The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.
Try pricing something against this insane dumping price Google sets - there is no TAM, the M does not payback enough to justify the effort.
The cross-financing with Ads would finally stop and fair pricing would come.
It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades! That sounds ridiculous on its face. Of all the product areas to complain about Google having a monopoly, you picked the office suite!?
HN tends strongly to one side of this argument, but really this is trending towards a "Google Derangement Syndrome" kind of analysis.
Office is Microsofts bread and butter, for Google its a side project that disrupts Microsofts business model.
So... you're saying the presence in the market of a viable competitor improved the value provided to consumers? Who knew!
> It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades
Both can be true at the same time. For example Tmobile and Sprint merging led to even more pressure on any new or existing networks that were/are not in the top 4. But it also led to increased competition with Verizon and AT&T.