Microsoft (MSFT.O) will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.
Maybe businesses will stop forcing “free” Teams on their workforces now. What a pile of shit.
What’s a better alternative? I was a big fan of Teams back when I worked with an org that used it
Slack and Mattermost
Slack is my modern go-to, but I still also use IRC. Slack has great support for technical chat, doesn’t slow my i7 with 32GB RAM to a crawl, has great multiple account support and even voice chat if you are into that. I prefer zoom for video when I need it, but slack’s isn’t nearly as shit as teams.
How? It can’t even handle copy/pasting text without fucking up the formatting.
Creating new SharePoint sites whenever you start a chat so that you have a whole new way to lose your documents?
Better alternative? Pretty much any other chat app.
THEY ARE UNBUNDLING PRODUCTS?!!? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS, APRIL FOOLS DAY?
the two ways to increase profitability: bundling and unbundling
So uh… April Fools?
They’ll still be rolled up in an E3 license so corporations won’t really notice the difference
In Europe Teams isn’t included with E3 or E5.
The change will only apply automatically to new consumers though.
Would you happen to have a source that you could link on that please? I’ve been trying to see if it affects us since I read the Ars Technica story this morning. We have been getting Teams historically with the Office 365 E3 license that comes with our Action Pack sub.
Oh, it wasn’t a verified response, just one of those “well this is most likely how Microsoft will deal with it” things.
I suspect you’re correct, but I’d like to see it in black and white. I wear a number of hats and one of them makes me answerable to questions like “Why has my Teams stopped working?”
That will just make them more money as they can charge whatever they want for both
From Teams plus office 10 euros a month per user to Office alone 9 euros a month per user and Teams alone 5 euros a month per user.
Microsoft would never do that now, would they ?
Capitalism has a lot of problems, but the freedom given to a seller to set their prices to whatever they like and watch the buyer decide it is not a fair price and go buy from someone else is not one of them.
This is a win for everyone.
The problem with that is when a company like Microsoft has used and abused its position for such a long time that the only possible competition is another megacorp. No real choice there, only an illusion of choice.
Its only freedom if there’s actual choice involved.
The scale at which these sales are made has nothing to do with the average consumer. Its just mega corps crunching numbers.
And that really only has to do with share prices, none of it trickles down to the actual workers.
This is just rich people having slap fights.
this is all well and good when we’re talking about a properly elastic market (eg food)
however, the supply of hosted enterprise video conference software is extremely limited (teams, zoom, google meet) and the demand is extremely high
moreover, switching providers and reeducating the staff will also be highly expensive
you can’t exactly go anywhere else, you just have to agree to whatever msft is doing
Are you familiar with the concept of a captive market?
Never!!! 🤪
…now that the marketplace has been altered.
Zoom was disruptive in the market because the other options SUCKED - Skype, GotomyPC, WebEx, etc all did a lot of rapid maturing during the pandemic to catch up to Zoom, and this ‘bundling’ of Teams with Office has built user lock-in via Office 365.
Well played Microsoft, once again ducking a well deserved anti-trust suit. ‘Historic injury’ should count equally as ‘current injury’ for prosecution, arguably especially so if that historic injury is what created your current market share
