[thethethethe]

> These giants, armed with nearly limitless funds and extensive client relationships, frequently abuse their advantage and bully smaller upstarts into oblivion.

I don’t really understand this viewpoint. Companies are _choosing_ to use Microsoft’s products for various reasons. Maybe they already use Office and the integration with Teams made Teams the best choice over Slack. Maybe the company had an existing relationship with Microsoft so onboarding Teams required less Administrative overhead. There are probably many more that I am not listing. These are legitimate reasons to choose a product over another, not Microsoft abusing its power.

Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem. Lone, un-integrated startups, like Slack, still pop up and shake up the market. Then big companies replicate their product and integrate it into their existing software suites and sales pipelines, providing value that the smaller startup cannot. In this case the smaller startup merged with a larger company and will likely be integrated with their systems, providing value that both companies could have easily created alone. This all seems like it’s working as intended to me.

[Barrin92]

>Generally, big companies are only capable of delivering this type of value, and I don’t really see why that’s a problem

It's a chat app. (And Slack itself is a huge company) Teams, as a product on its own merits, is not necessarily better than Slack. I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power.

When you switch from product A to product B only because product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and competition. It also is a positive feedback loop in that those services just keep claiming more and more space and the claim of space alone diminishes the value of everyone else, because you're forever locked into a web of, in this case, Microsoft products. Which is of course one of the reasons the company is so powerful.

You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.

[thethethethe]

> It's a chat app

I think you are reducing my argument a little here. I mentioned in my previous comment there are other benefits to working with large b2b companies other than the raw merits of a single provided app by itself.

> I very strongly disagree with the notion that integration into a locked-in ecosystem is a legitimate reason and not an abuse of power.

I disagree with you here. There are many legitimate business (and personal) reasons to stick with an ecosystem. If that wasn't the case, then people wouldn't pick those products. Open standards with interchangeable clients and servers do exist right now, IRC for example, though nobody uses them because companies like Microsoft provide a hosted solution that provides more value.

> You can ask yourself this, if every software company waas forced to implement transparent protocols and APIs, so that clients can freely choose their end-user software, what would the market share look like? If it would look different than it does now I think you can make a strong case that consumers are being deprived of choice.

This would be nice but I don't really think things would change that much. As I mentioned above, open standards already exist. We have email protocols, IRC, RTF, LaTeX, etc and people don't use them (with the exception of email). Forcing companies to open their APIs wouldn't force them to integrate with each other and, if they did, imagine being Slack in a world where Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, etc all had different APIs you had to integrate with and their products were already integrated with each other? That would be pretty expensive to implement and maintain and would definitively put you at a disadvantage due to your relative lack of resources.

Also, if all APIs were forced to be transparent, companies would still be able to build ecosystems that are more comprehensive and desirable than a patched-together set of disparate clients and hosts setup by some IT admin. A company which does one thing well, even if compatible with all other, like services (which would be an incredible feat) would never be able to ensure that their product would integrate better into every major company's ecosystem, putting them at the same disadvantage.

Additionally, there is real value with consolidating your software services under one company. You only have to manage one account, you might get a better deal because you are buying multiple services at the same time, all support would be centralized and bundled with other services you are buying.

[Barrin92]

> imagine being Slack in a world where Google, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, etc all had different APIs you had to integrate with and their products were already integrated with each other?

That's already the world we're in except for the fact that small competitors can't integrate with them, or reimplement clients even if they want to. Netflix runs fine on every platform of the large players. I can log into everything with Google, Facebook and vice-versa, the very largest companies often already adjust their infrastructure to be mutually compatible to significant degrees.

It's really only third party incumbents who get locked out regularly, if you're already an Apple or Microsoft you can at least partially get your way with the other big sharks. It's the Signals and IRCs and (until recently) Linuxes of this world who have to exist at the margins.

I also think it's important to point out that nobody has to fully reimplement a services API. If you're one guy, and you want to make a sleek, minimialist facebook client, why not? If people prefer full featured Facebook they can go to Facebook, but at least then there is choice. I wasn't saying either that a company can't have huge market share in this system, just that they ought to do it on the merit of their software, facing full competition. Large companies that provide feature-rich experiences will still win customers who desire these features, so I don't see the downside to my proposal.

[thethethethe]

I think I agree with everything you are saying here. I think things would be better if APIs were open and people could write their own clients in most--if not all circumstances, I just don't think open APIs would fundamentally change the influence of large companies or diminish the advantages their ecosystems have for most businesses and consumers

[warkdarrior]

> When you switch from product A to product B only because product B integrates with proprietary protocols or services you rely on and not on the merit or price of the product itself then that's bad, and it's harming consumer welfare and competition.

Slack could have integrated with LibreOffice Online and ownCloud. They chose not to.