[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.

[AnthonyMouse]

The issue is not the inconvenience unless they took action to make it inconvenient on purpose. It's when they do take action to make it inconvenient on purpose, or prohibit it through contracts or DRM.

[posix86]

Really? The reason it's not possible to put a Ford engine in a Toyota is not that Toyota purposefully make their cars not fit Ford motors; it's because they're not keen on making it so. It takes way more effort to create a unified standardized interface that 3rd parties can connect to rather than just making the interface fit your product. That's what I mean about actively shooting themselves in the foot: They spend money exposing the interface such that others can connect to it, and then loose money by others providing 3rd party services connecting to them.