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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

> “force installing it for millions,...

Quite the framing. Some of us consider this to be an amazing feature. I have approximately zero hours per day available to manage machine images and 3rd party integration bullshit.

Do any of these antitrust proponents ever consider the value that many small businesses and startups are able to extract by being able to do everything with one simple bundled offering?

I get the argument and the principles of competition, but can we look at the bundling as a feature in and of itself as well? Should we make the IT experience of SMBs worse on purpose to satisfy the ideological curiosities and principles of a select few participants? Could I frame this as big business trying to indirectly oppress small business?

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The ease of your deployment is not the point.

The point is that if we allow very large businesses with a dominant market position to destroy smaller competitors in another market by bundling, then we all suffer.

We get reduced choice, reduced competition, worse software and higher prices.

Have you ever been made responsible for managing the technology for an entire business enterprise?

No. Have you ever been made responsible for utterly destroying your competitors?

I hope they were.

Your job is to provide tech to make employees efficient and effective. When you take a shortcut and choose garbage like Teams to make YOUR job easier you're just fucking everyone else over to save yourself a few hours at best.

So, what will you choose ? zoom ? gmeet ?

If anything, the utter disaster of Teams quality is the prime example of what kind of utter product turds survive because they're propped up by monopoly abuse. Any kind of free market would let this die years ago. Teams was a dying joke before it got bundled.

Anyone who wants to use it can visit the official store, or similar.

Not to defend Teams but having to visit an AppStore to download a separate app is a hassle for most users who tend to use what's already on their system out of the box and tend to happy that way with the lower friction. Those who are unhappy with Teams, can and always do download and use another app.

Similarly, it's why iMessage gained wide adoption, became and stayed the de facto messaging app on iOS despite the users being able to go on the AppStore and download any other free cross platform messenger. It was already on their phones and it worked well enough not to push users to look elsewhere.

So if we can file an antitrust investigation in Microsoft for bundling Teams with Windows, why don't we also go after Apple for bundling iMessage with iOS under the same logic? Or after Google for monopolizing the web browser market with Chrome? Where does the buck stop on these ecosystems that have monopolies in their respective sectors?

We already went through something similar nearly 15 years ago when Windows copies sold in EU would not come with IE preinstalled but would prompt you to choose which of the 4 major browsers at the time (IE, FF, Chrome, Opera) you would like installed (while now those same browsers would be FF and 3 flavors of Chrome, how ironic). Was a good idea at the time that needs updated and refreshed for modern platforms and tools, not just Teams.

the element missing here is an old idea -- appliance versus tool. Post-Industrial revolution, inventions of all kinds could be mass produced and marketed, but to whom? for what? The idea of 'appliance' is as you say.. consumer wants it for a function, they buy it, it should work.

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.

>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.

>It's why iMessage gained wide adoption

In a single country in the world. Everywhere else people use third-party apps that you download from an app store.

>In a single country in the world.

*the most financially lucrative consumer market in the world

> Those who are unhappy with Teams, can and always do download and use another app.

Not if you don't control your machine like most corporate users? Anyway Slack was installed on my image before Teams existed. Then the company goes well why are we paying for Slack when we have Teams?

>Then the company goes well why are we paying for Slack when we have Teams?

To play the devil's advocate, that's the bean counters' job, no? Otherwise, whithout any oversight over finances, the expenses can easily spiral out of control and hurt the bottom line. Probably no big deal in the wealthy US where VC money is plentiful, but in Europe where start-ups need to be scrappy, it starts to add up.

As a consumer, I also ask myself, "well if I pay for Netflix, Prime, etc, can I just get rid of most of them and only keep one?"

Of course but MS has no incentive to compete on merit when Teams is "free" and the users are worse off for it. This sucks. We're not going to get paid more because our IM solution is cheaper but our job will suck that much more.

That's why you integrate as many workflows and alerts into slack as possible, it gives a reason why you cant move to teams.

I'm all good with your proposal, as long as the "one simplified bundled offering" can be preconfigured to install a Teams competitor, instead of Teams itself.

Otherwise it's simply abusing dominant market position.

How many components of Microsoft's offering must provide options for 3rd party integration? If someone starts a multimedia player company (a la VLC) and decides they want to charge a premium fee, would we find ourselves having similar conversation about antitrust? What about MSPaint, or file explorer?

All of them.

> Otherwise it's simply abusing dominant market position.

Should this actually be independent of market position? Basically if you offer an OS or something, you can not bundle anything at all in it if someone asks to have their paid option as alternative.

Let say someone writes paid CLI-tools for Linux. Could they go around all distros and demand they unbundle things from them so they can offer some way to sell their own inside it? Maybe remove vi, less and so on. Or even entire shell...

Are there any material advantages gained by linux distributions by providing cli tools, vi less, entire shells? Do they gain an ability to enter and control new market segments, or ability to control standards than everyone else must follow?

Microsoft does gain an significant advantage by bundling Teams. Do linux distributions gain similar advantages by bundling shells? Do they even have similar impact on others in the industy (hh-score)? Bonus question: did they cross-finance from other sources to get the position there?

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Who would use a distro with a lesser set of CLI tools? Who would use a distro without a supported shell? Canonical is now using their position to push Snaps, for example. And it's usually financed through enterprise (server) software support contracts, instead of direct payments for the product.

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