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by ajross 459 days ago
> The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.

It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades! That sounds ridiculous on its face. Of all the product areas to complain about Google having a monopoly, you picked the office suite!?

HN tends strongly to one side of this argument, but really this is trending towards a "Google Derangement Syndrome" kind of analysis.
2 comments
alt227 459 days ago
Microsoft have always made a point that they can never compete with Google on price of office apps, therefore they try to compete on service, support, and included bells and whistles. This is why when you buy an O365 license you basically get anything Microsoft has ever developed thrown in with it.

Office is Microsofts bread and butter, for Google its a side project that disrupts Microsofts business model.

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ajross 459 days ago
> Microsoft have always made a point that they can never compete with Google on price of office apps, therefore they try to compete on service, support, and included bells and whistles.

So... you're saying the presence in the market of a viable competitor improved the value provided to consumers? Who knew!

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alt227 458 days ago
No Im saying that a big company decided to piss off another big company by offering their main product for free, just because they had infinite money and could. Thats disruption not competition, and you can be sure if Chrome is taken away, the price for Google office apps will increase.
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ivewonyoung 459 days ago
>> The artificial price point for GMail, GDocs, GMeet has killed so much competition.

> It literally led to the creation of Office 365 and broke open a market that had been closed to competition in the face of an unbreakable Microsoft Monopoly for decades

Both can be true at the same time. For example Tmobile and Sprint merging led to even more pressure on any new or existing networks that were/are not in the top 4. But it also led to increased competition with Verizon and AT&T.

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