Comment by harikb
1 day ago
Products don't necessarily win on merit.
Microsoft Teams "won" entirely because it was given away free with Office. Even though it is acceptable these days, it was horrible when it started. There is no way it could have won without unlimited backing from a bigger force.
You have to see EU trying these things in the same light.
> Even though it is acceptable these days
Have you used Teams these days? If you think it's acceptable, I suggest that may be the Stockholm Syndrome kicking in.
I'd take teams over google chat any day.
And maybe you'd take gargling diarrhea over gargling battery acid, but the rest of us are looking on in disgust and pity either way.
He didn't say good. I'd agree with his assessment. It's acceptable.
And for all its many flaws it does have some advantages over Meet (which is what my company switched to it from):
* Remote control of other people's desktops (except on Linux unfortunately). Meet has no solution for that. Endless "no up a bit, left.. no you had it. Third one from the top. Here let me share my screen instead".
* Conversations you have in meetings don't disappear into the aether. In fact for recurring meetings it's even clever enough to use the same chat.
* You can directly call people. Meet requires you to create a meeting and then invite someone.
Ok that's all I've got. My list of complaints is much longer, but even so it just about makes it to acceptable.
Kind of crazy that Google hasn't just solved this though. Clone Slack, integrate it with Meet. Make a high performance desktop client (not web app) with remote control. They'd make a fortune.
It falls below the bar of acceptable for me because I can't share videos or images over a certain size because it requires someone in my org to have configured SharePoint correctly which is apparently an impossible task.
Sure, Betamax was technically superior to VHS. But in the end the market still decides… nobody said “better” means technically superior… just something people want to use an other options available to them. “Good enough” with attractive value to the individual/business typically wins.
Sure, and right now, a product being owned by a corporation susceptible to direct influence from the US government is a massive negative when people are evaluating products.
The evalutation metric for various vital projects has massively changed over the last couple years. These European products still need to be technically good, but they no longer need to be better than American products in order to find customers.
With the current level of geopolitical tensions, this is nowhere near enough to cause a massive exodous where all systems that were previously working fine are ripped apart and replaced with new systems, *but* one can be sure that whenever people are looking at new projects, or updates to old systems, the evalutation metrics have changed quite a bit, and this is creating strong momentum for European tech.
Not to get too much into a debate about Beta vs VHS, but VHS did have longer run times and its cheapness was the main reason it won, It just fit better for the consumer overall desires at the time
Exactly. It's about whose definition of "better" you use. Sony thought that a better picture would win out, and it did where that mattered: TV studios and video-journalists used Betamax until digital formats took over. For consumers, "better" meant cheaper tapes and longer run time.
JVC also licensed the VHS format to many manufacturers, so there was a lot of competition on recorders, further driving the price of ownership down. I don't recall anyone ever selling Betamax other than Sony.
Edit: JVC actually released VHS as an open standard, not a license, per Wikipedia.
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Technology connections did a video on Betamax vs VHS that debunked this in a practical sense as Betamax had a version II that allowed 2 hour recordings, the quality was slightly better to early VHS instead the significant improvement of beta I (original standard)
Retail movie releases used II since most movies could fit on one tape. Beta I was rare and later betamax decks just ignored it or something for compatibility.
VHS HQ and HiFi, which came much later when beta was basically dead, was probably better than beta II and close to beta I in quality
I have made most of my karma off of trashing Teams, and while it is "better" than it was before (I rarely get infinite loops crashing my browser now), it is hard to call it acceptable.
Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting. The entire purpose is supposed to be collaboration with other people; if they aren't going to notify me on the web app, what's the point?
I know a lot of it is because of their need to support an infinite number of potential configurations, but if it had been a protocol instead of an app, we would have had the perfect frontend by now. (But then, how would they be stealing all of my data?)
> Yesterday I was supposed to have a call. I have the app open and it never once let me know that there was a meeting.
Lol, we use WebEx, and someone actually went and developed an internal app to make it usable by piloting WebEx through accessibility APIs (including starting the call a minute before the meeting starts).
So it's not just a failing of Teams.
I have also seen situations where sales opted into Microsoft early on. When they grew in relation to engineering forced the rest of the company to standardize to Microsoft products so they could get better rates and “save money”.
The EU can also ban access to US products, once EU alternatives are available, for example. "National security" or whatever PR is needed to make the case.
I'm unsure the EU could build and require anything worse than Teams, considering the open source landscape for that product category, for example. The primitives exist, scale them up and lock out US companies from the EU market with policy. Recycle the capital internally, just like VC funds do with their portfolio companies.
I'm absolutely against banning usage of computer programs and platforms BUT I would rally for getting Teams banned from the face of the earth and applying a law to prevent Microsoft to attempt to create or acquire any kind of communicator for the next 50 years.
It wasn't seen as a priority national security measure before.
Now we have a US leader who may wake up tomorrow and put 100% tariffs on cloud services to EU corps or have the NSA demand chat logs.
The security issue is real and the main motivation behind decoupling from US cloud services.
Export tarrifs aren't really a thing, particularly for software. Making US cloud more expensive would only make transitioning away from them faster.
The 25% export tariff on Nvidia chips from the US to China wants to have a word.