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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

#51

Post by dtech »

fakename11 wrote: post #6
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.

Dozens of IT vendors sounds like a security risk.

Ah, the ever-common excuse from corporate IT to avoid any work or change: "it's not secure".

If you add these I'll have bingo:

  * "We already have X for this" (X is only vaguely related and/or does it far, far inferior)
  * "it's too expensive" (said by $200/hour consultant vetoing $50/month SaaS)
  * "it doesn't conform to the architecture" (used for anything that isn't Java and Microsoft Office)

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

#52

Post by thrower123 »

chii wrote: post #41
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…

> we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together or, have mandated open apis that _force_ products to integrate. That's what the web is today (mostly). Links, and embedable content (like frames). APIs and data. The reason companies don't do this - as demonstrated fairly recently by google with their removal of xmpp protocols from google chat - is that open apis prevent lock.…

The problem with common APIs is that they are a lowest common denominator. I deal with this all the time with Microsoft's Bot Framework - which is somewhat shitty open protocol for writing chat bots that plug into a whole range of messaging platforms, including Teams and Slack. It's functional, more or less, but it by necessity has to target the lowest common set of capabilities of the services it plugs into, and that makes it clunky as hell. And you still end up having to write a bunch of bodgy platform-specific code to get it to do anything interesting.

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

#53

Post by simion314 »

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…

IMO integration will force us stuck in a point of local optimum, Apple,Tesla,Microsoft,Google will decide what this point is and you will have to like it, changing a wallpaper will need to be approved, starting an application will be also approved and logged, social media apps or groups will also be censored to protect you. You will not be able to tweak a color or replace the shitty browser with a better one (Microsoft would have loved to have Apple privileges and force all it's users to use IE).

If you don't like regulators deviding, maybe we should ask users ?

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

#54

Post by Hammershaft »

weego wrote: post #34
Hammershaft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As opposed to decades of companies and governments arguing in court what constitutes a monopoly? I mean, composability would just be the intended net result, not a part of the legal framework of the mandate.

I think you could also avoid using the word API entirely. I could see the end result being similiar to how default app selection works in Android.

That said, I still haven't sat down and thought through the unintended side effects.

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

#55

Post by thanksforthe42 »

simion314 wrote: post #53
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…

IMO integration will force us stuck in a point of local optimum, Apple,Tesla,Microsoft,Google will decide what this point is and you will have to like it, changing a wallpaper will need to be approved, starting an application will be also approved and logged, social media apps or groups will also be censored to protect you. You will not be able to tweak a color or replace the shitty browser with a better one (Microso…

Microsoft already lost this battle. Google has decided not to fight the battle.

Apple has their segment walled in like North Korea.

Tesla uses religion to control their followers.

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

#56

Post by thanksforthe42 »

a_imho wrote: post #42
em500 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be well known by now that if you're running Windows 10, Microsoft is your system administrator, and can control (at least technically) exactly what runs on your computer. Unless maybe if you really put time/effort into stopping that (if it's still possible at all). This is not meant to be judgemental. I'm actually of the opinion this is better in general than leaving sysadmin duties to the general public, w…

We know what happens, the question is why is it allowed?

Apple did it 10x worse with their iphone apps and now no one cares anymore.

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

#57

Post by rmrfstar »

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…

Take a look at the issue from another point of view. Predatory pricing and bundling are two destructive ways to compete.

Predatory pricing is just dumping. You sell something below cost until your competition goes out of business, then you either raise prices or hold prices constant but reduce quality (eg Amazon selling counterfeit books).

Bundling is requiring people to purchase A+B in combination. An example would be a gourmet ice-cream maker that is actually famous for chocolate but only sells 50% chocolate, 50% vanilla.

You can see this move as a combination of bundling and predatory pricing. Microsoft did this with Defender too. Their strategy is to starve nascent competitors for revenue in a niche area so they can never mount a direct attack on the core business.

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

#58

Post by sandworm101 »

thrower123 wrote: post #52
chii wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together or, have mandated open apis that _force_ products to integrate. That's what the web is today (mostly). Links, and embedable content (like frames). APIs and data. The reason companies don't do this - as demonstrated fairly recently by google with their removal of xmpp protocols from google chat - is that open apis prevent lock.…

The problem with common APIs is that they are a lowest common denominator. I deal with this all the time with Microsoft's Bot Framework - which is somewhat shitty open protocol for writing chat bots that plug into a whole range of messaging platforms, including Teams and Slack. It's functional, more or less, but it by necessity has to target the lowest common set of capabilities of the services it plugs into, and tha…

Yes but at least you are allowed to write that bodgy code. In some people's ideal world such APIs would be hidden behind DRM, chatbots only physically possible with godzilla's permission.

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

#59

Post by Gravityloss »

Gh0stRAT wrote: post #39
Gravityloss wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my opinion, Webex is very old and for example Linux compatibility is worse than Teams.

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

#60

Post by Gravityloss »

addicted wrote: post #48
Gravityloss wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone can build a 1 click experience similar to the Teams add-in for outlook.

So some kind of plugin?
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