Hacker News Reader

Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

Antitrust doesn't punish success, it punishes the abuse using the position that success brought. In the US, the Chicago School of Thought says a company doesn't do anything wrong from a market position until customers are charged more, so megacorps dumping free use of product on customers is not factored into the position.

In the EU, monopoly is gauged by how much choice and diversity is lost, even in the face of free product. I am very much aligned with the EU view of monopoly.

Dumping free services is great (temporarily) for the user, but ultimately harms them in that it starves out competition that can't afford such dumping.

*edit, words.

View on HN

> In the US, the Chicago School of Thought says a company doesn't do anything wrong from a market position until customers are charged more

> In the EU, monopoly is gauged by how much choice and diversity is lost, even in the face of free product. I am very much aligned with the EU view of monopoly.

Interestingly the US used to have the EU viewpoint as well, until the 1970s. Robert Bork was one of the main people behind that.

For those interested in a deeper look at Antitrust in America, Planet Money had a great three part series on the topic [1].

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/20/704426033/anti...

Are there not already viable free alternatives to all of MS's, as well as to many of their paid services? I don't see how MS is in a unique position, aside from being more vertically integrated than anyone else (excepting Apple, on a different range of products).

Users of technical software (I.e. developers, especially for websites) have never had it better.

that’s a false dichotomy

IMHO, price is one thing you look at as a customer. If the value you derive is greater than what you pay for it you should definitely pay the price for the product.

people don’t use vscode because it’s free. they use it because it’s great.

I use vscode because it's free. I use eclipse because it's free. I use sublime because it's "free for evaluation" forever.

The convenient to download and install on any machine at any given time without having to deal with payment removes friction and it's a huge thing.

vim is free, and has a large user base. But even more people use VSCode because it's powerful, free, and easy to use. Meanwhile, folks are rebooting their boxes just to exit vim.

counterpoint: i pay for intellij because it’s great. eclipse can be free forever but that does not make it less of a dumpster fire.

Don't kid yourself with it. People use vscode, because it's free - first - and because it's great - second. It wouldn't have probably even 1% of it's user base and plugin writers otherwise.

There are tons of free options out there though. People chose to use VSCode from the list of free tools because it is great.

And I have no problem paying for an IDE, but I stopped because VSCode was as good, if not better, than any paid option out there for my uses.

If "free" and "has plugins" were what mattered, there is Notepad++, Atom, Emacs, and many other choices. VS Code is doing rather better than all of them.

I only said that price is an overriding consideration. It would not matter how much better it is, if it would not be free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com