<story><title>Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says</title><url>https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-union-antitrust-26d11ada00f504d537d1b054dd6f6bbf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wytwwww</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s am understandable perspective but wouldn&amp;#x27;t this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle?&lt;p&gt;e.g. selling Word&amp;#x2F;Excel&amp;#x2F;PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want  to enter the document processing&amp;#x2F;spreadsheet&amp;#x2F;etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be only allowed to sell subscriptions&amp;#x2F;licenses for individual apps?&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft&amp;#x27;s practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.</text></item><item><author>farhadhf</author><text>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...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Perseids</author><text>&amp;gt; At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft&amp;#x27;s practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.&lt;p&gt;Focusing on short term repercussions for consumers has significantly hurt long term consumer interests and there is evidence that it hurt the economy in general. In the decades preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and that extreme power concentration (as we e.g. see today in the IT sector) is hard to reconcile with efficient markets and political freedom.&lt;p&gt;See [1] for details, here is an excerpt:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; An emerging group of young scholars are inquiring whether we truly benefitted from competition with little antitrust enforcement. The mounting evidence suggests no.  New business formation has steadily declined as a share of the economy since the late 1970s. “In 1982, young firms [those five-years old or younger] accounted for about half of all firms, and one-fifth of total employment,” observed Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But by 2013, these figures fell “to about one-third of firms and one-tenth of total employment.” Competition is decreasing in many significant markets, as they become concentrated. Greater profits are falling in the hands of fewer firms. “More than 75% of US industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades,” one recent study found. “Firms in industries with the largest increases in product market concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins, positive abnormal stock returns, and more profitable M&amp;amp;A deals, which suggests that market power is becoming an important source of value.” Since the late 1970s, wealth inequality has grown, and worker mobility has declined. Labor’s share of income in the nonfarm business sector was in the mid-60 percentage points for several decades after WWII, but that too has declined since 2000 to the mid-50s. Despite the higher returns to capital, businesses in markets with rising concentration and less competition are investing relatively less.  This investment gap, one study found, is driven by industry leaders who have higher profit margins.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;HEik3#selection-1737.0-1737.346&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;archive.is&amp;#x2F;HEik3#selection-1737.0-1737.346&lt;/a&gt; (original: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hbr.org&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s-antitrust-movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;hbr.org&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;12&amp;#x2F;the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s...&lt;/a&gt; )</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft breached antitrust rules by bundling Teams and Office, EU says</title><url>https://apnews.com/article/microsoft-teams-eu-european-union-antitrust-26d11ada00f504d537d1b054dd6f6bbf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Wytwwww</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s am understandable perspective but wouldn&amp;#x27;t this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle?&lt;p&gt;e.g. selling Word&amp;#x2F;Excel&amp;#x2F;PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want  to enter the document processing&amp;#x2F;spreadsheet&amp;#x2F;etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc.&lt;p&gt;Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be only allowed to sell subscriptions&amp;#x2F;licenses for individual apps?&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft&amp;#x27;s practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.</text></item><item><author>farhadhf</author><text>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...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swores</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft&amp;#x27;s practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand that&amp;#x27;s a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both prevents consumers from having choice, and also therefore in the longer term allows the monopolistic company to raise prices without consumers having any option other than to pay more or go without.&lt;p&gt;So in reality the harming or competitors can be considered the harming of consumers.</text></comment>