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.