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An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

mattstoller.substack.com

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Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#11

Post by pjc50 »

cafed00d wrote: post #9

> it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas. I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas. I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. O…

The more integration, the less competition.

The software competitive scene is fairly good at the moment, and the open web remains an escape hatch, but the risk of too tight integration is that startups become impossible.

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#12

Post by collyw »

pjc50 wrote: post #11
cafed00d wrote: post #9

> it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas. I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas. I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. O…

The more integration, the less competition. The software competitive scene is fairly good at the moment, and the open web remains an escape hatch, but the risk of too tight integration is that startups become impossible.

Would that be the case if open standards were used?

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#13

Post by TeMPOraL »

pjc50 wrote: post #11
cafed00d wrote: post #9

> it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas. I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas. I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. O…

The more integration, the less competition. The software competitive scene is fairly good at the moment, and the open web remains an escape hatch, but the risk of too tight integration is that startups become impossible.

Let's aim for integration on equal footing, then. No special APIs for vendor only, and no ToC clauses prohibiting third-party clients/integrations.

I don't know how to work around the "COM problem", though - IIRC, your product can have just as deep integrations with Outlook & Office as Teams has, if you're willing to throw man-hours at dealing with the clumsiness of COM. This understandably advantages a company with lots of money to spend and direct access to people who develop the platform. Some non-MS products still manage to ship with deep integrations, but in my experience, they tend to be fragile.

That said, I feel it would be a tremendous help for both competition and integration, if some form of "can't restrict access to a service to vendor-owned clients" clause entered the law.

It's kind of my problem with products being turned into services - service providers currently have way too much power over their customers/users.

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#14

Post by pjc50 »

collyw wrote: post #12
pjc50 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more integration, the less competition. The software competitive scene is fairly good at the moment, and the open web remains an escape hatch, but the risk of too tight integration is that startups become impossible.

Would that be the case if open standards were used?

Arguably if it's an open interface it's not "integrated". You certainly lose the product improvement and co-design benefits of tight integration when you have to run it past a standard committee.

Or you end up with "open standard with proprietary extension" (bane of everything from HTML to opengl)

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#15

Post by TeMPOraL »

MattGaiser wrote: post #8
ralph84 wrote: post #5

The article vastly underestimates the desire of large enterprises to deal with only a handful of IT vendors. Sure, no enterprise wants monopoly pricing, but they also don’t want dozens upon dozens of different IT vendors to deal with.

You want to tackle monopoly power? Find a way to make purchasing accept other vendors.

Where I work, software purchasing is outsourced to a third-party company. I can appreciate the value this provides.

And part of the reason why I hate the trend of turning everything into services is that regular (middle-class and below) people don't get to outsource the increasing amount of relationships they have to enter into.

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#16

Post by nverno »

cafed00d wrote: post #9

> it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas. I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas. I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. O…

Agreed. It sounds like the author is envisioning a society where regulators have a hell of a lot of power- would every price change a company made need to be given the OK? I guess the litagators would have a field day. Doesn't every profitable company have a monopoly on its niche space? Not all monopolies are equal

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#17

Post by MattGaiser »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #15
MattGaiser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to tackle monopoly power? Find a way to make purchasing accept other vendors.

Where I work, software purchasing is outsourced to a third-party company. I can appreciate the value this provides. And part of the reason why I hate the trend of turning everything into services is that regular (middle-class and below) people don't get to outsource the increasing amount of relationships they have to enter into.

I too find it exhausting to manage all my subscriptions, communications, and such. I wish I could just hit "cancel all" and restart them as I needed them.

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#18

Post by pembrook »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #15
MattGaiser wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to tackle monopoly power? Find a way to make purchasing accept other vendors.

Where I work, software purchasing is outsourced to a third-party company. I can appreciate the value this provides. And part of the reason why I hate the trend of turning everything into services is that regular (middle-class and below) people don't get to outsource the increasing amount of relationships they have to enter into.

There’s 2 ways to make money in software: bundling and unbundling.

There’s downsides to both.

We’re on a trend of unbundling right now, but the pendulum is quickly shifting the other way.

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#19

Post by shp0ngle »

cafed00d wrote: post #9

> it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas. I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas. I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. O…

I have no idea how that happened, but one day, I found Teams suddenly automatically installed on my spouses computer; and not only auto-installed, but it auto-started on Windows start.

How? Why? It was probably bundled with Office and/or Windows.

MS got news-breaking fine for far less with Netscape before. But, nobody cares in 2020.

Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

#20

Post by oaiey »

cafed00d wrote: post #9

> it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas. I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas. I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. O…

I agree with that. The market is full of chat software, some better, some worse. Microsoft for example had Skype (for Business). All they did is the consequent next step and integrate chat with the rest of their productivity suite (as everyone else in the market does). They basically follow Google Workspaces which innovated many things in the last 10 years. It is an oligarchy but it is not that Microsoft is owning the market.

I think it is sad that Slack is loosing independence in the the market. However, I blame investors far more than the market. When I understand it right, they yearly profit is in the 100s of millions. It is a financial decision of them.

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