[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.