Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly? | Hacker News Reader

Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

cursor.tue.nl

48 pointssergdigon60 comments

Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization. They must have some personal incentive in one way or another to keep close to the status quo.

Anyone large organization has ever moved away from dependency on US BigTech has done so piece by piece. China is the prime example. They've been decreasing their dependencies every year back from when it was at its highest. Percentage by percentage. This is the way.

> “Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.”

> And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e.

I'd be surprised if this article wasn't indirectly written by Microsoft.

>Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization.

That's modern academia for you.

The CISO of a university is not an academic; neither is a writer at its student magazine.

I think China generally pirates all of our software in the U.S.

That is a common practice. For example, look it up on the history of Swiss Pharma industry. They grew from pirating to enforcer once they got industry lead. I pretty sure we can find examples for US, Japan, India and what not. Only the country on top of a given sector care about enforcing patent.

SaaS aren't directly pirateable. And they do so less and less in general, that's my point. 20 years ago, sure, everything was pirated US software. Now they've replaced it piece by piece.

And software is just a small part, the physical world is nuch more importance. There too they've become more independent incrementally.

People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product.

In some of the Microsoft lore there seems to be a split between Gates as an "end user" guy and Ballmer as an "enterprise" guy. Despite taking his lumps in the late 2010s, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version.

But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.

I thought that while Ballmer started the idea, Nadella is the one seen as pivoting the whole company towards the whole cloud first concept

That might be true, but I think Ballmer claims the "Enterprise Agreement" concept where they just tack on everything as available and have a box for every possible product in the EA. [Edit: The note is really more about founders originally in position to influence the company culture.]

To the point the whole desktop development experience makes us grey hairs miss Balmer.

Nadella would rather sell thin clients into Azure OS mainframe.

As someone that (for now) only ever has 2 digits worth of grey hairs at a time, I feel the same.

It definitely seems like Visual Studio is no longer feeling the love.

IMO Visual Studio presented an incredible opportunity to sell Copilot. Implement a MCP server, give the LLMs in Copilot all the tools available to a human developer to analyze and debug a codebase. Instead it's just a shitty autocomplete you have to turn off in order to get the good, IntelliSense autocomplete working.

Our parent company went hilt-deep into Copilot and ... now they're backing off, because nobody likes it!

I just don't get it. They couldn't get the AI people and the Visual Studio people in a room together? I guess, cynically, probably not, because the AI people aren't on the same continent as the Visual Studio people?

Very frustrating.

You need to jump into VS 2026 for those goodies.

It was so rushed out, that many of the dialog windows on the new settings pane show tiny VS 2022 settings dialogs as popups.

Wait, can VS2026 Copilot make tool calls to bring only relevant type and function definitions into Context?

If yes, that would be great! I've been trying to bodge that together with clangd and emacs LSP, but the amount of yak shaving to get clangd actually working on our codebase (on which Visual Studio just works for the most part) is prohibitive for actually accomplishing anything.

Our codebase is millions of line of very non-standard C++ (some automatically translated from Pascal years ago), and single files can get up to 50,000 lines.

So a LLM really needs (just like us human developers!) the ability to skip around and only read the parts that matter.

Gates cared about products deeply. This lot? They only care about the shareholder, not the customer, and we all know how that turned out for GE and Boeing. It's a long path, but it's a path of degradation.

I am pretty sure the the file explorer is "slow" because it's doing cloud sync crap in order to collect my data.

Balmer figured out the most profitable product is compliance sold to governments and other corporations. And Nadella figured out it's more profitable to lease it.

Considering Gates was instrumental in bringing MS and OpenAI together, I think this is just greatmanning.

Where is this information even coming from?

https://businesschief.com/news/why-bill-gates-warned-microso...

> People forget that Microsoft was in position to compete because of Gates' and Allen's stellar BASIC. They were hand-picked by IBM because the market loved BASIC to the point of pirating it before that was even a thing. They cared about the product.

I thought the whole MS-DOS thing happened due to Billy's mom being secretary for the law firm that had IBM as a client.

> Even if the Netherlands makes every effort now, a fully-fledged alternative won't be readily available.

You don't need to match their product. You have a smaller user base and smaller number of functionally to cover than Microsoft.

> That gives American companies power.

Guess what happens if you don't do anything?

The trend of universities sacrificing long-term sovereignty for minimal short-term savings is concerning. I have observed this in my home country, where the strategic investment in national technology (which would return back to the country) is dismissed in favor of cheaper foreign platforms like Google. This approach naively puts sensitive research and institutional data on external servers, creating vulnerability where access could be compromised[^1].

Hopefully this person does not express the opinion of that university.

[^1]: https://agorarn.com.br/ultimas/google-bloqueia-acesso-ufrn-c...

>The interruption occurred after the institution exceeded the 152.5 terabyte storage limit contracted with the technology giant, which maintains a partnership with UFRN .

152 TB is something nerds self host in closet home labs, no need to tie yourself up to Google. I though people went to google for solutions with much more scale than just 152TB.

I did a quick check and for a name-brand (but not DELL or HPE solution) 200TB self hosted server with redundancy you're looking at 16K USD upfront cost and then you need to add your own maintenance and support costs which shouldn't be too high with Brazil labor costs and university's easy access to (often voluntary) skilled labor.

From what I can gather this is still cheaper than paying Google.

There are Microsoft alternatives for everything they offer.

OS: Ubuntu is British, Linux Mint is Irish, there are French distributions, and let's not forget SUSe from Germany.

Office: there is LibreOffice, which is not very good IMO, but also OnlyOffice, I think it is German, also Proton, and Infomaniak from CH.

For file sharing, NextCloud exists, but if you want cloud services, there's Jottacloud, Koofr, Proton Drive, and more.

For cloud, Hetzner and OVH may not be as comprehensive, but that just means you have to hire consultants and specialists to simplify deployments to something similar to AWS tools. Perfectly possible.

E-mail, you can self-host or just use Tutanota, Protonmail, Soverin, mailbox.org; there are thousands, really.

To believe that we can keep Microsoft under control just because there is a financial transaction in between is to believe in the more than debunked Angela Merkel policy or pacifying and democratising Russia through trade. Germany stood behind Angela Merkel for years, and at the end, Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine anyway.

Peace through trade does not work. The question is whether the Netherlands values money more than sovereignty, because of course Microsoft offers an all-in-one solution to governments, but the other options are all small parts of the IT ecosystem, which can be difficult to keep together.

How did you forget that Apple offers alternatives to almost everything Microsoft has, and is one of the world's largest companies?

You likely won't find a business office working exclusively with the Apple office suite of tools, despite how comparable their features are. No one ever got fired for suggesting Microsoft, and in the business world, the safest choice (read: one that ensures an individual's job security) is often the one people go to. Google also has its own suite of tools, and I would argue the choice is really between them and Microsoft, with Apple not receiving much attention. Proton is also creating their own office suite of tools, their version of Sheets was just released not too long ago [1] but I have a feeling they will be as ostracized in the business world as Apple is.

---

1. https://proton.me/drive/sheets

> How did you forget that Apple offers alternatives to almost everything Microsoft has, and is one of the world's largest companies?

I think the point is to avoid dependence on US based companies as opposed to getting away from Microsoft specifically. You will notice they did not mention obvious Google products as an alternative either.

With exception to Ubuntu and maybe Office your list is mostly enterprise-incomplete. Big corp cares about Active Directory, Teams, Azure and most of all Exchange (M365). Microsoft have managed to carefully pack all of these around Microsoft Entra and most IT admins in big corps are keen to get on-board with that.

We lost a big customer yesterday to Microsoft. They offered them much more than we could and there were also internal politics where I believe most of that customer's IT pushed towards that decision. I think the culture around alternatives, especially European-made or maybe European-supported is lacking. This has to change.

edit: typo

As an anecdote, I believe the final frontier in software development is permissions or who can do what. Entra is one of the few software that manages permissions at scale; even if it is user unfriendly.

> TU/e and ICT cooperative SURF are also looking for replacements for Microsoft and Google. However, a fully-fledged European alternative is not yet available...

The only possible alternative to the entirety of Microsoft/Google is a European monopoly that is similar in scale. Indeed, such a monopoly does not exist (nor should it). People go to Microsoft and Google because they're already spending money on one product of theirs and there happens to be this completely different product of theirs which you also need as a business user. Sooner or later you end up using 20 completely different products that are "well-integrated" because at no point did you look for an alternative to any of those use cases.

Your job is not to go from 100% reliance on Google/Microsoft to 0% reliance, that'll never happen. Your job is to look at their offerings in isolation and reduce your reliance one product at a time. And yes, paying for 20 products from 20 companies is gonna cost you more when each of them needs to be profitable separately, only monopolies can afford to offer some product at a permanent loss.

Should the Netherlands fear the North Sea? It looks so beautiful and benevolent! Major storms are extremely rare, and the Deltawerken has been a huge waste of time and resources...

No because Microsoft no longer has the competency to maintain and leverage a monopoly. They'll keep rolling on inertia and Azure. Windows and Office are likely on a terminal decline from which Microsoft is unwilling or unable to recover.

> Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.”

This seems much less like a "monopoly" sort of situation and more of a "you explicitly chose to put all of your eggs in one basket" kind of deal.

My biggest issue is identity. One login for device, sql server/data access, powerbi/reporting, office/productivity (and all its connectivity) as well as communications.

What alternative does anyone have?

Why does it have to be "fully fledged" - not like most people use the advanced features in office.

It's a procurement fallacy to let a corporation dictate what features should be there and not.

I am more worried about M/S influence over the Linux Foundation than this. In reality people only have themselves to blame if they decide to use Microsoft than an alternative.

If there is a monopoly, anyone should be afraid. Even if it is government. That is why you have democracy.

Second source … is one of the example of a major strategy against this.

in 6th edition of Ian Sommerville's "Software engineering" textbook, there was a whole chapter on legacy software. How to fix, how to emulate, copy, migrate, whatever. Technical issues slowly progressing into human/social. Maybe because it was after the y2k. Then in 8th, it got merged into other sub/chapters, and later ones the topic is even more muddied. There's no more legacy software, right? Except there is.. all of it may become a burden, because of time or because of politics.

Come on, that is an University, there are many many students eager to learn the art-of-migration, for free. Migrate away, one by one, department by department if needs be. Disable M$ Excel, give everyone Libreoffice , python, r, or any-other-linux-stuff, and if the professors are so wooden, let the students find a way to replace that wonder.xls with something else. Then repeat with next piece of the entanglement..

But, no, only complaining (a.k.a. need more money)

Someone needs to explain vendor lock-in to them.

The article is quite light in its definition of "monopoly".

It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO.

Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.

Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook.

Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0]

Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products.

Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL.

AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models.

Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly.

Gaming and leisure? Nope.

To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

Switching from Office to Libre Office would take about ten minutes training, for most people's usage. The software can be installed in less than that.

Just another log on the fire: Microsoft holds a lion's share of market, but not a monopoly (anymore).

Plus finding another email provider and client, finding a chat app, cloud storage, etc

>my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.

Sure they won't use it at school?

School issues every student a Chromebook starting from 3rd grade. Outside of gaming, my kids do all of their work on Chromebooks. Presentations, documents, email, messaging are all on Google products.

And if any of them work for the government, for example, they are going to be forced into Microsoft Office.

I also don’t find it very reassuring how many people here are saying “well everything they do is on Google.” Same problem, different flavor.

    > they are going to be forced into Microsoft Office

Not by Microsoft.

And to be clear, this is far from modern day truth. My wife "works for the government" and the municipality uses Google.

> Not by Microsoft.

That doesn’t make it not a monopoly

It may not be reassuring, however it rather obviously demonstrates Microsoft has no monopoly re Office.

That's an incomplete view. Office is a strong incumbent not because it's a good product, but because there's decades of processes built around it. To take a small slice from my world, if you do any kind of government-funded research, you must use Microsoft Office because government funding agencies have in-house templates for budgets and technical reports. They'll reject proposals and contractually-obligated deliveries if you don't use their template. Those templates break in spectacular and unpredictable ways on non-MS-Office suites.

People use MS Office because other people use MS Office. It's network effects.

    > because there's decades of processes built around it

That's not Microsoft's problem; Microsoft isn't broadly writing legislation that compels the use of `.docx` format and PDFs are a thing.

None of that really matters when we are assessing whether something is a monopoly or not.

Well, I don't know how you define it, but here's Wiki's first paragraph[0]:

    > A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell') is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.

And Merriam Webster[1]

    > exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

Do these hold true for Office? Azure? VS Code? Teams? Windows?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly

You are using the dictionary definition of monopoly, not the legal definition according to any particular nation’s laws or looking at how it has been enforced/on what basis, which is the only version that really matters in this discussion.

I imagine everyone on HN knows that simply linking Wikipedia is generally considered little more than a snarky, passive aggressive response. I don’t need the dictionary or Wikipedia definition of a monopoly for this conversation. I didn’t ask for it and you know that it wasn’t necessary or productive.

If you want to have an actual discussion I’m all ears.

Please cite the legal definition and let's have a discussion on whether it meets the legal definition or not.

I never said it was Microsoft's problem. I'm just showing you that "oh, switch to something else" is a naive view if you actually have real work to do.

That's fine, but that doesn't meet the definition for a monopoly; that's just inertia.

I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal gain.

Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position. They may not be a monopoly in the strict sense (and I never said they were), but they're not a passive player either who accidentally fell into this situation. We don't need to give trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt here.

    > Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position

For the edification of the readership, please share how Microsoft's business decisions are being made to maintain a monopoly in your space. Are they buying out competitors? Are they using contract terms that forbid the use of other vendors? Are they under-pricing their product relative to the market?

If the cost of migrating results in "minimal gain", doesn't that mean that they have a top product and the market has other competitive products by definition?

If you can provide some evidence of how they actively use business practices to maintain a monopoly, it would go a long way to advancing this discussion instead of showing long-held biases and I'm sure some lawyers out there would be ready to make a name for themselves.

A monopoly is measured in a given market by marketshare.

Ofcourse the existence of 10 alternatives is meaningless if they count for 0.01% of given market section. Lol

Find any definition of "monopoly" and it should be pretty clear that it's not merely marketshare but the active manipulation of markets and market conditions to produce that marketshare.

    > A monopoly is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.

^ Wikipedia def is a prime example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly)

Someones template breaking is not a real problem. The office alternatives work perfectly fine for "real work". If your template doesnt work fix it. You fixed it all those times it broke on office.

The word 'monopoly' may be not quite right but the premise is.

The notion of 'there are other choices' is simply not the measure of a competitive landscape in systems with very high switching costs, incumbencies.

The pedestrian view that we have for 'competition' is 'retail' - you move from one shop to the next.

Big Industry is nothing like that.

They entrench themselves, with standards, process, procurement, brand, strategic leverage at the Executive layer, regulatory capture.

My local 'pharmacy corner store' has the same 10 chocolate bars my whole life: KitKat, Coffee Crisp etc. It never changes.

Does anyone in the world think that KitKat has some magical 'product quality' beyond the 10 000 other variations of chocolate?

No - they have 'market power'. They control distribution, they have deeply entrenched relationships with retail, they have relationships with coco producers, which shows up in a lot of ways.

If a buyer want access to the release of the 'New Swiffer' - you can't just try to 'drop our other products' like KitKat, besides, consumers have not been trained on a different product.

Consumers have seen a lifetime of KitKat ads, we don't necessarily like it, but it's a known quantity and we basically 'submit'. There are other choices, but a bit further back, a bit more expensive, a bit more unknown.

The very fact that 'chocolate bars' are unambiguously a commodity - and yet - there is no 'apparent broad market' should well serve to starting thinking more about how these systems work.

Google pays Apple an absolute fortune to be the 'first choice' on iPhone.

Google pays a fortune to create/control Chrome - which makes $0 in revenue, but which is a critical distributional component.

So your kids use 'something else' because they're in a situation where they can - but when the go to the office - do they make their own choice? No - IT does.

If IT wants to move away from just Word - then they loose deep integration with so many other things: MS Office is designed to be fully integrated precisely to thwart off all of those individual incumbents - the only way someone can make inroads, is on the margins with something really powerful, like 'Airtable'. Even then, it's relatively niche.

Combine that with the Operating System, which integrates deeply with chipsets and scale, and you can see the power.

I think that Slack is essentially a superior product, but the law firms, energy companies, gov offices are going to be sold 'Teams' and that's it. I know a lot of people who use teams and have literally never hear of Slack.

Slack is the 'niche chocolate bar in aisle 3 that costs 20% more, that they have never tried and not sure about - just buy KitKat'.

I have colleagues - very educated - who only use Copilot for AI - they think that's AI. They're not allowed to use anything else - because 'security'. Copilot is a ridiculously inferior product, not only do they exist in the ignorance of that, they actually think it's 'great', partly because 'It's Microsoft'.

The power of 'Brand at Scale' is really hard to fathom - managers and executives particularly are moved by this. They probably believe in institutional power and legitimacy more than anything and so MS because a 'hard default' that becomes difficult to overturn.

If there's a problem with some 'uppity gov. official' somewhere - MS can make discounts, steak dinners, custom integration, talk to people higher up in government, and make a strong case as why disrupting the 'default' should not happen.

ERP like SAP ... are just interminably integrated, and AWS/GCP are practically different products they are so different.

All of that is the tip of the iceberg.

There is no 'free market' in the way our instinct may apply, which is mostly derived from our 'retail' position in the value chain - the market operates a bit more differently at that level.

At that level 'Market Power' is the dominating factor, and 'product' is always second, generally things need only be 'sufficiently good'.

MS is an ok company and can create 'workable products', Google has some 'great' (and some terrible products), it's all they have to do to perpetuate - there is absolutely nothing anyone could do to displace them without some non-market force (aka government regulates competition).

If this dependency becomes a problem , and I would suggest finally in 2025 it is, then the only way out is coordinated action.

After all that I just said, the true power of institutionalization is not always hugely critical: if KitKat disappeared tomorrow nobody would care. If MS word was removed ... and everyone just choose something else, the world would not miss a beat. I truly believe that if we all woke up tomorrow and had to use Bing, it wouldn't matter that much.

Aside from major market disturbances, like AI in which those 'adept players' will probably be ahead anyhow, then it takes coordinated action to disrupt these systems.

It's much better to view those things through the lens of 'power' and not so much 'product', unless 'product' is absolutely decisive, novel, and/or it exists outside of locked-down value chains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com