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Comment by brmgb | Hacker News Reader

I think you are involuntarily given a great exemple against the point you are trying to make.

WhatsApp is the de facto default messenger even on iOS and despite having to go the AppStore to install it in most of Europe and South America.

The situation has a lot to do with Android not bundling a default messenger. So yes, competition authorities are very much right to be investigating bundling. It’s a real attack against free and fair competition.

Plus it’s not like you are not actually paying for Teams in your subscription. Actually you are even if you don’t use it which is silly. Products should be sold by themselves with a proper price tag.

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>Plus it’s not like you are not actually paying for Teams in your subscription. Actually you are even if you don’t use it which is silly.

Well I'm also paying for Spotify subscription but I never listen to Justin Biber yet he's still on the platform I'm paying for anyway, but that's just how bundles work.

Would be nice as a consumer to cherry pick lower priced plans specifically on the exact pieces of SW or products we want out of the larger pool/catalogue, but then I doubt many SaaS would be in business if every customer would just choose only the specific pieces that they need and not get everything as a bundle.

Or maybe it would work from a business PoV, I dunno, but maybe then in a nefarious way.

That’s not comparable and you know it. Spotify offers to you is a software and a subscription to their music catalogue. The music is content. The different pieces of software in Office 365 are not. They all do widely different things. You could argue that word, excel and PowerPoint somehow go together if you squint hard enough (I don’t and don’t think they should be bundled either) but Teams does something entirely different and was only brought there for opportunistic reasons (as does Outlook actually).

> then I doubt many SaaS would be in business if every customer would just choose only the specific pieces that they need and not get everything as a bundle.

Maybe the issue is the SaaS business model then. But somehow I doubt it because Slack managed fine because Microsoft started unfairly undercutting them.

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