[CharlieDigital]

The article is quite light in its definition of "monopoly".

It's hard to take this seriously given that the ecosystem of alternatives has never been richer, IMO.

Word processing? Notion for web natives; my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.

Email? Same for Gmail vs Outlook.

Messaging? While Microsoft gets a big chunk of the market via bundling Teams, there's Slack and a slew of options on the market for enterprise chat and messaging. They've also been forced to unbundle Teams in the EU market[0]

Cloud? AWS still holds a commanding lead and there are other vendors like Google, Oracle, et al. that offer competitive products.

Operating systems? My kids are growing up on ChromeOS. My dev team is maybe 80% macOS and 20% Linux. All of our software is shipped as Linux containers. The OS that most of us are interacting with is probably made by Google (Android, Android Auto, Android Watch, Google TV) or Apple (iOS, CarPlay, Apple TV) or open source (Linux) and not Microsoft. The OS running most of the software we access via the web is not Windows Server. The database that is backing the majority of those servers is not SQL Server and more likely to be Postgres or MySQL.

AI? Microsoft has aligned themselves with OpenAI, but it's not hard to see that Google is very competitive in this space as is Anthropic not to mention the Chinese teams doing stellar work with model advancement despite (or maybe as a reaction to) Western restrictions on hardware. Microsoft's open source VS Code and Copilot let you pick from a slate of Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI models.

Browsers? Search? Ad platforms? Social media? No, not even close to a monopoly.

Gaming and leisure? Nope.

To be clear, I'm not here to defend Microsoft; I'm voicing my disdain for a very poorly written article that in no way backs up the claim of Microsoft's "monopoly". By all means, please point out Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but do so with evidence and facts -- not your feelings and dated takes from the 90's. Very, very hard to take this seriously without more specifics or context (possible in some narrow context, Microsoft does indeed have a monopoly). At least from my perspective, for Microsoft to survive these days, they have to have at least a decent product at a competitive price; otherwise, there's always a strong competitor in every one of their major profit areas.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

[the_snooze]

That's an incomplete view. Office is a strong incumbent not because it's a good product, but because there's decades of processes built around it. To take a small slice from my world, if you do any kind of government-funded research, you must use Microsoft Office because government funding agencies have in-house templates for budgets and technical reports. They'll reject proposals and contractually-obligated deliveries if you don't use their template. Those templates break in spectacular and unpredictable ways on non-MS-Office suites.

People use MS Office because other people use MS Office. It's network effects.

[CharlieDigital]

    > because there's decades of processes built around it

That's not Microsoft's problem; Microsoft isn't broadly writing legislation that compels the use of `.docx` format and PDFs are a thing.

[Forgeties79]

None of that really matters when we are assessing whether something is a monopoly or not.

[CharlieDigital]

Well, I don't know how you define it, but here's Wiki's first paragraph[0]:

    > A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell') is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.

And Merriam Webster[1]

    > exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

Do these hold true for Office? Azure? VS Code? Teams? Windows?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly

[Forgeties79]

You are using the dictionary definition of monopoly, not the legal definition according to any particular nation’s laws or looking at how it has been enforced/on what basis, which is the only version that really matters in this discussion.

I imagine everyone on HN knows that simply linking Wikipedia is generally considered little more than a snarky, passive aggressive response. I don’t need the dictionary or Wikipedia definition of a monopoly for this conversation. I didn’t ask for it and you know that it wasn’t necessary or productive.

If you want to have an actual discussion I’m all ears.

[CharlieDigital]

Please cite the legal definition and let's have a discussion on whether it meets the legal definition or not.

[the_snooze]

I never said it was Microsoft's problem. I'm just showing you that "oh, switch to something else" is a naive view if you actually have real work to do.

[CharlieDigital]

That's fine, but that doesn't meet the definition for a monopoly; that's just inertia.

[BartjeD]

A monopoly is measured in a given market by marketshare.

Ofcourse the existence of 10 alternatives is meaningless if they count for 0.01% of given market section. Lol

[CharlieDigital]

Find any definition of "monopoly" and it should be pretty clear that it's not merely marketshare but the active manipulation of markets and market conditions to produce that marketshare.

    > A monopoly is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.

^ Wikipedia def is a prime example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly)

[the_snooze]

I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal gain.

Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position. They may not be a monopoly in the strict sense (and I never said they were), but they're not a passive player either who accidentally fell into this situation. We don't need to give trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt here.

[CharlieDigital]

    > Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position

For the edification of the readership, please share how Microsoft's business decisions are being made to maintain a monopoly in your space. Are they buying out competitors? Are they using contract terms that forbid the use of other vendors? Are they under-pricing their product relative to the market?

If the cost of migrating results in "minimal gain", doesn't that mean that they have a top product and the market has other competitive products by definition?

If you can provide some evidence of how they actively use business practices to maintain a monopoly, it would go a long way to advancing this discussion instead of showing long-held biases and I'm sure some lawyers out there would be ready to make a name for themselves.

[AuthAuth]

Someones template breaking is not a real problem. The office alternatives work perfectly fine for "real work". If your template doesnt work fix it. You fixed it all those times it broke on office.

[jimnotgym]

>my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office.

Sure they won't use it at school?

[CharlieDigital]

School issues every student a Chromebook starting from 3rd grade. Outside of gaming, my kids do all of their work on Chromebooks. Presentations, documents, email, messaging are all on Google products.

[Forgeties79]

And if any of them work for the government, for example, they are going to be forced into Microsoft Office.

I also don’t find it very reassuring how many people here are saying “well everything they do is on Google.” Same problem, different flavor.

[CharlieDigital]

    > they are going to be forced into Microsoft Office

Not by Microsoft.

And to be clear, this is far from modern day truth. My wife "works for the government" and the municipality uses Google.

[Forgeties79]

> Not by Microsoft.

That doesn’t make it not a monopoly

[adventured]

It may not be reassuring, however it rather obviously demonstrates Microsoft has no monopoly re Office.

[castoral]

The word 'monopoly' may be not quite right but the premise is.

The notion of 'there are other choices' is simply not the measure of a competitive landscape in systems with very high switching costs, incumbencies.

The pedestrian view that we have for 'competition' is 'retail' - you move from one shop to the next.

Big Industry is nothing like that.

They entrench themselves, with standards, process, procurement, brand, strategic leverage at the Executive layer, regulatory capture.

My local 'pharmacy corner store' has the same 10 chocolate bars my whole life: KitKat, Coffee Crisp etc. It never changes.

Does anyone in the world think that KitKat has some magical 'product quality' beyond the 10 000 other variations of chocolate?

No - they have 'market power'. They control distribution, they have deeply entrenched relationships with retail, they have relationships with coco producers, which shows up in a lot of ways.

If a buyer want access to the release of the 'New Swiffer' - you can't just try to 'drop our other products' like KitKat, besides, consumers have not been trained on a different product.

Consumers have seen a lifetime of KitKat ads, we don't necessarily like it, but it's a known quantity and we basically 'submit'. There are other choices, but a bit further back, a bit more expensive, a bit more unknown.

The very fact that 'chocolate bars' are unambiguously a commodity - and yet - there is no 'apparent broad market' should well serve to starting thinking more about how these systems work.

Google pays Apple an absolute fortune to be the 'first choice' on iPhone.

Google pays a fortune to create/control Chrome - which makes $0 in revenue, but which is a critical distributional component.

So your kids use 'something else' because they're in a situation where they can - but when the go to the office - do they make their own choice? No - IT does.

If IT wants to move away from just Word - then they loose deep integration with so many other things: MS Office is designed to be fully integrated precisely to thwart off all of those individual incumbents - the only way someone can make inroads, is on the margins with something really powerful, like 'Airtable'. Even then, it's relatively niche.

Combine that with the Operating System, which integrates deeply with chipsets and scale, and you can see the power.

I think that Slack is essentially a superior product, but the law firms, energy companies, gov offices are going to be sold 'Teams' and that's it. I know a lot of people who use teams and have literally never hear of Slack.

Slack is the 'niche chocolate bar in aisle 3 that costs 20% more, that they have never tried and not sure about - just buy KitKat'.

I have colleagues - very educated - who only use Copilot for AI - they think that's AI. They're not allowed to use anything else - because 'security'. Copilot is a ridiculously inferior product, not only do they exist in the ignorance of that, they actually think it's 'great', partly because 'It's Microsoft'.

The power of 'Brand at Scale' is really hard to fathom - managers and executives particularly are moved by this. They probably believe in institutional power and legitimacy more than anything and so MS because a 'hard default' that becomes difficult to overturn.

If there's a problem with some 'uppity gov. official' somewhere - MS can make discounts, steak dinners, custom integration, talk to people higher up in government, and make a strong case as why disrupting the 'default' should not happen.

ERP like SAP ... are just interminably integrated, and AWS/GCP are practically different products they are so different.

All of that is the tip of the iceberg.

There is no 'free market' in the way our instinct may apply, which is mostly derived from our 'retail' position in the value chain - the market operates a bit more differently at that level.

At that level 'Market Power' is the dominating factor, and 'product' is always second, generally things need only be 'sufficiently good'.

MS is an ok company and can create 'workable products', Google has some 'great' (and some terrible products), it's all they have to do to perpetuate - there is absolutely nothing anyone could do to displace them without some non-market force (aka government regulates competition).

If this dependency becomes a problem , and I would suggest finally in 2025 it is, then the only way out is coordinated action.

After all that I just said, the true power of institutionalization is not always hugely critical: if KitKat disappeared tomorrow nobody would care. If MS word was removed ... and everyone just choose something else, the world would not miss a beat. I truly believe that if we all woke up tomorrow and had to use Bing, it wouldn't matter that much.

Aside from major market disturbances, like AI in which those 'adept players' will probably be ahead anyhow, then it takes coordinated action to disrupt these systems.

It's much better to view those things through the lens of 'power' and not so much 'product', unless 'product' is absolutely decisive, novel, and/or it exists outside of locked-down value chains.

[IAmBroom]

Switching from Office to Libre Office would take about ten minutes training, for most people's usage. The software can be installed in less than that.

Just another log on the fire: Microsoft holds a lion's share of market, but not a monopoly (anymore).

[jimnotgym]

Plus finding another email provider and client, finding a chat app, cloud storage, etc