Sounds like a pretty desperate move to me. Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products. Office products these days don't even need to be installed (in fact, I bet MS would rather prefer that you did not).
>Teams is not preinstalled with Windows; it's part of a suite of products.
Most businesses are buying that suite for Word/Excel. Teams comes along with it for free from their perspective. That can definitely be anti-competitive.
I agree that Slack's case is pretty weak here. It's hard to see the harm to the consumer when Microsoft's bundle is cheaper than Slack's lowest paid plan.
Skype for Business (or whatever the legacy chat product is or has been called) dates back to 2007 and was typically present in your EA seat license bundle. Slack might be better than Skype, but it’s weird to suggest that getting into a market with an established history suddenly becomes anti-competitive only as soon as your competitor actually produces something that’s not a raging dumpster fire.
Skype For Business was a separate product. It's only when rolling it into the office suite that it becomes problematic. And that is only because of the dominant position Word/Excel/PPT hold.
I personally don't think it's anti-competitive but I at least see the argument that can be made.
it was. two years ago i changed job and the current employer use Skype for business as it was part of Office 365. we moved off Skype when Windows Team roll out.
Microsoft have a monopoly on office software. All businesses more or less have to buy Microsoft Office. Microsoft bundles Teams for free with it.
There is something stopping businesses from using Slack - the fact that Microsoft gives them Teams for free.
To be honest I doubt this will be a successful case. Companies get away with this all the time. I think the Windows/IE case is the only instance I've ever heard of something coming from it.
Office 365 is more of a monopoly than Windows now. This kind of bundling and cross-subsidy is classic monopoly abuse, and is almost identical to the IE case.
Users aren’t customers. If you give something away for free, you will always have people clamoring for it rather than the paid product.
However people take what is free for granted and don’t consider it a part of the market. For instance, many hold that iOS is a monopoly despite being a minority of the market because you pay Apple for it, where as Android is just free and Google does not get your money for its use.
There has not been a free tier of GSuite since 2011. It is a commercial service that has a monthly cost per seat. There are 6 million users on GSuite for Business and 120 million on GSuite for Education. None of the grandfathered free Google Apps for Domains users are included in those numbers.
Google sheets, et al are free for personal use while Office 360 is a subscription as far as I know.
The numbers given in the article specifically are users not paying customers. As quoted:
> Google's G Suite boss Javier Soltero... did not say how many of those 2 billion users were paid
Additionally it indicates that Office may have more paying users:
> Google said roughly one year ago that 5 million businesses are now paying for G Suite, which pales in comparison to Microsoft Office 365's 200 million monthly active users of its version for businesses.
The conversation was about suites not individual applications. Even though you can use some of the separate GSuite applications for personal use, you cannot get GSuite for free. There is no free tier.
Likewise, there is no free tier of Office/Microsoft 365, but there are free services that are considered part of this suite. How many of the 200 million monthly active users are customers? How many users were paid? If a person uses the free tier of OneDrive, OneNote, or Skype they are not considered a customer even though they are an active user.
When you compare, you do like for like. The comparison is GSuite to Office 365, and many independent studies have said Google has a larger market share.
I'm curious in what way microsoft would not be interested in having users not install office. I thought that office was microsofts primary revenue source (maybe this is info from before cloud stuff though).
I think GP meant MS might prefer people not install Office and use the online version instead. I don't know if there's a difference in pricing and if it's possible to only get the online or the offline version.
Using the online versions allows them to have everybody at the same level all the time, which might mean easier support.
I for one prefer the online versions. They work fairly well in Firefox on Linux. Outlook online is way nicer to use than the installed one. Much, much snappier...
This is what I meant. It’s very clear that Microsoft sees the future as cloud-first, and their traditional installers are still there only for defensive purposes. I bet they’d love to drop them, if they could be 100% sure that this wouldn’t mean losing customers (the ones with old browsers, unwilling to retrain, unwilling to use Sharepoint rather than network folders, etc) and that it wouldn’t weaken their entrenchment (those billions of offline .docx and .xslx are a massive moat that is very hard to abandon for good).
Unless you have an Enterprise license, Office 365 pushes updates for both on-prem and cloud at the same time and you cannot opt-out. On-prem uses the CTR installer, not MSI, which includes DRM that must be activated online and phones home every thirty days. If you are offline for more than a month, the on-prem apps will go into restricted mode allowing viewing documents only.
Office365 is cloud based. The more you use it, the more you use Microsoft's resources, the higher the cost for them and maybe the higher the strain on resources available to others.
So for an Office365 bundle with x products, you pay the same price whether you use all x products or fewer. The fewer you use, the better for Microsoft and they don't take a hit on revenue.
Office 365 (actually Microsoft 365 these days) is, depending on what edition you buy, a set of cloud based services and licenses for installing the traditional desktop applications.
As with most Microsoft licensing & naming things it is surprisingly complex!
> As with most Microsoft licensing & naming things it is surprisingly complex
And weird. Like they don't want your money weird.
We have Office 365 for small businesses (or whatever it is called these days). A co-worker needed Visio for something. Nope. Visio is for businesses with Office 365 Enterprise subscription only.
Long story short, ended up with him having to buy a personal copy with the company credit card.
Imho it's a very, very weak complaint.