PowerPoint, Excel, Keyhole, YouTube, Google Maps and Android could be significantly better. There’s no competition, which means they keep their users, which means they’re not incentivised to find those ways in which those products could be significantly better.

Okay wait, Excel does have some competition now, with Google Sheets, and that can be seen in Microsoft’s recent push to distinguish Excel from Google Sheets with new features like the ‘LET’ and ‘XLOOKUP’ formula functions.

Android has no competition? I could swear there is iOS. Same with Maps - Bing, Here, Waze, Apple, Yandex even OSM provide their own maps. Do I fail to recognize a point you're making here?

Waze is owned by Google.

That's barely enough competition...

Fuck yeah, let's have 50 different websites doing the exact same thing. The problem with your utopic vision of competition is the fact that people need to get paid for their work.

The result of this little competition means that Huawei is now struggling to build its own reliable push notification server because it is not allowed to use Google's one. I'm not saying they should use different code bases and I'm not saying they shouldn't get paid for their work, also not saying that there should be 50 different websites, but I think another 4-5 would be healthy for everyone.

In the examples that you site, the acquisitions were complementary additions. In this case, Adobe already has a competing product suite.

In the YouTube example, Google already had in house tech. Google videos even continued to run for a few more years.

Why are we just taking for granted that the Youtube acquisition wasn't anti-competitive? There is a reason that Youtube hasn't had any competitors in the 15 years that Google bought it. It's because video can't be done as cheaply as Youtube does it, unless you have an entirely separate industry propping it up. Selling on product at a massive loss and propping it up with a separate industry is anti-competitive.

Nobody can compete on Youtube-style video unless they first create Google. If that isn't true, where are the competitors? TikTok is the first one to even resemble a competitor, but it took 17 years and even that isn't really the same thing.

Adobe shouldn't be compared to Microsoft or Google, or hell even Salesforce, which are really good at integrating new companies into their existing suite of tools.

Adobe is comparable to Oracle or IBM, where acquisitions mean the death of product innovation as Adobe has a hard time attracting and retaining engineers to the same degree as the above companies.

Are these examples supposed to be arguing for the purchase? Lol.

Those are all cautionary tales...