[TheRealDunkirk]

> That's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous that you think it's ridiculous. No, I don't think Office should exist. If Microsoft had been forced to sell Word separately from Excel, we might all still have a choice to run Lotus123, or QuattroPro. There's nothing enshrined in the Constitution that says that companies have to be allowed to bundle whatever they want into their other products. I think it's the job of our government, in fact, to prevent it this sort of thing. Microsoft bought lots of companies during the 90's (good for them!), but ran a least a dozen more -- and prominent ones, at that -- out of the market by duplicating their software, and absorbing their business. Yes! Absolutely! Microsoft can make their own disk defragmentation product. Or antivirus. Or whatever. But put a price tag on it, even if it's $0, and let it compete with everything else that's already in the market. Don't bundle it. I mean, did the browser wars teach us nothing?

[crazygringo]

But then where does it end?

Why should Word be allowed to bundle a spell-checker? Why shouldn't you have to buy that separately?

And why should the spell-checker be allowed to bundle a dictionary? Shouldn't that have to come from a separate company?

Should Photoshop be allowed to bundle a set of default filters, when there are companies that produce third-party filters? Should macOS be allowed to bundle ZIP compression, when there are companies that sell standalone compression software?

You're right we don't have Lotus 123. But we have Google Sheets, and we have Tableau, and we have Jupyter notebooks.

Literally every product is bundle of things that were combined into it, until you get either to raw physical materials or perhaps single functions in code.

I don't know how you're going to come up with a standard that allows Macs to include a menu option to compress a folder, but doesn't allow a bundle of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

[lefrenchy]

You’re operating on two fallacies (slippery slope and a strawman). I think there’s a pretty clear distinction between having a spell-checker bundled into word, and reproducing the product of a competitor after the fact and bundling it into your office suite as an accessory.

Also, that’s the whole point of the legal system (and part of what Stoller is arguing). If a spell-checker company feels the behavior was anti-competitive, they should be able to go through the legal system and fight it. I think Stoller is saying that this exact legal system is currently flawed.

[crazygringo]

I'm not operating on any fallacies at all.

First of all, it's not a straw man. Spellcheckers were standalone applications for years before word processors began integrating them. [1]

And second, it's not a slippery slope fallacy, it's an actual slippery slope, that's the whole point. There isn't a "pretty clear distinction" at all.

If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that when spellcheckers came out, the existing products should have been able to legally prevent WordPerfect (and eventually Word, and Docs, etc.) from ever building their own integrated spellcheckers. To this day, you'd need to buy Word, and then buy a separate spellchecking app or extension.

But there's no distinction between spellchecking and 100 other features that Word has that also used to be separate programs -- like mail merge, like drawing capabilities, like a citations manager, etc. etc. etc.

And you really think that would be a good idea?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spell_checker#History

[jryle70]

> I think there’s a pretty clear distinction between having a spell-checker bundled into word, and reproducing the product of a competitor after the fact and bundling it into your office suite as an accessory.

I'm not seeing a clear distinction. Imagine a scenario where Word and Excel aren't bundled. Word has always had table functionality. The Word team decides that it'd be useful if, when creating a table, end user is able to enter @cell1 + 1 to cell two to make it show the incremental value of cell one. Soon enough they'll add sort, sum, average. Then they'll create a template that creates a document with a table created by default, which looks like a spreadsheet.

Should those new functionality be allowed and who get to decide? Any attempt to regulate such product features are futile and inevitably stifle innovation.

Apple M1 is universally praised exactly because it's a SOC with integrated functions that used to require dedicated chips from multiple vendors. Imagine the inferior product if Apple is legally obliged to use Intel/AMD graphic card, in the name of maintaining the competitive landscape?