[lefrenchy]

> That's ridiculous. According to that logic, neither Office (nor Google Workspace, formerly G Suite) should be allowed to exist

It's not that they should not be allowed to exist. Rather, they should not be able to undercut competitors by using their leverage as massive tech companies to subsidize losing money on something while they starve out competitors. Stoller's article has much more nuance than you are attributing, and he outlines that in a world where these tech corporations were not allowed to get as big and powerful, you wouldn't have to be left with binary decisions like this one.

This sort of behavior is akin to Amazon selling items at a loss in order to starve out some competitor and then buying them out afterwards in order to benefit from their infrastructure and logistics.

[crazygringo]

I read his article, and unfortunately his nuance essentially comes down to:

> The loss of an independent Slack is sad, because Slack’s strategy wasn’t just a standard attempt to gain market power. As a company, Slack’s team thought carefully about product design, and that care showed.

That's not an economic argument, it's an aesthetic one.

The fact is, it's natural in many industries to coalesce around 2-3 major competitors. And as we can see, that's exactly what's happening here. Slack isn't being snuffed out. It's living on as part of one of the ~3 major players in the space, which is a natural and desirable outcome for consumers who want simple bundled all-in-one solutions.

And Microsoft hasn't been "losing money" by including chat functionality in Office -- what you're describing is predatory pricing which is simply not the case here. Office is an expensive product that companies pay tons of $$$ for.

[sjy]

How is it “natural” for many industries to coalesce into oligopoly? This requires a legal system with strong property rights for corporations and lax competition law enforcement. These conditions have not always existed. You can argue that the status quo is welfare-optimising, but I don’t see what’s natural about it.

[crazygringo]

Coalescing into 2-3 major competitors is natural in the sense that consumers can't, and don't want to, keep track of 10 or 20 different choices for the same thing. It's just too much. It's the paradox of choice.

There's nothing inherently wrong with "oligopolies" except when they collude together to raise prices, and competition is weak. But that's obviously not the case in office productivity software -- competition and innovation are intense, and there's zero evidence of price-gouging whatsoever.

[lefrenchy]

For a small/medium sized business trying to optimize expenses, Microsoft can gain a competitive edge simply off having teams “bundled” into it’s offering, without actually being a superior product.

If your argument is that there is a tendency towards monopoly and that’s just the way of thing, even in a “free market capitalist” economy which is based largely on the idea of competition, then I don’t find it convincing.

Consumers end up with bundled solutions with 2-3 companies precisely because those companies take steps to make that the outcome (eg Apple making integration sub-par when it is not first party)