Was Google Maps anti-competitive? Perhaps in the sense that it was incredibly hard to compete with, but that benefits the customer.

And let's be real, it's not like Microsoft had never conceived of a chat client before Slack came around. Slack rode the chat trend. It didn't create it.

But at the same time it’s extremely anti-competitive: essentially very few companies can invest many billions of dollars it took Google to collect the data for a product which is still very poorly monetized. Instead Google chooses to offer it for free to moat Search/Ads.

I don't see how a high cost of entry is anti-competitive...at least in a way that's google's fault. Many industries have a high cost of entry, and there's entire businesses that crop up to lower it. Technology used to have a much higher cost of entry before cloud computing, for example. If you were doing anything at scale before 2005 or so, you had to own and maintain your own metal. Even Google Maps is one of those cost lowerers. A lot of companies were able to build their business on the back of google maps APIs.

Taking information that used to be locked up, re-discovering it from the "ground truth" (literally driving every road in some cases), and then giving it to the world for free does ruin some business models based on gate keeping, but it doesn't harm the consumer.

So should society force Google to charge for Maps? How much?

With a price artifically approaching zero in a product with high margnial cost and higher long run average cost, product tying with android and google search at the least, dominant and uncontestable market power, there's a lot of bells ringing here, and more than enough to suspect significant deadweight loss to society and, yes, "harm" to consumers.

All of these terms have specific definitions, by the way. They don't just mean good or bad. And that list is far from exhaustive.

What I left out of my original story was that a third engineer chimed in (from Yahoo!) that asked if the real enemy to innovation here wasn't the map-data companies whose terms made it impossible to leverage for innovation. The cost was prohibitively high to get started. It's really what kept innovation back in maps and affording it was what google's real advantage was.

But that's a big reason why OpenStreetMaps exists today.

Now there is no service for customers to switch to. Anti competitive behavior benefits the customer as long as the company wants it that way. The moment it decides otherwise, customers hurt a lot more than they would have by paying for the service since its inception (where there would be alternatives to the service)

Is this really true? For installed software this is true. But at least with everyone I work with, it’s all Google docs now. I was honestly floored the other day when I got a presentation in an email rather than a link to one online that could be collaborated with. Maybe I’m in a bubble, but I can’t imagine going back to Word or Excel.

Microsoft has also taken some pretty big steps forward over the last couple of years when it comes to document collaboration/sharing. Most Office applications now allow for live sharing/collaboration via the desktop apps.

There’s also the O365 web-based capability similar to Docs/Sheets. Plus, these are integrated with other O365 products like OneDrive and SharePoint (laugh, but SharePoint is unlikely to go away anytime soon with enterprise customers).

I have yet to find a product differentiator that GSuite (or whatever they call it now) has over M365/O365, except maybe sometimes price. On the other hand, Microsoft has a number of differentiators over Google’s products. Even with the price differences, Enterprise customers get significant volume licensing discounts and see cost savings through not having to retrain everyone from IT administrators to day-to-day users.

I forgot to mention previously all the integration with existing system administration capabilities widely in use at companies (e.g., Active Directory, identity management/permissions/sharing permissions, etc.). It is only becoming more ingrained with Azure AD, M365 Enterprise licensing, etc.

I’m sure I am missing something, but I do not understand why a business - other than very small ones - would choose to use GSuite.

But almost all businesses are SMEs, and almost all of those are small businesses.

If you're operating at enterprise scale, and you've got dedicated contacts at Microsoft and negotiating leverage in your commercial terms for using their products and access to the top editions of those products, you're moving in a different world to most smaller businesses. That's true whether we're talking about Office, Windows or almost anything else Microsoft offers these days. For a small organisation, the pricing structure and artificially broken products and lock-in effects and so on are significant downsides to going with Microsoft.

On the other hand, if you are part of a large organisation, being able to create and collaborate on a single document or spreadsheet in isolation is still the foundation of everything, but being able to manage large numbers of those documents and spreadsheets and access to them by large numbers of people for large numbers of reasons is also an important requirement. I have yet to encounter an online competitor that really has powerful tools for things like formal revision management, organising the full set of information for large projects, and constructing large, complicated documents with many contributors who have different responsibilities. There's a whole ecosystem around MS Office that deals with these kinds of issues, but a smaller organisation would probably have little need of it.

I agree with you that some of the functionality in O365 (or M365 for that matter) is unnecessary for many small businesses. However, for the features that are most likely to be necessary, the costs and terms are not all that unreasonable and Microsoft does do their Business level plans without an annual contract.

Further, the costs between GSuite and O365 are comparable, while features are disproportionately in Microsoft's favor. Whether those features are needed or not, is a legitimate question to ask though.

Can you be a little more specific about the artificially broken products and lock-in effects are you referring to? I have not experienced those types of issues with any of the O365 tenants I set-up and currently manage.

For artificially broken, I was more thinking of products like Windows 10, where anything below Enterprise/Education is IMNSHO unsuitable for professional use for well-documented reasons around forced updates and reboots, mandatory phoning home, etc. However, to get the best of Office, you typically also need to be on Windows, as other platforms are either unsupported or very much second tier.

For lock-in effects, I'm partly talking about the commercial terms for accessing the serious products particularly for smaller businesses, partly about tactics like the various poorly documented and sometimes changing file formats Microsoft has relied on over the years to try to force upgrades, and partly about the push to use ever more of Microsoft's online services. Microsoft relies heavily on trying to get you onto its platforms, and particularly these days the establishing subscription-y enterprise-y relationships even if you're a small business that never needed that kind of relationship with MS before, and then using various technical barriers to make it hard to get off the ride.

Its main advantage is that it presents an extremely good history of who said what when, and what parts of the document were updated. It also has a cross-document “inbox” of relevant updates.

The main disadvantage is that we can’t use it with collaborators outside the company. I’m not sure if that’s specific to our company or a product limitation.

I’ve worked at SAP, Oracle, and a few large consultancies. Most of my customers are in the enterprise size range. Office is used heavily by the larger companies of the world and therefore is used by their software and service vendors. The only company I’ve ever worked with that was totally google drive was an American startup. Office is still very much the dominant suite of software across most companies although there are plenty of smaller American companies trying to work without it. I personally can’t tolerate the the lack of basic formatting that docs offers are how limited sheets and slides are. Just adding section numbers in docs needs an add on and if your collaborators don’t have the same add on they just add new sections without numbering. I can’t imagine large documents without numbering...

Would it be anticompetitive to add a chat feature to that program? If so, when do software updates become anticompetitive? If not, what is the functional difference between that and the situation we have now?

WeChat and Indian "Super Apps" followed this model to grow to success. WeChat Pay in 2013 was basically like Facebook taking WhatsApp and using it to become a player competing against MasterCard/Visa.

Yes you can build a giant do it all monolith app to duplicate your competitions features and then crush them. The fact the apps are packed as a single program instead of via distinct programs isn't THAT meaningful and I'm kind of happy it isn't otherwise we would veer into lawyers designing programs more and more.

The Slack/Microsoft thing smacks of anticompetitive behavior simply because Teams is essentially free and on Microsoft's lowest cost plans and Microsoft is transparently attempting to crush Slack to death in a price war to secure a monopoly. The underlying quality of the two products is rendered a moot point.

I guess it's hard to see what's a transparent attempt to crush Slack and what's just the regular enhancement of business. After all, you can hardly buy Word alone and no one complains.

The problem I run into here is that somehow relying on antitrust prosecutorial discretion does kind of make it hard to innovate, since you might be unsure about the line between outcompeting and being anticompetitive. Slack drove HipChat out of business because it was frankly terrible. But I do think the lawyers can mostly figure this out.

Really saying that Microsoft won't let you buy their most popular products alone is just another way to phrase this situation.

That seems like a very good thing to complain about! Why should I pay for Excel when I only want Word?

Word and Excel integration is one thing. In my opinion, the integration with Outlook is the bigger selling point. I want to schedule a teams meeting with a customer? Create a calendar invitation and click a button to make it a Teams meeting. Dial-in information is then automatically placed in the invitation. That same meeting (and the rest of mg Outlook calendar) is also now synced with my calendar in Teams, so now I receive alerts in Teams when someone starts the meeting, the meeting start time, etc.

Other services have integration with Outlook, but nothing like what Teams has, and to go against the grain a bit, that aspect of Teams’ UX is fantastic.

I think one thing many are missing is a lot of new Teams users aren’t using it for the Slack-like features (e.g., channels). Most of the people I’ve worked with on teams over the last 6 months use it solely for direct messaging, file sharing, direct phone calls to coworkers, internal meetings, teleconferencing, etc. for those purposes, Teams’ UX is more than adequate and I actually prefer it over Slack.

That is not to say it’s perfect though (dear Microsoft: please make changing input/output device settings more intuitive and well-behaved...).

Outlook reminders will say click to join zoom meeting.

And the zoom client will have a list of your upcoming meetings

Further, why leave the Microsoft O365 ecosystem if you’re already using it? Teams offers other capabilities and integrations that Zoom doesn’t have and the Teams integration does not require additional user action to add to Outlook (it’s there by default). Other value adds for enterprises include centralized identity/license/user management via the existing O365 admin portal/Azure AD, singular invoicing, consistent SLA with single vendor, etc. I haven’t looked into Zoom’s SSO integrations with things like AD or Azure AD, but again, that’s another example of resistance for enterprise customers/system administrators.

As far as I understand, it is Microsoft who are putting third parties at an unfair disadvantage by not offering them the same level of integration.

These days, bundling fueling stations (Tesla) and access to streaming audio services (some head units) arguably crosses the line.

Some cars won’t start if you replace the radio with a third party unit. I’m not sure when that started being a common thing.

It’s like when Google uses their monopoly on search to highlight their own price comparisons in the top part of the result section, thus being anti competitive towards other price comparison companies (e.g. Pricerunner)

I have barely touched office over the past decade; been using Google Workspace. My past four employers have used Google. I have been using it personally, at work, for longer. My weightlifting club using Google sheets. My mortgage sheets were Google sheets.

The only company I’ve ever worked with that was totally google drive was an American startup.

Office is still very much the dominant suite of software across most companies although there are plenty of smaller American companies trying to work without it.

I personally can’t tolerate the the lack of basic formatting that docs offers are how limited sheets and slides are. Just adding section numbers in docs needs an add on and if your collaborators don’t have the same add on they just add new sections without numbering. I can’t imagine large documents without numbering...

Lets make the unit of measure a paying business subscription. We will call them business units, or BUs. Microsoft Office is 5MBUs(mega business units) away from being a monopoly.

I also never claimed it was a monopoly in the first. Looks like a few people are arguing against their own projections.

As other commenters say, many others don’t.

> The office suite market in the United States is split between Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365, with G Suite being the market leader holding a share of 59.41 percent and Office 365 occupying 40.39 percent, as of October 2020

I mean, maybe old-style orgs still use MS office, but it looks like all the non-IT ones are moving to Google.

Schools in our town use Google calendar and Google classroom. My gym uses google docs and google forms. Many of the random event "sign-up" pages are on google forms.

"Free" is a great price, and many businesses (especially smaller ones) do not want to pay extra for ms office.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/961105/japan-market-shar...

Yeah technically it's not a monopoly because there is Linux.

If there were already half a dozen Slacks in use and they were all interchangable and customers were indifferent to which one was on their computer, would Microsoft be jumping in with their own product?

For example, this is why Microsoft was sued for antitrust in 2001. Microsoft was alleged to have used its market power in OEM operating systems (Windows) to sell its browser (Internet Explorer) through bundling. Microsoft settled with the DOJ.

You could allege that in this case, Microsoft is doing the same thing — using market power in office software to sell unrelated chat software. This practice is harming competitors to such a degree that they seek to be acquired by other companies. It's also telling that HN regards Slack as a better product than Teams. The resulting decrease of competition is detrimental to the consumer.

Maybe you want to argue that Teams is being provided for free, so this is better for the consumer. While that nominally might be true, Microsoft must pay for development on Teams somehow. Consumers are likely paying higher prices than if Teams was not being developed. And even if they aren't, we still should consider how bundling can lead to consolidation.

Not to mention companies like Uber using massive amounts of VC money to break laws and social contracts in whole countries despite no goal of actually being profitable. Medium did the same when providing free access and then turning on the paywall after that. There are many more examples.

That's a company policy setting and not something inherent to Teams.

Seriously, nobody should ever require SMS in 2020. Kill that nonsense.

It does (indirectly) if you use SAML single sign on (which many large corporations do). That is what is happening with Teams. You're not being asked to sign in to Teams itself. You're being asked to identify yourself via Microsoft single sign on and the people that set up that companies Microsoft single sign on have set SMS as the default 2FA.

Whether or not you should use SMS for 2FA is of course a separate discussion.