while there are some disadvantages arguable this has benefited consumers overall. At least I wouldn't be too glad about having to buy separate licenses (or pay separate subscriptions) for Excel, Word and PowerPoint (or any other product bundle like Jetbrains IDEs for every language etc. etc.). Most people would also not rather get a non-functional barebones OS whenever they get a new PC and have to chose and install all the basic apps themselves.

vasco 2y ago

My company switched half the development from Gitlab to Github after many years of being happy customers because they bundle Github pricing also with the rest. I'm not even talking about azure and the anti-competitive shit they do there. Teams is but a drop in the ocean.

constantcrying 2y ago

Microsoft Teams inclusion did not kill your product. If a single customer dropped you because he now has Teams for free your product was a failure for that customer anyway and he just suddenly realized you offered him no value. Just look at https://taskulu.com/ https://taskulu.com/ and tell me how Teams even competes with you. Your real competition was Jira and customers dropped you because Jira was a superior product and integration with Teams gave them everything you offered and a chat application separate from project management is an all around better option as there is a single chat for all employees, regardless of them using the project management tools.

iLoveOncall 2y ago
Yeah the truth is those project management SAS companies are a dime a dozen, I see ads for at least 3 of them on my daily commute to work. Failure to innovate kills those companies. Just look at the latest "innovation" of the OP: a wrapper around SES (5x more expensive!), like thoudand others exist.

wordofx 2y ago

Your product failed because there’s better products.

Wytwwww 2y ago

That's am understandable perspective but wouldn't this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle? e.g. selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want to enter the document processing/spreadsheet/etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc. Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be only allowed to sell subscriptions/licenses for individual apps? At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.

swores 2y ago
> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors. On the one hand that's a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both prevents consumers from having choice, and also therefore in the longer term allows the monopolistic company to raise prices without consumers having any option other than to pay more or go without. So in reality the harming or competitors can be considered the harming of consumers.
- ThunderSizzle 2y ago
  However, this is an interesting problem. By nature of competition, every customer a competitor takes is a customer missed. So when is competition anti-competive? In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?
  - linuxandrew 2y ago
    > In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers? Well, they should at very least make Teams interoperable like every other goddamn service should be - or be forced to do so.

lofaszvanitt 2y ago

EU should do this the following way: Too big company must announce what it tries to do, then EU replies: - You are too big, you glutton. We don't allow this. Slim yourself down, now gtfo.

osigurdson 2y ago

Pivot maybe? Direct, undifferentiated competition with a giant company is never a good idea.

throwAGIway 2y ago

Basically, users got a good enough product at no additional charge, greatly reduced costs and operational overhead, and you want the government to force users to pay more?

nova22033 2y ago

What did you project management startup do that dozens of other non-MS companies don't already do?

jbluepolarbear 2y ago

What was the product? How did teams bundle kill your growth? Office already bundled Skype and teams was a natural progression for Microsoft in response to slacks and zooms growth in taking Skypes market share. I don’t think Microsoft is innocent in this, but still think it made sense from a business point and from what companies wanted from Microsoft.