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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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