[jm4]

There are so many more choices than there were 20 years ago. Microsoft makes a kick ass office suite. There's nothing monopolistic about it. They've been in this game longer than anyone and that's reflected in the feature set.

Their products and licensing provide more value now than they have in a very long time. There's also G Suite which is pretty cool. Or you could use Libre Office.

Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

In what areas? I see an industry with more and more consolidation. There is no longer the serious competition there once was in the field of office suites or certain kinds of creative software, which is really sad.

[jm4]

When was there competition in the office suite space? In the early 90's? Or the law firms that continued to use a stagnating WordPerfect for way too long after everyone else standardized on MS Office?

I entered computing at a time when there was basically nothing else available. Mac was trash and way past its glory days. Linux was a toy that no one would use seriously. The hardware support was non-existent and if you wanted to get online you often had to go buy a new modem. The other players today didn't exist yet.

It's true there is consolidation, but there are also options which didn't exist at all not too long ago.

[marcinzm]

>There's nothing monopolistic about it.

By definition, a monopoly is a majorly dominant market position, it says nothing about how it was achieved or the quality of the product.

>Anyone complaining about monopolies today has no idea how bad things actually were in the late 90's to early 00,s. We have more high quality products from more vendors and better interoperability than probably any other time in the history of computing.

Things being worse in the past is not a reason to not push for further improvement. By your argument we should stop all research and progress since things used to be worse so we should be happy enough with the status quo.

[jm4]

That's a distortion of what I said. If you want to have a debate about it, at least be intellectually honest.