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Slack complaint spurs EU to investigate Microsoft Teams Office integration (windowscentral.com)
18 points by itsme-alan 1710 days ago
3 comments

They're all terrible, but surely Teams is the worst-est
Working with an international team Zoom is the only one I’ve found that really works for everyone.

Teams is a horrid resource hog on MacOS and Linux - on MacOS I can watch it drain the battery, on Linux it messes with the microphone volume and often destabilizes the entire system needing a reboot.

Hangouts burns less CPU then teams doesn’t function without a gmail or gsuite backed account which makes it tough to use in business settings. Plus it comes with Google’s legendary “can’t talk to us” product support.

Slack’s attitude has always been “find out what people want and do the opposite”. Their grand plan must be to stand out by being the worst. The sales people must be really hot and dipped in cocaine, otherwise I have no idea why anyone pays money for Slack. Their video is also really unstable with a mix of low and high latency, include people from Eastern Europe and India and your back to typing.

Then there is Zoom - it works, it isn’t tied to a platform, it seems to have the lightest CPU and memory footprint, does well with a mix of international participants, really no gripes except for getting logged out every couple weeks.

As Churchill once said, "Microsoft teams is the worse system imaginable, except for all the others". On its own Teams is not a great product. But the ecosystem taken together adds up to something that is difficult to beat for a lot of companies.
So this is the same Slack that wrote a love letter [0] to Microsoft about competing with them and now they are crying to the EU to investigate them over Teams because they failed.

Sounds like a chicken blaming the wolf for eating them after inviting it to a dinner party. After all, they asked for it.

[0] https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/blog/news/dear-microsoft

Teams being bundled with Office, which seems to be bundled (at least in some form) with Windows, and with Windows 11 having forced teams integration alongside renewed anti browser choice shenanigans?

Totally some fair competition and not MS embracing and extending old strategies...

> So this is the same Slack that wrote a love letter [0] to Microsoft about competing with them and now they are crying to the EU to investigate them over Teams because they failed.

Slack filed a complaint with EU antitrust regulators regarding Microsoft's anti-competitive practices of integrating Teams with Office.

This is a repeat of Microsoft force-feeding everyone IE, a case where Microsoft was already found guilty of abusing it's monopoly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Upon reading this my first thought was also about said love letter. I guess they’re not that eager about the competition anymore. Or perhaps they figured out that competition does not necessarily equate to fair play.
If you're going to claim that Microsoft including Teams in Windows is "competing" then Slack is simply "competing" by utilising the EU.
Appear strong by pretending not to care.
Microsoft must be shaking in their boots! How will they ever survive a fifteen year investigation that’ll at most lead to a slap on the wrist!