[jedieaston]

Blocking it's removal? How? Teams was installed with Office on my current system, and it pops up in Add/Remove Programs. IT Admins can prevent it from being installed with Office (and remove it from all of their machines if it has already been installed)[0]. It's not included with Windows either (just as Office isn't). And Slack isn't blocked from being installed either.

What's the anti-competitive angle here, other than the OS is created by Microsoft, the IM system is created by Microsoft, the Office suite is created by Microsoft, and the licenses are often bundled? Apple would be guilty of a similar thing by shipping Messages.app and iWork with macOS, no?

0: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/teams-install#...

[annoyingnoob]

As a person that sets direction for IT in an organization that uses Office 365, I can say that I didn't appreciate that MS forced Teams on us. And the controls that you mentioned were not available from day 1.

I don't support Slack here but MS really forced Teams on us like it or not.

[beezle]

Not being an office 365 user, how is it any different than other software? For instance, I believe the LibreOffice installer defaults to install all the modules. But I can change it to just install writer and calc.

[pmontra]

I'm not familiar with Office licensing. Do you have to pay more because they bundled Teams (maybe) or do you have to use it? (that would be surprising)

Anyway, at least you can self host Exchange. Slack is centralized.

[hcurtiss]

What do you mean MS forced Teams on you? IT has always been able to control what apps install with the office suite, including Teams. Teams being freely offered as a bundled service certainly incentivizes its use, but there has never been any penalty for using an alternative service other than, of course, the cost of layering on another service.

[waddlesworth]

For me, Microsoft Teams installed itself one day, unprompted. In order to remove it, I uninstalled it.

The following day, it came back. It turns out you have to remove both Microsoft Teams and something I think was called "Teams Machine-Wide Installer." Only then would it stay removed.

[smileybarry]

> It turns out you have to remove both Microsoft Teams and something I think was called "Teams Machine-Wide Installer."

Isn't that because your org chose to deploy Teams, though?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/msi-deployme....

[marcinzm]

Microsoft has basically a monopoly on enterprise tools such as word/excel/etc. Apple does not.

[jm4]

There are so many more choices than there were 20 years ago. Microsoft makes a kick ass office suite. There's nothing monopolistic about it. They've been in this game longer than anyone and that's reflected in the feature set.

Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office.

Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

[whereistimbo]

No, according to https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/office-suites--370 Google holds more marketshare with G Suite with 59.91%, compared to Microsoft Office 365 with 39.96%

[addicted]

Google Docs/Sheets?

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more google docs/sheets created on certain days of the year than there are Word/Excel documents.

[TulliusCicero]

Isn't G Suite fairly popular these days as well? What's the market share for these productivity suites?

[radley]

> It's not included with Windows

While it may not be included in the OS, it is certainly promoted in Windows. I saw a full-size pop-up ad in Windows telling me to install Teams. I did not have Office installed.