Let me guess. You’re an American?
In Europe we have rules, regulations and consumer protections because our respective countries and the collective union actually give a shit about the people that live here.
Help! MS gives us chat with good integration with its other services, I’m being assaulted!
Did you even read what this is about?
The European Commission used its statement to detail its concern “that Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications. This advantage may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings. The conduct may have prevented Teams’ rivals from competing, and in turn innovating, to the detriment of customers in the European Economic Area.”
I doubt that you’re interested in arguing in good faith, but if by some miracle you do care about having an informed opinion before opening your mouth, how would you respond to things like this?
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…
There are many reasons vc’s fail and just as many excuses. 2 paragraphs with no mentions of slack, workspaces, hipchat, discord, etc is far from an analysis of an uncompetitive field and product
Teams offers voice, chat, call queues and routing, telephony and traditional voip including international regions, along with saml, log shipping, and DLP. And they are charging $5/mo in a revenue positive service. So, to answer your question, I would reserve my judgment for something more substantial than a failed CEOs single rant on hacker news.
I would be more supportive if there were more products that could compete on base features before we talk about integration, as well as seeing a non profitable service eg loss leading.
