[exogeny]

You’re missing the point. The outcomes and upside are irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft’s only strategy to attack was to give it away for free and bundle it, creating a profoundly unfair (and illegal) advantage that continues the trend of consolidating power and reducing choice.

[philg_jr]

Free? Office365 isn't exactly free. Its arguably the new/better (subjective, I guess, both kinda suck) version of Skype for Business.

Slack is actually free to use (last I checked), if you don't care about the chat history.

[maigret]

If an electricity company would offer a TV to each customer without any surcharge, then yes that’d be free, because customers are paying the same for less before. So, while I get your point, we are near unfair use of a monopoly situation here. Such a thing is good first for consumers, but once the companies own the monopoly, they own the pricing and can charge more than the former competitor used to, while customers becomes slave of one single monopolist.

[JanisL]

Even if you pay the chat history is a massive pain in the ass to get out of the system, something that was a deal breaker for me when I was running a business.

[satyrnein]

Whenever I build the next feature on my roadmap, have I now bundled and given away for free something that could have been a standalone company? Is there a bright line where it flips from incremental feature additions to anticompetitive behavior?

[formercoder]

Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an interesting conundrum.

[orf]

But it's not that they just gave consumers a cheaper product - they used their dominance in a specific market to gain dominance in another. It's the same thing as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

[nodamage]

Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court overturned the district court's initial ruling and remanded it for further analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any ruling could be made.

[WorldMaker]

Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have been right that the browser is an important operating system feature/component and may have simply been ahead of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed component. Most consumers today would be extremely confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all; whether or not they primarily use that browser to install a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with Electron.

[megablast]

There is 0 reason why help and file browsing needs to be part of a browser. MS forced IE deep into the OS, when firefox and chrome, two incredibly successful and popular browsers do not need this at all, and are better for it.

[WorldMaker]

Base FTP/Gopher/WebDAV "file browsing" was at the time definitely seen as a common browser feature. It was much lamented when Firefox dropped those features and left them to be plugins/external applications.

Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very early version of EPUB.

I think these are very strange things to complain about.

[nodamage]

I tend to agree. I think if the case had continued in court, Microsoft would have won this particular argument.

(Of course, they still would have lost on the other claims involving more egregious behavior.)

[WorldMaker]

I'm not sure about some of the other claims either.

The AntiVirus claims set Windows virus/malware safety back by like a decade. Needing to install Security Essentials into XP/Vista instead of it just being out-of-the-box probably cost a lot more dollars to Windows users than if the court had agreed that such security concerns were the domain of the operating system.

The PDF claims that Office shouldn't be allowed to directly export to PDF because that was the domain of paid add-ins also seem silly from 2020.

[Qwertious]

The browser primarily exists to address Windows's deficiencies in smooth package management for installing basic apps - that is, for "downloading" basic "webpages" - by simply clicking on the link.

Counterfactual are hard, but if you see browsers as a sort of "replacement OS as desktop application" then you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!

[WorldMaker]

I find your viewpoint rather confusing and I'm not sure I see it at all. The browser primarily exists to traverse hyperlinked documents on the internet, which we call the "web". Though we've built plenty of "apps" now on top of hyperlinked documents, for the most part that remains arguably a secondary or tertiary reason for the browser to exist, and even if you could argue that secondary usage has rose to prominence to eclipse the primary reason for the existence of the browser, the use of the web for "apps" certainly has a lot less to do with Windows package management specifically and instead the convenience of simple, standardized client-server communications and development patterns that arise from that original primary usage goal of hyperlinked documents in a web of servers.

Web "apps" seem to only increase cross-platform interests, rather than serve to "smooth deficiencies" in a single platform.

> you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!

We've seen exactly the opposite in practice: a ton of web "app" innovation occurred when there were a variety mobile "smartphone" OSes with reasonably modern browsers whereas development has shifted much further back to OS-specific apps as mobile devices have calcified into the iOS/Android duopoly.

[satyrnein]

Or consider Chrome OS, which is not much else beyond a browser.

[toyg]

It’s hard to argue chat is a different market from office. IBM sold Lotus Notes with integrated IM (Sametime, iirc) 15 years ago.

[WorldMaker]

Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app.

We also know that from a technical perspective Teams actually was a "cheaper product" because it was built on the backs of other existing parts of Office 365. It shares a ton of backend with SharePoint and it swallowed up Skype for Business/Lync. Both key products of the "bundle" before Microsoft decided on a need to compete with Slack.

[Teckla]

Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app.

You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.

[WorldMaker]

Perhaps, but in this specific case:

1. Slack from a very early point in their pivot away from games branded themselves as an Enterprise Productivity app and made comparisons to Enterprise Email tools.

2. Microsoft's inclusion of Skype for Business/Lync (and to another extent Outlook, especially given Slack's own email-competitive marketing) for years prior to Slack/Teams implies that Chat/Communications has a long history of being considered an Enterprise Productivity App.

[ska]

> You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.

Perhaps, but in the case of Teams you don't even have to stretch.

[treis]

Bundling is a legitimate market strategy and not inherently anti-competitive. So long as the overall package is not sold at a loss I don't think there's an issue.

There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at least to many, was worth the extra money.