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Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

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Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#21

Post by Forgeties79 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #16
jimnotgym wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#22

Post by CharlieDigital »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #17
CharlieDigital wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#23

Post by CharlieDigital »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #21
CharlieDigital wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#24

Post by CharlieDigital »

the_snooze wrote: post #18
CharlieDigital wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#25

Post by kevin061 »

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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#26

Post by snarfy »

renegade-otter wrote: post #7
piker wrote: post #3

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,…

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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#27

Post by adventured »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #21
CharlieDigital wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#29

Post by johnwheeler »

deaux wrote: post #6

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…

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

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#30

Post by neutronicus »

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.

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.

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