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Comment by singhrac | Hacker News Reader

The more I consider it, the more I think that bundling is anticompetitive. I guess there are some synergies to having Teams and Word integrated, but they don't seem very large. It seems if you want to do chat, you must also do all productivity software to compete, which is a real shame.

The ideal world (to me) is that Microsoft is forced to charge some price for Teams being turned on in a 365 subscription, which means that some companies can justify paying for 365 + Slack, not that Slack is acquired and bundled in with Quip. Honestly I think Salesforce will lose that battle; Microsoft's Word/Excel monopoly is unbreakable. I wish that didn't mean that they could weaponize that into destroying Slack, instead of competing with them in a regular way.

That's an idealist's take, though, it seems impossible to write reasonable rules that produce that kind of outcome without harming innovation.

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I remember, a long time ago, I went to a barcamp-style event hosted at Google in Mountain View. This was maybe a year after Google Maps was released. I forget how it came up, but at one of the sessions, an attendee got into a heated debate with a googler over whether it was ok that Google was able to release Google Maps to the world for free, essentially putting for-pay map services out of business. Apparently, Google Maps put this guy's startup out of business since there was no way to monetize anymore.

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.

It's funny how we've taken it for granted that the service of maps and routing (one I consider a technological marvel) is free just when Google starts to put ads in Maps. I guess it must have been hard to convince venture capital in 2005 to fund the innovation necessary (or, more likely, early Google engineers were incredibly good).

In 2005, the VC scene was very different. YC was doing its first year. Cloud computing wasn't really a thing yet. You had to have own your own metal if you were at any serious scale.

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.

What happens if Google decides to exert its authority with its monopoly (charging a ton, charging businesses to appear, etc)?

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)

Well, there's Bing Maps and Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap. Also, paper maps are still a thing, believe it or not. There's always been map competitors, so your argument is already a little shaky. However, let's go with the spirit of your argument and say Google is now the only game in town when it comes to maps. What happens is that antitrust law kicks in. The FTC web site has great material explaining how it works. Attempted monopolization with the intent of controlling market price is arguably a black and white violation of the Sherman Act. This would not necessarily require there to be competitors, but would require Google to operate in good faith with the public, similar to public utility companies and even cable providers.

The only redeeming quality of Google Maps is that it is incredibly good product.

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 mean, that's a pretty great redeeming quality!

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.

Predatory pricing is the issue here, not high cost of entry. Anti-competitive activities have specific definitions rooted in the study of industrial organization. You can't go around making judgment calls based on what seems intuitively good or bad to you.

The anti-competitive question varies country to country, but in the US (where Google, the example given, is based) the question is: "does this cause consumer harm?" not "does this make it hard for another company to make money at it?".

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?

No, anticompetitive behavior is not determined with a single question. It's a whole field of study. You may as well say companies evaluate their code by the single criteria of "how fast does it run?"

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.

As a user, I honestly prefer Open Street Maps, because it has a much finer level of detail. For instance, it shows playgrounds, which is great if you are a parent.

Ive heard a bit about these barcamp style events (I'm not in SF) and I'm interested in replicating this culture or event format. might you have a link or search terms where I can find more info about how these are like?

The problem with the trend is the next step, where significant monetisation only starts once a monopoly has been created (first kill the competition through subsidisation from a big company and a price tag of £free, then create a poorer product with loads of ads to profit once the original company is dead).

> Microsoft's Word/Excel monopoly is unbreakable

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.

Pretty sure you’re just not the intended user. Many in finance are pretty much forced to use Excel, and specifically on Windows because there’s functionality that isn’t available on OSX

We use a few things at work (including google docs by not office). Quip is by far the universal favorite.

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.

In over 10 years I’ve rarely received a google drive doc / sheet or presso. Can’t imagine relying on those school child level tools to be honest.

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...

Having worked in a number of large commercial enterprise (non-IT product) and government environments, next to no one uses Google Docs. The ones that do, are looked at sideways and are a pain to work with due to interoperability issues with Word/Excel and Docs/Sheets (yes, they do exist).

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.

Inertia is a thing. A guy I work with has used Office for decades. He's never even tried Google Docs. Refuses to look at stuff if you send him a Google drive link. Asks for a Word document. He doesn't do anything sophisticated. Google Docs would be more than adequate. Just set in his ways.

Yep and by my completely speculative estimate, that is likely the case for 90% of people born before the mid-90s. Office has been pretty pervasive in professional work and even academic environments for quite some time. My first exposure to Word/Excel was in high school and its use was continued through college.

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.

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.

Those are all certainly fair points and I definitely appreciate you taking the time to provide your perspective!

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.

Can you be a little more specific about the artificially broken products and lock-in effects are you referring to?

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.

At least if you're on a Linux desktop, the GSuite experience is vastly better than the online Office 365 one, as there's no desktop clients. That's a pretty small market segment though.

Yeah, that is a good point! Like you mentioned though, it’s a very small market segment and I could see Microsoft spending more resources on Linux interoperability in the future. They have already been doing it with some products and I would be surprised if it’s not on their mid-long term roadmap.

It's tricky, though. Technical aspects nonwithstanding, suppose what we call "Microsoft Office" had never been separate programs to begin with, and right from the beginning had been a single binary that did Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. depending on what you clicked, and then that binary had just gotten new features every time Microsoft discovered a new thing they thought it needed.

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?

One will recall that Internet Explorer was literally integrated into Windows 98, replacing the file explorer at one point, so Microsoft could argue they couldn't unbundle it.

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 think Microsoft bundling IE is a very valid comparison.

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.

> After all, you can hardly buy Word alone and no one complains.

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

IIRC it used to be possible to buy them separately.

The fact you can't hardly buy a copy of word without having a copy of teams thrown in is what's the issue. You can't get excel with powerBI without also having to buy teams. It's more how Microsoft sells Teams than the fact that Teams exists at all that raises my eyebrow. Teams doesn't sell Teams, Word and Excel sell Teams.

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

This is like complaining about the coupons you get included from an online order. You're technically correct, but the version you get for "free" is pretty much just a freemium version of the actual product. It's usually limited in such a way that maybe small teams would get some benefits, but any sizeable organizations would have to pay to upgrade. As an example, being able to use an API requires an upgraded license

They kind of charge for Teams already, at least for some customers/users. In order to have a teleconference dial-in number, the user that created the conference has to have a license (I believe it’s somewhere around $10 p/mo). In my company, this is more or less a fundamental requirement if you interact in a customer facing role.

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...).

Zoom has most of this as well, one click creating meeting in calendar invite with all your dial in information

Outlook reminders will say click to join zoom meeting.

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

Fair point, but I have used Zoom and GoToMeeting’s integrations with Outlook and there may be some similar (or identical) features, but the experience with Teams is a far more integrated experience in Outlook.

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.

I don’t disagree with you and other companies do the same thing to Microsoft. Just saying it’s reality at this point in time and at least for now, offers an advantage for Teams.

which parts of a toyota must not be made by toyota though? tires? air bags? seats? audio? air con?

Toyota aren't a monopoly and the auto industry is one of the most regulated on earth

Microsoft is not monopoly by any means now.

90%+ on the OS speaks otherwise.

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

And Mac OS, which is about 14% of desktops?

MacOS never ever as a 14% desktop market share. Maybe in some states in the US but worldwide it's below 5%. It might reach 14% if you include iOS.

It's about 14% per https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.

More like 7%: https://macdailynews.com/2019/10/10/apples-mac-holds-7-6-of-... This is actual sales, visibility on the Internet is skewed off by a number of limitations.

More like 4% depending on what statistic you'll believe.

It's about 14% per https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide.

linux devices far outnumber windows ones...

It’s not on OS, but on Word/Excel they are considered monopoly in this context

You might be surprised at the market share of Google docs

Google Docs can't really compete with the MS feature set.

It can for 90% of users, I'd say.

I guess I implied that I think they're a monopoly in the area of productivity software, which isn't entirely fair since Google Suite exists. But in my shallow opinion Google Sheets is not really a competitor to Excel.

Five years ago I would say you are right. But Google Sheets is now good enough for all but the most serious Excel power users, and I'm sure they're still improving it.

Word/Excel is the defacto default across industry. It’s a monopoly. Microsoft is using their monopoly on office suite to get a competitive advantage on chat/video collaboration software.

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)

In the year 2000.

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...

It's not a monopoly and far from it.

How far exactly? Most businesses use word.

Most people know Word. Most schools teach Word. It's not the companies' fault for following trends that make it easiest on their employees.

Most businesses you have interacted with use word.

As other commenters say, many others don’t.

Many don’t but most do.

where do you get this info? the statistics say otherwise [0]:

> 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...

I suppose the distance between being the sole provider, or having exclusive control over, office suite software and the 5 million businesses paying for GSuite as of last year? Or the 2 billion active GSuite users?

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.

And office had 155 million in 2018 to your 5 million......

Ergo.. Not a monopoly.

How do you quantify?

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

My company, and many that I am aware of primarily use google docs. I could get behind duopoloy though.

Most of those things probably are not made by Toyota. Maybe the seats are.

yes indeed. the question is whether its ok for toyota to make tires. at which point is it no longer part of the car?

I'm not sure, but why would they want to? It's a very mature product, with many established competing manufacturers, and not much room for any real improvement or profit margin.

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?

should laws prevent them though? is toyota. or microsoft. allowed to make more than 1 product?

Sure you can, but treat them as a standalone product. Currently companies (like Amazon with AWS) are using massively profitable products to dump prices in totally unrelated industries and kill off the competition.

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.

as a consumer i find it a brilliant deal? Softbank is subsidising my cab ride!

Sure but hopefully you're a citizen also that values a healthy, vibrant and fair economy, not only a consumer

Microsoft is allowed to make more than one product. Microsoft is not allowed to use abuse their market dominance in one product to help them capture another market, with harm to the consumer.

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.

If Slack is marketing their product for businesses and as an office product ("we're trying to kill email"), then it's hardly unrelated. If companies are looking for a solution that streamlines the functionality of SharePoint, Teleconferencing, and collaboration, it seems directly within Microsoft's wheelhouse to include Teams as a part of M365.

The classic analogy says Toyota shouldn’t be allowed to own the roads.

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.

Is it just me or does anyone else find Microsoft Teams horribly unusable? Every time I try to log in (for a client's project) it wants a goddamn SMS authentication and Slack never had me do that BS. I don't even use SMS and so I have to dig through Twilio API just to log in.

I have multiple office365 accounts and within those accounts, and in a large number of different teams. The UX of switching between these is absolutely terrible.

It has its problems but so does Slack. It seems to be getting better quickly though. I applaud MS for having a Linux client that actually works. The biggest annoyance is that it doesn't remember my phone number when using phone audio for meetings. The UI is a bit confusing at times but I'm getting used to it.

Teams is probably the buggiest software on Earth. A true achievement.

Does it actually work? It seems to crash and freeze my machine for 15 seconds at every startup. It also loves going full screen on my 4K monitor. Spews out 404 errors half the time when I try to log in. Freaking 404 errors! That shouldn't even be a thing.

Works great. I run it on Ubuntu 20.04 in a virtualbox VM running on Ubuntu 20.04 as I keep my work stuff in a VM. Audio and video work fine, although I generally use phone audio because my bluetooth doesn't seem to work in the VM. It works fine on the host OS though. Also, I can use phone audio with the USB webcam on the PC providing the video and it works great.

It supports other 2FA methods too (although it's possible your client has set it to force SMS, maybe that's possible)

AFAIK the default is that it's SMS on first login but you can change it to something else afterwards, which seems quite stupid.

That's the problem, I don't even use SMS, I deprecated it starting in 1999 and ended deprecation in 2007. It's 2020 already. Use e-mail. It's better than SMS in every way.

No, never gave it a phone number and have 2FA enforced by the org and active.

I've meant default for org-wide policy. If your org admin is aware of it it can be changed.

it wants a goddamn SMS authentication

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

Well at least Slack doesn't even offer such stupid policies, so I prefer Slack. I began the deprecation process of SMS around 1999 with the first Blackberry which supported this awesome new thing called e-mail. E-mail is this FANTASTIC new thing that offers more than 140 characters, allows larger attachments. It works just like SMS, except you can receive them even if you change your SIM card while travelling! Your inbox moves with you from provider to provider! How COOL is that!

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

Well at least Slack doesn't even offer such stupid policies

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.

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