An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

Post by willyg123 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

rmrfstar wrote: post #57

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…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

willyg123 wrote: post #62

rmrfstar wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> then you either raise prices or hold prices constant but reduce quality (eg Amazon selling counterfeit books) I can't think of one example of a company killing a competitor via free products and then raising prices. And let's not pretend Amazon's counterfeit book problem was part of the business plan.

Post by rohittidke » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

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.…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #67

rmrfstar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions it all the time. The index to his book has 11 references to the "consumer rights movement". A central premise of his book is that the "Watergate babies" shifted antitrust law from a focus on democratic control of corporate power to so-called "consumer rights".

Also, looking at antitrust purely through a price lens is extremely narrow, and practically unintelligible in most big-ticket modern examples. In the netscape-msft case, prices didn't even exist. They don't exist or aren't central in a whole lot of modern businesses. How do you analyze FB in terms of the CWS model? It's like trying to examine the health of a rose bush by taking its temperature. It's a pretty good exa…

Post by sandworm101 » Wed, Dec 09, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #25

nverno wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It sounds like the author is envisioning a society where regulators have a hell of a lot of power- would every price change a company made need to be given the OK? I guess the litagators would have a field day. Doesn't every profitable company have a monopoly on its niche space? Not all monopolies are equal

For physical products we have anti-dumping laws. You can't abuse your monopoly power to sell products below cost in order to take out competition. We need something like this for software products.