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Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

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Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#41

Post by kryllic »

carlosjobim wrote: post #34
kevin061 wrote: post #25

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 Driv…

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.

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

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#43

Post by drdec »

carlosjobim wrote: post #34
kevin061 wrote: post #25

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 Driv…

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

> 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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#45

Post by the_snooze »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #24
the_snooze wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#46

Post by jack_tripper »

gabrielgio wrote: post #32

> 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 concerni…

>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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#47

Post by sys_64738 »

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,…

> 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.

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#48

Post by BartjeD »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #24
the_snooze wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?

#50

Post by rawgabbit »

p2detar wrote: post #40
kevin061 wrote: post #25

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 Driv…

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 a…

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.
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