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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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

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.

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