safari/iMessage/Facetime/Maps or every default app on iOS? or any preinstalled and uninstallable app on Android?

Yeah, I thought of this too when I saw the integration, but a lot of things have changed since the antitrust issues at the time. If there's bundling issues, then I don't know.

The one thing I lament though is that using the same platform for work and personal communication tends to trigger some anxiety reflex in me.

I sometimes dread the long "quick call" in Teams, so hearing the call notification even in a video has me looking for my headphones :(

I'm with you on this reaction. Sometimes hear the message notification while watching Linus Tech Tips' WAN Show. Always triggers a spike of anxiety because I think someone is looking for my help with something on the weekend. Ugh.

Neither iOS nor MacOS are dominant in their respective categories. You can argue that the right metric to look at is market share by revenue and not by devices sold, and iOS does increase its footprint significantly at 42% of global smartphone revenue [1] (cementing itself as the single largest player), but still, arguably, not monopoly levels. I couldn't find a similar figure for the Desktop OS market, only (what I assume) is for devices currently running [2]. Sidenote: I think it's interesting to note that Windows market share has been steadily declining over the years, from a peak of ~91% a mere 8 years ago to around 76% in 2020.

Given this, by bundling a chat/productivity application (that has nothing to do with the OS product that Microsoft is selling), Microsoft is using its huge leverage in one category (OS) to increase its market share in another unrelated category (chat apps). This matches one of the conditions for US anti-trust action [3], and could even match the predatory pricing [uncited, hard to prove] condition (Microsoft bundling Teams for free indicates the cost of Teams is being absorbed by the Windows or some other business unit).

[1] https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2021/04/apples-....

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...

[3] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/09/antitrust-law.as...

It's just teams replacing skype and easy enough to disable, the issue with IE was strong arming I doubt Microsoft is going to strong arm slack at any other level.. same goes for Onedrive/iCloud

Relevant snippet from the Wiki article on the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit:

"The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft had abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser integration. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE. It was further alleged that this restricted the market for competing web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator or Opera), since it typically took a while to download or purchase such software at a store. Underlying these disputes were questions over whether Microsoft had manipulated its application programming interfaces to favor IE over third-party web browsers, Microsoft's conduct in forming restrictive licensing agreements with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and Microsoft's intent in its course of conduct."

To draw parallels between that lawsuit and this discussion:

1. I guess the download effort of Slack isn't really a concern anymore. And while I have no idea of the feature parity between the free versions of Teams and Slack, the free versions of both apps should probably be sufficient for casual users (i.e. the inertia of entering payment information is not a concern).

2. I have no idea if Microsoft has added any secret sauce to Windows 11 that would make Teams run better on Windows owing to tighter in-house integration. But if this is true, and Slack (or other competitors) won't be able to use this to boost their own performances as much, I suspect this could be a big deal.

I don't use any of safari/iMessage/Facetime/Maps and, gladly, they are sitting quietly in the corner. Don't think Teams stuff will behave like that

Skype does in Windows 10

They didn’t get in trouble for bundling IE. The got in trouble for legal and technical restrictions on using alternatives to IE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

They got in trouble in the EU, that's why they had to make a version without ie > Windows 7 E

I think they learned their lesson very well. Microsoft suffered little for bundling Internet Explorer into Windows. The court case cost them some time and money, and in return they made no substantive business changes, and shut out browser competition for years. They had a plan and it worked. Why shouldn’t they do it again?

it worked?!?

they pretty much lost browser war to chrome and safari

Yes, it worked, and far longer than most corporate initiatives do. The antitrust trial was decided in 2001 and Chrome didn’t launch until 2008. Microsoft owned the pathway to the Internet for Windows users for a solid decade.

If you can even uninstall it. That's honestly my biggest gripe about Windows besides the fact it's proprietary is all of the stupid shit it comes bundled with that you will never use and can't remove.

Does that mean it's finally becoming a native app? By far the worst part of MS Teams is that it's slow and can't really help when it can't connect to its servers because it's just a web page.

It's moving from electron to webview2

Do you have any information about what problems this is expected to solve?

WebView2 is shipped/serviced by Windows (auto-updates with Edgmium at roughly the exact same pace as Chromium/Chrome), and it's a shared control with a single install which Windows can optimize memory usage/performance. As opposed to Electron packages its own Chromium, updates have to be shipped inside the application at the application's pace (including and especially security updates), and the install size and memory usage/performance is bloated for every Electron app bundling lots of the exact same Chromium DLLs and whatnot.

Doesn’t Windows 10 come integrated with Skype? This would just replace that wouldn’t it.

Will uninstalling be an option? They say it's integrated, so that seems unlikely.

Most likely easy to disable. Pretty sure I have Cortana and Microsoft Store but I disabled the services, removed the Taskbar icons and never think about it heh.

I wouldn't be surprised if both of those are still running in Task Manager's process list if you look, under unassuming names like SearchUI.exe. It's quite hard to disable Microsoft's malware in my experience, a lot of it relaunches itself, or comes back after an OS update. The number of running Microsoft processes goes up every year.

I've given up. If you have a computer with a spinning rust disk this crap alone will saturate the I/O and become completely unusable. (then you have OEM bloatware which has also become harder to remove and bloated software in general on top of that.)

At this point I just hand people thumbdrives with PopOS on them when they complain that their computer is slow. Both OSes run Android apps and between that, the web, and wine most people hardly miss anything.

I doubt it. What's important too is that you have to use a MS account to use teams, goodbye local windows accounts.

Eh, I do have misgivings about Teams and such tight Teams integration since my company chose it as its default communication platform.

My biggest beef is how limited I am as user with configuration ( the notifications are too big for my taste -- and I can either choose that they show or don't) and that UI somehow feels worse than webex.

I'm on MacOS, not Windows, but I really concur with you on the notifications. They're huge, they stay on screen too long, and they can't be dismissed early. I hate that they chose not to go with the standard MacOS notification system.

Another MacOS annoyance: Teams seems to exist in every virtual desktop, so even if the main window is in (say) desktop 3 and I'm in desktop 2, if I cmd-tab to Teams it won't take me to desktop 3. I have to manually switch desktops to get back to Teams.

I'm sure they will gladly accept a billion dollar fine for their video chat service to be dominant.