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An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
31–40 of 113 posts
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#32> 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…
An off the cuff idea I haven't really thought through the implications of:
What if these (somewhat arbitrary) product categories were enforced, but instead of preventing different products from integrating, we mandated they be composable over documented APIs?
That way we could get some of the benefits of integration, but without the intensely anti competitive nature of walled garden apps?
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#33> 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.
Microsoft is slowly consolidating "phone" features into the main windows OS, and I would imagine teams is the next step. The same way that "call" apps are a bundled thing on phones.
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#34> 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…
An off the cuff idea I haven't really thought through the implications of: What if these (somewhat arbitrary) product categories were enforced, but instead of preventing different products from integrating, we mandated they be composable over documented APIs? That way we could get some of the benefits of integration, but without the intensely anti competitive nature of walled garden apps?
The net result would be Govt vs Megacorps tied up in a decade of litigation arguing what the terms 'composable' and 'API' mean
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#35> 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…
In my view, it would probably be a non-issue if the "anti-trust" regulations simply required interoperability to a sufficient degree. Then you can bundle and integrate to your hearts-content, but you have to stick to open APIs or allow easy usage of your own API freely.
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#36> 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…
When the cost of replication moves towards zero, the loss leaders pricing move towards free.
My gut tells me this is probably quite bad overall because it is de facto total market control but only for those that are either incumbents or can somehow compete with free. It smells of AT&T, Comcast, and other “locked in” vendors, aka the most loathed companies in the nation.
At a minimum it raises the bar of entry to a market.
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Seems like MS literally installed this about two hours ago for me with a forced update on Win10
I wonder if it's Office thing or they just push it to all Windows users.
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#38The 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.
In addition to that, before getting to the "accepting" part, it's often a PITA to even request new contracts with other vendors.
Justifying the need for it, go though the paper work, estimate costs etc. VS just adding a new line item in an existing bill.
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#39> 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…
Many people using Outlook run Teams meetings, because it's just one button click away in Outlook. Compare to others where you have to go to a different tool and create a meeting and copy-paste a link. The antitrust way would be to have Outlook have buttons for a lot of different meeting services out of the box. Many don't require installing any software (Google meet for example). It's all just API:s.
My employer's Outlook does have a button for a competing meeting service. (WebEx)
Some people are starting to use Teams for their meetings now because some of them like it better than WebEx, but it is exactly the same amount of effort to schedule either of them directly from Outlook.
Re: An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft
#40Earlier 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.
> The software competitive scene is fairly good at the moment, and the open web remains an escape hatch Can't agree really. On the operating system front, it's Linux-only at this point. And the "Linux community" has completed its long way to the dark side, with RedHat paying devs to subvert the portability Unix/POSIX has always stood for, with systemd and the rush to containers. For a perspective, consider Docker was…
> RedHat and Kubernetes essentially deprecating Docker (and adding unbelievable amounts of code to replace it as infrastructure) just means a central entity calls the shots now.
Err, the concept of containers aren't being deprecated. At first, Kubernetes only supported Docker. This was considered a negative monopoly, so they defined the CRI (Container Runtime Interface) and started shifting towards that. Now they're just taking the sensible step of deprecating the old specific support for Docker. Docker is still free to implement CRI (and IIRC there have been motions towards this). Containerd (Docker's underlying runtime) already supports it today.
Your Docker images will also keep working. Even if Docker doesn't end up implementing CRI, both containerd and CRI-O use the same container format, and are compatible with your existing images.