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Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

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Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#11

Post by IAmBroom »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #10

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 o…

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).

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#12

Post by Cyan488 »

pjmlp wrote: post #8
netdevphoenix wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#13

Post by jimnotgym »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #10

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 o…

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

Sure they won't use it at school?

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#14

Post by the_snooze »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #10

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 o…

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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#15

Post by CharlieDigital »

the_snooze wrote: post #14
CharlieDigital wrote: post #10

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 o…

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 deliveri…

    > 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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#16

Post by CharlieDigital »

jimnotgym wrote: post #13
CharlieDigital wrote: post #10

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 o…

>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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#17

Post by Forgeties79 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #15
the_snooze wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deliveri…

> 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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#18

Post by the_snooze »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #15
the_snooze wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 deliveri…

> 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.

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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#20

Post by MangoToupe »

> 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.

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