3 ms·

I'm all good with your proposal, as long as the "one simplified bundled offering" can be preconfigured to install a Teams competitor, instead of Teams itself.

• bob1029 3y ago
  How many components of Microsoft's offering must provide options for 3rd party integration? If someone starts a multimedia player company (a la VLC) and decides they want to charge a premium fee, would we find ourselves having similar conversation about antitrust? What about MSPaint, or file explorer?
  • vetinari 3y ago
    All of them. > Otherwise it's simply abusing dominant market position.
    • Ekaros 3y ago
      Should this actually be independent of market position? Basically if you offer an OS or something, you can not bundle anything at all in it if someone asks to have their paid option as alternative. Let say someone writes paid CLI-tools for Linux. Could they go around all distros and demand they unbundle things from them so they can offer some way to sell their own inside it? Maybe remove vi, less and so on. Or even entire shell...
      • vetinari 3y ago
        Are there any material advantages gained by linux distributions by providing cli tools, vi less, entire shells? Do they gain an ability to enter and control new market segments, or ability to control standards than everyone else must follow? Microsoft does gain an significant advantage by bundling Teams. Do linux distributions gain similar advantages by bundling shells? Do they even have similar impact on others in the industy (hh-score)? Bonus question: did they cross-finance from other sources to get the position there?
        • throwaway06072 3y ago
          Yes, yes, yes and yes. Who would use a distro with a lesser set of CLI tools? Who would use a distro without a supported shell? Canonical is now using their position to push Snaps, for example. And it's usually financed through enterprise (server) software support contracts, instead of direct payments for the product.