Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
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Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
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Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#2Should the Netherlands fear the North Sea? It looks so beautiful and benevolent! Major storms are extremely rare, and the Deltawerken has been a huge waste of time and resources...
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#3People 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, it seems like Ballmer has prevailed as correct in his "enterprise" push. Microsoft has gotten really good at selling over steak dinners. Now Azure and M365 are starting to dominate. This gives Microsoft a strong distribution platform to push crappy initial versions of any would-be competitors to drive them out. They do tend to iterate those into decent products around the 3rd version.
But will people tire of that? I think so. In which case Microsoft will get what's coming.
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#4People 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,…
I thought that while Ballmer started the idea, Nadella is the one seen as pivoting the whole company towards the whole cloud first concept
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#5People 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,…
I thought that while Ballmer started the idea, Nadella is the one seen as pivoting the whole company towards the whole cloud first concept
That might be true, but I think Ballmer claims the "Enterprise Agreement" concept where they just tack on everything as available and have a box for every possible product in the EA. [Edit: The note is really more about founders originally in position to influence the company culture.]
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#6Awful 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 its highest. Percentage by percentage. This is the way.
> “Besides word processors, Microsoft also has security solutions, cables, servers in data centers, access control, SharePoint, and AI across all of this,” De Jong explains. “So simply replacing Microsoft isn't an option.”
> And switching only partially would require a lot of extra administrative work and money, and wouldn't reduce the risk of data blocking. The American giant is the largest supplier of software and services to TU/e.
I'd be surprised if this article wasn't indirectly written by Microsoft.
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#7People 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.
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#8People 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,…
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.
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#9Awful 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…
>Awful piece and so incredibly discouraging to hear that this kind of person has influence at such an organization.
That's modern academia for you.
Re: Should we fear Microsoft's monopoly?
#10The article is quite light in its definition of "monopoly".
It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO.
Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.
Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook.
Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0]
Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products.
Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL.
AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models.
Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly.
Gaming and leisure? Nope.
To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...