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Comment by timewizard | Hacker News Reader

> before Microsoft's corporate hug of death

Abuse of the law to buy a competitor, form a monopoly, and then price fix an entire market. It sounds cute when you say "hug of death" almost like they didn't intentionally seek out this precise outcome.

> It was also available literally everywhere

Funny how that was literally the first thing to get the axe. I guess some "hugs" are like that, huh?

> Rest in peace!

Justice for Skype!

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Skype was founded 2003, wholly bought by eBay in 2005. MS bought it from eBay in 2011, when Skype had 30m users, which was and is tiny compared to relevant markets for videoconferencing. Even now Teams has around 30% of the market. In the 14 years since the purchase MS increased Skype usage significantly and brought the tech to a vastly bigger audience.

So no, there was never a monopoly, the market share was vastly too low to “price fix an entire market,” and “the hug of death” certainly doesn’t mean making a product better and more used and only shuttering it after 14 years when it’s been vastly outclassed (Skype usage sits at around 1%, and Zoom completely slaughtered it). Most tech fails much quicker.

but m$ doesn't have a monopoly on video/instant chat? teams is so objectively bad that anyone who was using skype will move on to a different company's product

I wish that were true. Every enterprise I've seen has thrown their hands up and said "we already use microsoft for everything else (generally email, ad, or office) and teams is bundled why would we use anything else". So instead of getting good chat and VoIP apps, the decision makers just stick with the cheapest option (Teams, they're already paying for it in one of their tens of other Microsoft subscriptions)

Compared to the rubbish that is MS accounts or email, teams is outright awesome compared to it's competitors! At least you don't get logged out of your email app and don't get notifications or any indication until you dig deep into what's going on (let's not even talk about how agonizingly slow outlook is). Or the rubbish of having to dig 3 levels down into the settings to get outlooks 2fa token (good look if the aforementioned lock out happened). I could go on. I seriously don't understand how companies would go with this rubbish (especially for shops which use Linux for a large fraction of their dev machines).

Didn’t MSFT recently uncouple teams license from O365? I think you now need a separate license to use business teams, but also why use anything else.

Yes, they did. They were forced by the eu commission to do so as bundling teams was an anti-competitive practice, similar to when Microsoft bundled internet explorer into windows, effectively killing the market for web browsers.

That they failed to successfully profit from their crime does not obviate it from being criminal. Skype was created in 2003, I do hope it's appreciated how much smaller the market was back then, on top of how bandwidth constrained it was.

On Hacker News of all places what I think gets lost in the monopoly conversation is that it's not just the consumer market you need to pay attention it's the _labor_ market. I always assumed that would more be more readily apparent here. I am often surprised to find out it is not.

In a personal setting? You may be right.

In a corporate setting? "We already have Microsoft accounts for all of our users, do you want us to maintain a separate user list? No way. Teams may be bad, but it's not bad enough to warrant that."

Some corporates, yes. Many others, no. A true sign there's no monopoly here, just regular old vendor lock in.

> teams is so objectively bad

What is better than Teams? I don't love Teams, but it's light years beyond what Zoom provides, and the services that Amazon and Google offer were pretty garbage last time I checked.

I worked at a company that used teams a few years ago, after an acquisition. I'd routinely not get notifications for DMs and other important messages. The devops guy was trying to figure out how to port our slack prod errors channel to teams. I felt bad for him. Can't remember if he ever succeeded.

I also really like Slacks huddles and Discord VC's (we treated them like conference rooms).

Jami (https://jami.net) and Tox (https://tox.chat) are better, being P2P and open source.

Speaking of hugs, remember the mantra: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

> Speaking of hugs, remember the mantra: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

They are working hard now on the Extinguish phase. Linux was set back by systemd and wayland. And what's left of it is available as WSL.

Monopoly? My god man get a grip.

Thank you for this thorough analysis.

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