5 ms·

You’re missing the point. The outcomes and upside are irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft’s only strategy to attack was to give it away for free and

You’re missing the point. The outcomes and upside are irrelevant, what is relevant is that Microsoft’s only strategy to attack was to give it away for free and bundle it, creating a profoundly unfair (and illegal) advantage that continues the trend of consolidating power and reducing choice.

formercoder 6y ago
Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an interesting conundrum.
- orf 6y ago
  But it's not that they just gave consumers a cheaper product - they used their dominance in a specific market to gain dominance in another. It's the same thing as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
  - nodamage 6y ago
    Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court overturned the district court's initial ruling and remanded it for further analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any ruling could be made.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have been right that the browser is an important operating system feature/component and may have simply been ahead of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed component. Most consumers today would be extremely confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all; whether or not they primarily use that browser to install a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with Electron.
      - megablast 6y ago
        There is 0 reason why help and file browsing needs to be part of a browser. MS forced IE deep into the OS, when firefox and chrome, two incredibly successful and popular browsers do not need this at all, and are better for it.
        WorldMaker 6y ago
        Base FTP/Gopher/WebDAV "file browsing" was at the time definitely seen as a common browser feature. It was much lamented when Firefox dropped those features and left them to be plugins/external applications. Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very early version of EPUB. I think these are very strange things to complain about.
      - satyrnein 6y ago
        Or consider Chrome OS, which is not much else beyond a browser.
      - nodamage 6y ago
        I tend to agree. I think if the case had continued in court, Microsoft would have won this particular argument. (Of course, they still would have lost on the other claims involving more egregious behavior.)
        WorldMaker 6y ago
        I'm not sure about some of the other claims either. The AntiVirus claims set Windows virus/malware safety back by like a decade. Needing to install Security Essentials into XP/Vista instead of it just being out-of-the-box probably cost a lot more dollars to Windows users than if the court had agreed that such security concerns were the domain of the operating system. The PDF claims that Office shouldn't be allowed to directly export to PDF because that was the domain of paid add-ins also seem silly from 2020.
      - Qwertious 6y ago
        The browser primarily exists to address Windows's deficiencies in smooth package management for installing basic apps - that is, for "downloading" basic "webpages" - by simply clicking on the link. Counterfactual are hard, but if you see browsers as a sort of "replacement OS as desktop application" then you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!
  - toyg 6y ago
    It’s hard to argue chat is a different market from office. IBM sold Lotus Notes with integrated IM (Sametime, iirc) 15 years ago.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app. We also know that from a technical perspective Teams actually was a "cheaper product" because it was built on the backs of other existing parts of Office 365. It shares a ton of backend with SharePoint and it swallowed up Skype for Business/Lync. Both key products of the "bundle" before Microsoft decided on a need to compete with Slack.
    - Teckla 6y ago
      Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app. You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        Perhaps, but in this specific case: 1. Slack from a very early point in their pivot away from games branded themselves as an Enterprise Productivity app and made comparisons to Enterprise Email tools. 2. Microsoft's inclusion of Skype for Business/Lync (and to another extent Outlook, especially given Slack's own email-competitive marketing) for years prior to Slack/Teams implies that Chat/Communications has a long history of being considered an Enterprise Productivity App.
      - ska 6y ago
        > You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum. Perhaps, but in the case of Teams you don't even have to stretch.
treis 6y ago
Bundling is a legitimate market strategy and not inherently anti-competitive. So long as the overall package is not sold at a loss I don't think there's an issue. There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at least to many, was worth the extra money.
philg_jr 6y ago
Free? Office365 isn't exactly free. Its arguably the new/better (subjective, I guess, both kinda suck) version of Skype for Business. Slack is actually free to use (last I checked), if you don't care about the chat history.
- maigret 6y ago
  If an electricity company would offer a TV to each customer without any surcharge, then yes that’d be free, because customers are paying the same for less before. So, while I get your point, we are near unfair use of a monopoly situation here. Such a thing is good first for consumers, but once the companies own the monopoly, they own the pricing and can charge more than the former competitor used to, while customers becomes slave of one single monopolist.
- JanisL 6y ago
  Even if you pay the chat history is a massive pain in the ass to get out of the system, something that was a deal breaker for me when I was running a business.
satyrnein 6y ago
Whenever I build the next feature on my roadmap, have I now bundled and given away for free something that could have been a standalone company? Is there a bright line where it flips from incremental feature additions to anticompetitive behavior?

formercoder 6y ago

Predatory pricing is a component of anti trust but a very difficult one to prove legally. One must prove that by giving consumers a cheaper product they are being harmed. It's an interesting conundrum.

orf 6y ago
But it's not that they just gave consumers a cheaper product - they used their dominance in a specific market to gain dominance in another. It's the same thing as bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.
- nodamage 6y ago
  Bundling IE with Windows was never actually ruled to be illegal. The appeals court overturned the district court's initial ruling and remanded it for further analysis, but the case was ultimately settled before any ruling could be made.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Also, from the 2020 perspective Microsoft seems to have been right that the browser is an important operating system feature/component and may have simply been ahead of the curve in realizing it. (Today's mobile OSes all make the case that it should be a tightly OS managed component. Most consumers today would be extremely confused if an OS didn't include a browser at all; whether or not they primarily use that browser to install a more preferred browser.) It's easy in 2020 to wonder if the Microsoft anti-trust effort delayed innovations like PWA standards and got in the way of people thinking to build earlier cross-platform, lighter weight HTML "app frameworks" than what we are seeing in this timeline with Electron.
    - megablast 6y ago
      There is 0 reason why help and file browsing needs to be part of a browser. MS forced IE deep into the OS, when firefox and chrome, two incredibly successful and popular browsers do not need this at all, and are better for it.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        Base FTP/Gopher/WebDAV "file browsing" was at the time definitely seen as a common browser feature. It was much lamented when Firefox dropped those features and left them to be plugins/external applications. Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very early version of EPUB. I think these are very strange things to complain about.
    - satyrnein 6y ago
      Or consider Chrome OS, which is not much else beyond a browser.
    - nodamage 6y ago
      I tend to agree. I think if the case had continued in court, Microsoft would have won this particular argument. (Of course, they still would have lost on the other claims involving more egregious behavior.)
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        I'm not sure about some of the other claims either. The AntiVirus claims set Windows virus/malware safety back by like a decade. Needing to install Security Essentials into XP/Vista instead of it just being out-of-the-box probably cost a lot more dollars to Windows users than if the court had agreed that such security concerns were the domain of the operating system. The PDF claims that Office shouldn't be allowed to directly export to PDF because that was the domain of paid add-ins also seem silly from 2020.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      The browser primarily exists to address Windows's deficiencies in smooth package management for installing basic apps - that is, for "downloading" basic "webpages" - by simply clicking on the link. Counterfactual are hard, but if you see browsers as a sort of "replacement OS as desktop application" then you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!
- toyg 6y ago
  It’s hard to argue chat is a different market from office. IBM sold Lotus Notes with integrated IM (Sametime, iirc) 15 years ago.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app. We also know that from a technical perspective Teams actually was a "cheaper product" because it was built on the backs of other existing parts of Office 365. It shares a ton of backend with SharePoint and it swallowed up Skype for Business/Lync. Both key products of the "bundle" before Microsoft decided on a need to compete with Slack.
  - Teckla 6y ago
    Except that in this particular case the aren't "unrelated" markets: Office 365 is a bundle of (enterprise) Productivity Apps and Teams is an (enterprise) Productivity app. You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Perhaps, but in this specific case: 1. Slack from a very early point in their pivot away from games branded themselves as an Enterprise Productivity app and made comparisons to Enterprise Email tools. 2. Microsoft's inclusion of Skype for Business/Lync (and to another extent Outlook, especially given Slack's own email-competitive marketing) for years prior to Slack/Teams implies that Chat/Communications has a long history of being considered an Enterprise Productivity App.
    - ska 6y ago
      > You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum. Perhaps, but in the case of Teams you don't even have to stretch.

treis 6y ago

Bundling is a legitimate market strategy and not inherently anti-competitive. So long as the overall package is not sold at a loss I don't think there's an issue. There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at least to many, was worth the extra money.

philg_jr 6y ago

Free? Office365 isn't exactly free. Its arguably the new/better (subjective, I guess, both kinda suck) version of Skype for Business. Slack is actually free to use (last I checked), if you don't care about the chat history.

maigret 6y ago
If an electricity company would offer a TV to each customer without any surcharge, then yes that’d be free, because customers are paying the same for less before. So, while I get your point, we are near unfair use of a monopoly situation here. Such a thing is good first for consumers, but once the companies own the monopoly, they own the pricing and can charge more than the former competitor used to, while customers becomes slave of one single monopolist.
JanisL 6y ago
Even if you pay the chat history is a massive pain in the ass to get out of the system, something that was a deal breaker for me when I was running a business.

satyrnein 6y ago

Whenever I build the next feature on my roadmap, have I now bundled and given away for free something that could have been a standalone company? Is there a bright line where it flips from incremental feature additions to anticompetitive behavior?