Microsoft may be hit with a massive fine in the European Union for "possibly abusively" bundling Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software suites for businesses.
On Tuesday, the European Commission (EC) announced preliminary findings of an investigation into whether Microsoft's "suite-centric business model combining multiple types of software in a single offering" unfairly shut out rivals in the "software as a service" (SaaS) market.
"Since at least April 2019," the EC found, Microsoft's practice of "tying Teams with its core SaaS productivity applications" potentially restricted competition in the "market for communication and collaboration products."
[...] For Microsoft, the EC's findings are likely not entirely unexpected, although Tuesday's announcement must be disappointing. The company had been hoping to avoid further scrutiny by introducing some major changes last year. Most drastically, Microsoft began "offering some suites without Teams," the EC said, but even that wasn't enough to appease EU regulators.
[...] Microsoft will now be given an opportunity to defend its practices. If the company is unsuccessful, it risks a potential fine up to 10 percent of its annual worldwide turnover and an order possibly impacting how the leading global company conducts business.
In a statement to Ars, Microsoft President Brad Smith confirmed that the tech giant would work with the commission to figure out a better solution.
"Having unbundled Teams and taken initial interoperability steps, we appreciate the additional clarity provided today and will work to find solutions to address the commission's remaining concerns," Smith said.
[...] The EC initially launched its investigation into Microsoft's allegedly abusive Teams bundling last July. Its probe came after Slack and Alfaview makers complained that Microsoft may be violating Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), "which prohibits the abuse of a dominant market position."
[...] Last March, the EC called for stakeholder feedback after rolling out "the first major policy initiative in the area of abuse of dominance rules." The initiative sought to update TFEU for the first time since 2008 based on reviewing relevant case law.
[...] Stakeholders had four weeks to submit comments. Among those providing feedback, however, was the US Chamber of Commerce (COC), which warned that the EU's updated guidance didn't seem to adhere to case law and would "likely will reduce innovation and lead to higher prices for consumers" when it's adopted. Currently, that is set to happen during the fourth quarter of 2025, the EC's call for comments said.
According to the COC, the EU rushed the comment period and could have missed out on a "meaningful opportunity" to adequately weigh all valid concerns.
[...] Just this week, the COC's fears seemed to be substantiated as the EC cracked down on Microsoft and Apple. On Monday, the Commission concluded that Apple may be violating the Digital Markets Act by preventing "app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content."
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The European Commission today said it found that Apple is violating the Digital Markets Act (DMA) with App Store rules and fees that "prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content." The commission "informed Apple of its preliminary view" that the company is violating the law, the regulator announced.
This starts a process in which Apple has the right to examine documents in the commission's investigation file and reply in writing to the findings. There is a March 2025 deadline for the commission to make a final ruling.
[...] Apple was further accused of charging excessive fees. The commission said that Apple is allowed to charge "a fee for facilitating via the App Store the initial acquisition of a new customer by developers," but "the fees charged by Apple go beyond what is strictly necessary for such remuneration. For example, Apple charges developers a fee for every purchase of digital goods or services a user makes within seven days after a link-out from the app."
Apple says it charges a commission of 27 percent on sales "to the user for digital goods or services on your website after a link out... provided that the sale was initiated within seven days and the digital goods or services can be used in an app."
[...] The commission today also announced it is starting a separate investigation into Apple's "contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores," including its "Core Technology Fee." Apple charges the Core Technology Fee for app installs, whether they are delivered from Apple's own App Store, from an alternative app marketplace, or from a developer's own website. The first million installs each year are free, but a per-install fee of €0.50 applies after that.
The commission said it would investigate whether the Core Technology Fee complies with the DMA.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday June 28 2024, @09:18PM (4 children)
I wonder what it will take to break MS's spell? LibreOffice is quite capable, open source, free, does not burden users with keeping up with licenses, and does not do file format lock in. The TCO of MS Office is much higher. But businesses and governments won't switch. MS Office is a monopoly. It's not a monopoly maintained forcefully, the users themselves maintain MS's monopoly! Is MS quiet;y bribing or coercing decision makers who show signs of switching?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 28 2024, @09:20PM
A: Here, I updated Office for you. It's the latest version. They changed quite a bit around and the the name as well to LibreOffice, oh and the icon has been refreshed too... but it's still Office, it says so in the name. I'm pretty sure you'll love this new version!
B: Cool, thank you for getting me the latest version!
(Score: 3, Touché) by corey on Saturday June 29 2024, @03:43AM (1 child)
I’ve been a big FOSS user for years but I can’t get my head around the love for LibreOffice. I’m glad it exists and there’s a decent following but I can’t use it. The interface is awful. The icons are something else and half the time I can’t even make out the picture on the icon. The arrangement seems stuck in 2000 and I know it probably just works but I’m used to the ribbon interface which is logical and works well in MS Office. The same ribbon in LO is unworkable. Plus the compatibility with MS Office seems really patchy. They font rendering seems clunky.
I like OnlyOffice, that’s a modern usable alternative to MS.
I’m in the market for a new laptop and can’t bring myself to buy one preloaded with Windows. Thinking about a Macbook with Parallels for Altium work.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Saturday June 29 2024, @04:25PM
The ribbon was thoroughly bashed as terrible UI when it first came out. But you like it? Must have grown on people. I find the LibreOffice UI okay. Sure, it could be better. What, specifically do you not like and what in your opinion would be better?
I'll give you an example. An area I find confusing in LibreOffice is how to copy (or move) multiple lines of text into multiple rows of a table's column, one line per row, and without the tedium of having to select, copy, and paste each line individually. A simple paste will go wrong, putting copies of all the lines in each selected row. Have to use this menu item Table->Convert->Text to Table. At least LibreOffice can do it, won't force the user to do it the tedious way. I do not know if Word is any better on that, but why should it be? This is one relatively complicated operation among dozens of other things one might want to do. Making this operation more prominent comes at the expense of making other things less prominent.
LibreOffice has pretty good online help. If you don't know how to do something a bit complicated or fancy in LibreOffice, a search of the Internet will turn up step by step instructions, or, sometimes, the answer that it can't do it.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday June 29 2024, @12:41PM
Both of my retired parents are on Linux Mint now. They got sick of Windows. My dad went first then my mum saw how much better it was so I installed Linux Mint on her Windows laptop last weekend. She is amazed at how much faster and easier to use it is. LibreOffice does everything they both need. They have an old Windows server for backup. I wrote a script hidden behind a desktop icon for them to connect to the server with nothing but a double click.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 28 2024, @10:03PM (2 children)
Ya mean like the Halloween Code? "If not Microsoft, throw catastrophic error code." Nahhh, lemme look up what it actually said . . . .
https://www.salon.com/1998/11/04/straight_39/ [salon.com]
The first half dozen links to the code that I clicked on came up 404 - it seems to be memory holed. Or, I'm just not willing to make the effort to find the actual code.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 28 2024, @10:18PM
A better link here, more detail, https://www.theregister.com/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/ [theregister.com]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Saturday June 29 2024, @03:38AM
Sounds a lot like the strategy of the systemd promoters.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Snospar on Friday June 28 2024, @10:49PM (3 children)
I've never been more bemused by a piece of software than Teams. When it was just a replacement for (was it?) Skype and you could do chats etc. that seemed fine. But then they started to bolt on everything else and e-mail (sorry Bill, I mean Outlook) alerts started popped up there. Next thing people started attaching files to meetings or files to Teams... doesn't matter which, you'll never find them again. I started to worry that this was the first technology I was struggling with because of my age, but it wasn't long before I started to hear complaints from the youngers about how hard it was to refind things. In the background of course we have Sharepoint, a pile of shite that will offer you a "short" URL with 64K of ASCII built in as the token - WTF?!
Huge thanks to all the Soylent volunteers without whom this community (and this post) would not be possible.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RS3 on Friday June 28 2024, @11:02PM (1 child)
I'm at a new job for about 2 months and they're (sadly) Microsoft-based, including Outlook and other stuff I'm not using (yet?).
The Outlook email web interface is quite awkward to learn. I'm sure that people who have been fully immersed in Microsoft stuff for many years are quite comfortable with the UI. I don't like it. It's too "flat". You click on a rectangle in the middle column to get the right-hand side to display the email. But, when clicking on one of the rectangles, you accidentally click the trashcan icon that was hidden until you hover the mouse. You can undelete it, but it's stupid. I hate that kind of UI where things are hidden until you hover. Stupid. No good reason to do it other than tricky / gadgetry.
The various tools / functions aren't very intuitive to me either. They're icons, and again, you can hover the mouse pointer and they'll reveal what they do, but it takes more time and just seems dumb.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Sunday June 30 2024, @09:51AM
> I'm sure that people who have been fully immersed in Microsoft stuff for many years are quite comfortable with the UI
Not in my experience. Outlook is terrible compared to, say, thunderbird. I assume it is (failed) M$ attempt to kill email and replace it with some horrible instant messenger crap like skype.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by corey on Saturday June 29 2024, @04:06AM
Man, your points hit the mail on the head, and are my identical gripes. My work uses Microsoft everything and it’s made me really despise any software by MS.
What you said about your age being a reason for not finding things in Teams is mirrored with me, I thought the same. But I now think otherwise. It’s like they went uber scope crap with the thing and tried to make it do everything, but nothing all that well. Like a cheaply made Chinese imitation Swiss Army knife to get for free in corporate junk bags. My work tried to use Teams for all this stuff, including raising procurement requests, tasking, meeting notes and having group discussions with design decisions documented. But I can never find anything. So I email stuff nowadays like I used to because I know I can find it then. Teams is an actual abomination and I think companies use it out of laziness to set up anything else. My old work used Webex which was decent. Oh the other thing I find annoying is it tries to open all links within itself. Like PDFs, within Teams. Eugh. I use MuPDF because it’s awesome and navigate with the keyboard. Took some mucking around to get it to open in the browser. Lately it’s been opening PDFs in Teams again. Grr. What a tool.
I’ve had to go through the login three times before web version of Teams would load, after logging into Outlook and SharePoint. It seems to go through 20 URLs to load it up too.
SharePoint links, yeah that’s a laugh. My old work used it to do change management (versioning, history, check in/out etc) and oh what a headache. Engineering organisations need proper PLMs. I must say though that the newer SharePoint is usable as an online file storage and is much better than it used to be. There are probably much better alternatives though.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 29 2024, @02:51AM
In Australia (and guessing other similar countries), the big players have convinced the government that certain strategies are critical for security reasons https://www.cyber.gov.au/resources-business-and-government/essential-cyber-security/essential-eight [cyber.gov.au].
When you read these strategies, they seem to make sense. But when you start implementing you notice that it is a control grab by the large players.
E.g. Reducing options on software used, e.g. only allow one browser, e.g. MS Edge (even when customers use different ones - how do we test?). And forcing extra administration on our admins, such as forced patching of internal servers well before they have any time to test breakages. If the admins complain then they are told to move the servers to Azure, where the magical fairies live to patch servers for us, and our admins don't have to do anything. So now the admins spend all their time managing magical fairy breakages.
But MS is making a lot more money out of us, and am guessing out of lots of similar companies.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Dr Spin on Saturday June 29 2024, @06:26AM
In this, and many other cases, it stands for
Software As A Scam.
Microsoft, and Google are effectively "demanding money with menaces" - the legal term for extortion. (in the UK)
Al Capone would be proud. Congress Critters will be bribed.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!