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Comment by gostsamo | Hacker News Reader

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

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How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"?

Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.

Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom.

Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging this position to capture the colab software one. Google is not a market leader and in addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace, though this is less significant than the market dominance.

I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the US not targeting Adobe with antitrust for bundling together tools for typesetters, marketers, video editors, animators, etc, etc?

This is actually a great counter example to the previous post’s perspective on bundling vs markets.

It should be. "Allowed in the US" is a bar so low that you can get oil out the end of it.

The only reason is that law enforcement is reactive. And usually requires the tactic to be effective before it does (yes, too late by then).

Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.

Two questions: do Adobe uses their dominant position in one of those markets to influence the clients in another market to use their product? Second, does Adobe's competition wishes to complain? The second part will prioritize the case, I think.

But where do you draw the line? In college, I used Word a lot and barely used Excel. At work I use Excel way more than Word (and often times I could easily just use a simple markdown editor instead of Word so I arguably wouldn't use that either). So they seem to be two different markets. I probably use the integrations between Excel and Teams more than I use the integrations between Word and Excel so bundling Teams makes more sense to me.

You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had. More importantly, installing Word doesn’t also automatically install Excel, and vice versa.

Microsoft wouldn’t have a problem if they provided a choice of Office with Teams and Office without Teams.

> You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had.

By this logic I can buy Excel + Word + Powerpoint and avoid Teams. They offer each office product individually or all their office products as a subscription. Why would it be different if they also offered a special subscription that just excluded teams?

> Google is not a market leader

Do you have stats that show this? "Market share" sites never feel very trustworthy to me, but they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience.

> addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace

This doesn't make sense to me as an argument. It sounds like you're saying that because Google hasn't bothered providing an offline version of their product they get a pass on bundling collaboration software, whereas because Microsoft provides an offline version that makes their bundling more egregious. Why exactly would that be?

> they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience.

I 100% believe that is your experience as 'HN-commenting SWE/tech bro/STEM worker', but just as strongly doubt that that is correct in the broader market.

Like I said, every source I found claims the same thing. Do you have data showing it as a distant second?

I see that too on Statists for example, which doesn't state a methodology that I can see but I suspect it's users (every Gmail account?) or 'I have used Docs/Word365'.

This site claims Office365 absolutely dwarfs Google Workspace in # business customers/licences , which is more in line with my expectation: https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/

That sounds about right. I routinely dig through cybersecurity data from around 100k companies, and Microsoft has no real competition. Occasionally I see Google at a little 500-person up-and-comer, but almost never in the enterprise, and they show up less and less as the companies get bigger. I don't think I've ever seen them in the Fortune 100, for example, other than at Google itself. The world runs on Exchange and Office.

a tcp/ip stack was not part of windows in 1993. You'd buy it from a 3rd party company. Was Microsoft adding it "bundling"? Same for mouse drivers. media players. cd writing software. Unzip functionality, and on and on. Ms got in trouble for IE but every os now bundles a browser.

team communication seems like a core feature of an office suite in 2024 just like those other features feel like core parts of an OS in 2024

And people who need spreadsheets are not the same as people who need documents as people who need slides etc.

Of course there is overlap, but there is also lots of overlap among those who need chat/meet and those who need slides.

For antitrust to work, all we have to do is break up the biggest players. There's no point in focusing on (in that market) smaller players. They'll get to them because recursion.

Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.

Because word and excel go together in the needs of a business and those who usually buy one use the other as well. All competition of MS in this space offer similar products bundled in a similar way.

Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.

I disagree. Excel is probably far more used than Word, and word could be dropped from many people’s computers and no one would notice.

Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software?

My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.

Wouldn’t it be that we have a fairly widely spread defecto definition of “office suite” as word processor, spread sheet, presentation, email as it’s been that way for decades? Not sure about “communications”however I think it is a serious argument to consider that a separate product, but not the others, they’re kind of like peanut butter and jelly or Bonnie & Clyde or the three stooges.

I think that is a very un-serious argument with no consistency.

Microsoft has always sold a cheaper "office suite" without outlook. What businesses have historically bundled and not bundled is irrelevant to what is best for society going forward.

Surely there were many features that many software businesses add that weren't there before. What if Microsoft relabeled Teams to be part of Outlook? Like they made Calendars part of Outlook. It all feels like starting at the result and working backwards towards a justification.

Tradition is more serious than you think.

Being around for a long time is a quality of its own. It strongly implies familiarity and good enough fit for everybody. (Traditions compete in a sense, some do not survive)

Yeah, I’m all for monopoly busting, but I don’t understand what kind of criteria are in use here. I’ve yet to see a definition that would allow me to apply rules in a coherent way.

My own company uses office 365, and of all the included programs, I basically only use excel, outlook, and teams. I haven’t even opened word in years, all documents are shared as PDFs. As such, word has no more inherent need for “bundling” than teams.

It just seems arbitrary. I’d be more comfortable just stating that companies over a certain size can’t bundle at all.

There do exist companies trying to compete on chat and complaining about it, I'd guess. (Whereas Gmail is doing fine and Thunderbird is free.)

That is the essence of anti-trust, it's nonsense. It's merely losers complaining.

It's not that simple. Imagine you build the next great thing, you open up a new product line for everyone. Your business starts doing well, but then Microsoft or Apple come along, throw money at it and include it in their bundles (Office or OS) by default.

Suddenly, you are the loser, while they are selling below investment cost to simply push you out of the market.

So that's the issue.

Similarly, it should probably be made illegal for VC-backed startups to undercut incumbents just to shut them down: that's very similar to me.

The EU's economic recovery isn't looking too good so it's time for them to dip into their war chest (USA tech companies).

> Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams?

It's not.

The argument you're replying to is remarkably similar to the ones in the EU+Apple threads: Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such. Why isn't Xbox or Switch a "general purpose" computer? Because people don't consider it as such. The whole thing boils down to circular logic of "it is a general purpose computer because it is".

The same thing is happening here: Why is it ok to bundle Word and Excel, but not Word and Teams? Because people consider the first one ok, but not the second. Ok, but WHY?!?

It's like arguing with a religious fanatic. You are wrong to assume there is any logic behind it.

If you really dig into why Microsoft and Apple, and why not Spotify and SAP, the only real answer is: because the EC defined the boundaries of the DMA to include the types of businesses that are run from America and exclude the types of businesses that are run from European. When you finally back them into a corner, the defenders of the DMA fall back to "well $AMERICAN_COMPANY is a gatekeeper, but $EURO_COMPANY is not a gatekeeper".

Spotify and SAP easily meet the quantitative thresholds that catch MS, Facebook and Apple, but the EC carefully defined that a "gatekeeper" belongs to certain categories of businesses (operating system, social media, etc.) and does not belong to certain other categories (music streaming, business software) so that it does not catch them. And as we saw with iPadOS, the quantitative thresholds don't even matter if the EC feels like ignoring them.

The gatekeeper criteria are open. Could you precise mention which criteria is bad instead of making strong assumptions?

I don't see why Spotify is a gate keeper. You have e.g. Deezer or Apple Music and you can switch very easily.

Spotify is the "gatekeeper" standing between listeners and musicians, like how OS vendors are "gatekeepers" standing between users and developers.

Yet you can easily switch to a different "gatekeeper" like Deezer while it is not possible.

I like the Australian approach to these types of laws. Rather than making some complicated definition that carefully selects the desired targets it's usually just a list that the government maintains. Makes it obvious to everyone how it works.

> Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such.

I don't.

No more than I consider NetApp OS or OneFS general purpose, even though both are based/built on BSD (I've SSHed into OneFS CLI often in my last job)

At least with Apple/iOS (not sure about Android), phones and tablets were purposefully designed to be appliances from the very beginning.

The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1.

By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s.

If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!

...if your idea is to push the market so that Teams is an open standard and protocol, this might have relevance.

(This is written as a thought exercise)

Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software?

Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup.

This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together?

Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more.

How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?

EU courts ruled that bundling an OS with a machine was ok.

https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...

Word and Excel aren't really that related either. The only reason we think of them as part of an office suite is because they have been bundled for a long time. As far as I can tell most people don't really use both, they mostly using one or the other.

Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

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