[fallingknife]

> They build this conglomerated system that all comes together as one blob, and get third parties to depend on various parts of it to prevent them from being swapped out individually. Then to replace one of them you have to be able to replace the others, which makes it very hard for any but the largest corporations to compete.

The case doesn't focus on this because it's not illegal. There are definite benefits to the user in terms of convenience here. And building a product that people want more is not anti-competitive behavior just because it requires a larger company to compete. Anti-competitive behavior is when you get customers by means other than building a product they want more.

[AnthonyMouse]

The entire point is that it isn't something the customer wants more, but they get stuck with it because they need a subset of it and it's all glued together.

This is quite distinct from providing two products together. You can go to the store and buy an entire PC with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Edge. Then you can install Firefox on it, or remove Windows entirely and install Linux. The trouble comes when you can't separate them anymore.

Then in order for a competitor, and therefore the customer, to replace the banana the customer wants to replace, and which would otherwise be easy to replace, the competing product also has to replace the gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. Which is bad for the customer.

And tying is illegal. Typically it was in the context of a company with a dominant market position requiring you to buy products in a related market if you want the product you had to get from them, but now they're doing a new thing. Not only can you not buy them separately, you can't even separate them after you've bought them -- which should be a violation regardless of what kind of market position you had to begin with, because its primary effect is to harm competition. But this stuff is pretty much invented by judges as they go along, so who knows what they're going to do.

[fallingknife]

What do you mean that you can't separate them? Seems to me that "tying" has no meaning for free services. You have access to the whole thing, but you are free to pick and choose exactly what parts you use. It's one thing when you want a banana that costs $1, but you have to pay $100 for the gorilla/banana combo. But if the banana + gorilla is free, then it's hard to complain that you are being abused because you got a free gorilla with your banana.

[lozenge]

How the start menu search always uses Bing with Edge? And every couple months you get a new notification or modal welcome screen trying to switch you back to Edge? And they add new features that insist on launching Edge. Oh, and the idea of uninstalling Edge has gone way out of the Overton window.

Same with Chrome, you can go without it but you will need to dismiss hundreds of nagboxes on Google sites.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It's one thing when you want a banana that costs $1, but you have to pay $100 for the gorilla/banana combo. But if the banana + gorilla is free, then it's hard to complain that you are being abused because you got a free gorilla with your banana.

A phone is $100 (or $1000) and an app is $1.

Or to take it from the perspective of the device OEM, the price isn't the money, it's having to agree to take the apps and services the customers might prefer alternatives to as a bundle with the services the customers demand you include with your product. Which has market value in the same way as paying for the default search engine does, and could have reduced the price of the device for the end user. Or increased competition for those services (like Google Play) that currently operate with high margins.

[posix86]

You're talking about tying things together like Microsoft Word with onedrive etc.? This sounds backwards to me. The "tying together" only feels like "tying" because you get used to the extent the services interact with each other, which is very convenient, and feel like you're unable to change, because you're unwilling to let go of those easy ways of interacting with other services.

But that doesn't make the interaction anti-competitive; it makes them a nice product. It wouldn't make sense for MS to allow, say, other clients to MS Word to interact with their cloud, that would be anti-competitive in that they're actively shooting themselves in the foot while doing it. I don't see why this is a bad thing.

And in general, the fact that we're even converging from multiple services towards one is purely historical. The reason MS word & excel are two separate programs rather than one is due to the tech landscape on the past. Google Docs or Notion or Coda are all supersets ot Word vs Excel, using newer tech & hardware to provide a more unified experience, which IS in the interest of the user.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The "tying together" only feels like "tying" because you get used to the extent the services interact with each other, which is very convenient, and feel like you're unable to change, because you're unwilling to let go of those easy ways of interacting with other services.

The tying together is tying together because you can sensibly separate them and the customer might like to use Microsoft Word with Google Drive or LibreOffice with OneDrive.

> It wouldn't make sense for MS to allow, say, other clients to MS Word to interact with their cloud, that would be anti-competitive in that they're actively shooting themselves in the foot while doing it.

It would be anti-competitive in that it would make it easier to compete with them?

> Google Docs or Notion or Coda are all supersets ot Word vs Excel, using newer tech & hardware to provide a more unified experience, which IS in the interest of the user.

The problem with the "unified experience" argument is that it only justifies putting them together, not inhibiting the customer from separating them. If the "unified experience" is actually in the interest of the customer then they'll choose it even when the alternative is available.

[fallingknife]

> The tying together is tying together because you can sensibly separate them and the customer might like to use Microsoft Word with Google Drive or LibreOffice with OneDrive.

They might like to, but those options are just not available in the market, and that's not an anti-trust issue. I might like to have a Tesla with Apple Car play. I might like to have Ford Ranger with an engine made by Toyota. But these companies are under no obligation to satisfy my desires. I am free to make those combinations happen at great inconvenience to myself, but those companies are in no way expected to help me do that.

[willywanker]

>You can go to the store and buy an entire PC with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Edge. Then you can install Firefox on it, or remove Windows entirely and install Linux. The trouble comes when you can't separate them anymore.

If you don't want Windows why would you buy a PC that has it pre-installed and the license price thus included in the total? The fact that you couldn't get a PC without Windows on it was one of the points made in the Microsoft antitrust case of the late 90s.

[hughesjj]

My 2c is that banning products from competing app stores or forcing the same price on your platform is definitely anti competitive