6 ms·

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundl

Because this is not bundling of features, but of market products. Here the bundling merges two markets which are not related, while it might make sense to bundle word and excel for example which are parts of an office suite while teams is totally different business solution.

falcor84 2y ago
How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"? Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom. Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging this position to capture the colab software one. Google is not a market leader and in addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace, though this is less significant than the market dominance.
  - eindiran 2y ago
    I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the US not targeting Adobe with antitrust for bundling together tools for typesetters, marketers, video editors, animators, etc, etc?
    - yunohn 2y ago
      This is actually a great counter example to the previous post’s perspective on bundling vs markets.
    - jjoonathan 2y ago
      It should be. "Allowed in the US" is a bar so low that you can get oil out the end of it.
    - necovek 2y ago
      The only reason is that law enforcement is reactive. And usually requires the tactic to be effective before it does (yes, too late by then). Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.
    - gostsamo 2y ago
      Two questions: do Adobe uses their dominant position in one of those markets to influence the clients in another market to use their product? Second, does Adobe's competition wishes to complain? The second part will prioritize the case, I think.
  - xmprt 2y ago
    But where do you draw the line? In college, I used Word a lot and barely used Excel. At work I use Excel way more than Word (and often times I could easily just use a simple markdown editor instead of Word so I arguably wouldn't use that either). So they seem to be two different markets. I probably use the integrations between Excel and Teams more than I use the integrations between Word and Excel so bundling Teams makes more sense to me.
    - layer8 2y ago
      You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had. More importantly, installing Word doesn’t also automatically install Excel, and vice versa. Microsoft wouldn’t have a problem if they provided a choice of Office with Teams and Office without Teams.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        > You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had. By this logic I can buy Excel + Word + Powerpoint and avoid Teams. They offer each office product individually or all their office products as a subscription. Why would it be different if they also offered a special subscription that just excluded teams?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > Google is not a market leader Do you have stats that show this? "Market share" sites never feel very trustworthy to me, but they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience. > addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace This doesn't make sense to me as an argument. It sounds like you're saying that because Google hasn't bothered providing an offline version of their product they get a pass on bundling collaboration software, whereas because Microsoft provides an offline version that makes their bundling more egregious. Why exactly would that be?
    - OJFord 2y ago
      > they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience. I 100% believe that is your experience as 'HN-commenting SWE/tech bro/STEM worker', but just as strongly doubt that that is correct in the broader market.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        Like I said, every source I found claims the same thing. Do you have data showing it as a distant second?
        OJFord 2y ago
        I see that too on Statists for example, which doesn't state a methodology that I can see but I suspect it's users (every Gmail account?) or 'I have used Docs/Word365'. This site claims Office365 absolutely dwarfs Google Workspace in # business customers/licences , which is more in line with my expectation: https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/ https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/
        FreakLegion 2y ago
        That sounds about right. I routinely dig through cybersecurity data from around 100k companies, and Microsoft has no real competition. Occasionally I see Google at a little 500-person up-and-comer, but almost never in the enterprise, and they show up less and less as the companies get bigger. I don't think I've ever seen them in the Fortune 100, for example, other than at Google itself. The world runs on Exchange and Office.
  - nox101 2y ago
    a tcp/ip stack was not part of windows in 1993. You'd buy it from a 3rd party company. Was Microsoft adding it "bundling"? Same for mouse drivers. media players. cd writing software. Unzip functionality, and on and on. Ms got in trouble for IE but every os now bundles a browser. team communication seems like a core feature of an office suite in 2024 just like those other features feel like core parts of an OS in 2024
  - sib 2y ago
    And people who need spreadsheets are not the same as people who need documents as people who need slides etc. Of course there is overlap, but there is also lots of overlap among those who need chat/meet and those who need slides.
- navane 2y ago
  For antitrust to work, all we have to do is break up the biggest players. There's no point in focusing on (in that market) smaller players. They'll get to them because recursion.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
lotsofpulp 2y ago
Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  Because word and excel go together in the needs of a business and those who usually buy one use the other as well. All competition of MS in this space offer similar products bundled in a similar way. Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    I disagree. Excel is probably far more used than Word, and word could be dropped from many people’s computers and no one would notice. Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software? My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      Wouldn’t it be that we have a fairly widely spread defecto definition of “office suite” as word processor, spread sheet, presentation, email as it’s been that way for decades? Not sure about “communications”however I think it is a serious argument to consider that a separate product, but not the others, they’re kind of like peanut butter and jelly or Bonnie & Clyde or the three stooges.
      - lotsofpulp 2y ago
        I think that is a very un-serious argument with no consistency. Microsoft has always sold a cheaper "office suite" without outlook. What businesses have historically bundled and not bundled is irrelevant to what is best for society going forward. Surely there were many features that many software businesses add that weren't there before. What if Microsoft relabeled Teams to be part of Outlook? Like they made Calendars part of Outlook. It all feels like starting at the result and working backwards towards a justification.
guerby 2y ago
EU courts ruled that bundling an OS with a machine was ok. https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=191734&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=8756818 https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...
halfcat 2y ago
Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.
nilsbunger 2y ago
The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1. By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s. If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!
- DANmode 2y ago
  ...if your idea is to push the market so that Teams is an open standard and protocol, this might have relevance.
chillfox 2y ago
Word and Excel aren't really that related either. The only reason we think of them as part of an office suite is because they have been bundled for a long time. As far as I can tell most people don't really use both, they mostly using one or the other.
daemin 2y ago
(This is written as a thought exercise) Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software? Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup. This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together? Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more. How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?

falcor84 2y ago

How do you define "not related" - why would a collaboration tool not be considered part of something called "office suite"? Also to the parent's point, why is it that Google are allowed to bundle Meet as part of their Google Workspace - it does seem like the violations are only applied based on retroactive decisions.

gostsamo 2y ago
Generally, you define a market by the market participants. There are people who need only the the office suite, and there are those who need the office suite and the colab chat but not necessarily by the same provider. This is visible by the fact that you have colab software providers like slack/zoom. Microsoft is targeted at the moment because they are market leader on the office suite market and they are leveraging this position to capture the colab software one. Google is not a market leader and in addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace, though this is less significant than the market dominance.
- eindiran 2y ago
  I am generally open to this idea, but this particular way of defining what bundles are allowed or not seems incredibly weak. Take Adobe's Creative Cloud. There is almost no one in the world who uses all of the tools in it. There are dozens of alternatives made by other companies that only cover a single component software. Adobe is the market leader with virtually all of the component pieces of software. Why is the US not targeting Adobe with antitrust for bundling together tools for typesetters, marketers, video editors, animators, etc, etc?
  - yunohn 2y ago
    This is actually a great counter example to the previous post’s perspective on bundling vs markets.
  - jjoonathan 2y ago
    It should be. "Allowed in the US" is a bar so low that you can get oil out the end of it.
  - necovek 2y ago
    The only reason is that law enforcement is reactive. And usually requires the tactic to be effective before it does (yes, too late by then). Which is to say that Adobe can and very well might be targeted in the future for abusing their monopolistic position in image editing market to get people to start using their other tools by bundling them.
  - gostsamo 2y ago
    Two questions: do Adobe uses their dominant position in one of those markets to influence the clients in another market to use their product? Second, does Adobe's competition wishes to complain? The second part will prioritize the case, I think.
- xmprt 2y ago
  But where do you draw the line? In college, I used Word a lot and barely used Excel. At work I use Excel way more than Word (and often times I could easily just use a simple markdown editor instead of Word so I arguably wouldn't use that either). So they seem to be two different markets. I probably use the integrations between Excel and Teams more than I use the integrations between Word and Excel so bundling Teams makes more sense to me.
  - layer8 2y ago
    You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had. More importantly, installing Word doesn’t also automatically install Excel, and vice versa. Microsoft wouldn’t have a problem if they provided a choice of Office with Teams and Office without Teams.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > You still habe the choice of purchasing Word and Excel separately, and always had. By this logic I can buy Excel + Word + Powerpoint and avoid Teams. They offer each office product individually or all their office products as a subscription. Why would it be different if they also offered a special subscription that just excluded teams?
- lolinder 2y ago
  > Google is not a market leader Do you have stats that show this? "Market share" sites never feel very trustworthy to me, but they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience. > addition, they don't have offline tools to separate from their workspace This doesn't make sense to me as an argument. It sounds like you're saying that because Google hasn't bothered providing an offline version of their product they get a pass on bundling collaboration software, whereas because Microsoft provides an offline version that makes their bundling more egregious. Why exactly would that be?
  - OJFord 2y ago
    > they all claim Google Workspace has a substantially higher market share than Office 365, and anecdotally that matches my experience. I 100% believe that is your experience as 'HN-commenting SWE/tech bro/STEM worker', but just as strongly doubt that that is correct in the broader market.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Like I said, every source I found claims the same thing. Do you have data showing it as a distant second?
      - OJFord 2y ago
        I see that too on Statists for example, which doesn't state a methodology that I can see but I suspect it's users (every Gmail account?) or 'I have used Docs/Word365'. This site claims Office365 absolutely dwarfs Google Workspace in # business customers/licences , which is more in line with my expectation: https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/ https://www.bybrand.io/blog/market-share/amp/
        FreakLegion 2y ago
        That sounds about right. I routinely dig through cybersecurity data from around 100k companies, and Microsoft has no real competition. Occasionally I see Google at a little 500-person up-and-comer, but almost never in the enterprise, and they show up less and less as the companies get bigger. I don't think I've ever seen them in the Fortune 100, for example, other than at Google itself. The world runs on Exchange and Office.
- nox101 2y ago
  a tcp/ip stack was not part of windows in 1993. You'd buy it from a 3rd party company. Was Microsoft adding it "bundling"? Same for mouse drivers. media players. cd writing software. Unzip functionality, and on and on. Ms got in trouble for IE but every os now bundles a browser. team communication seems like a core feature of an office suite in 2024 just like those other features feel like core parts of an OS in 2024
- sib 2y ago
  And people who need spreadsheets are not the same as people who need documents as people who need slides etc. Of course there is overlap, but there is also lots of overlap among those who need chat/meet and those who need slides.
navane 2y ago
For antitrust to work, all we have to do is break up the biggest players. There's no point in focusing on (in that market) smaller players. They'll get to them because recursion.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

lotsofpulp 2y ago

Why is excel and word any more connected than teams and excel or teams and word? Or even outlook? If outlook can be grouped with “office suite”, and EU didn’t have a problem with that, why not Teams? It is also for communicating with people.

gostsamo 2y ago
Because word and excel go together in the needs of a business and those who usually buy one use the other as well. All competition of MS in this space offer similar products bundled in a similar way. Teams is a recent addition which is orthogonal and is a product from entirely another market where the competition has offerings without an office suite. Looking from there, MS uses unrelated offering to hide the price of their product while pushing it to hundreds of millions who are already their clients.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  I disagree. Excel is probably far more used than Word, and word could be dropped from many people’s computers and no one would notice. Outlook is probably the most widely used, and again, if outlook can be considered part of the office suite, which it has been for decades, why not another communication software? My broader point being these groupings are all pretty arbitrary.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Wouldn’t it be that we have a fairly widely spread defecto definition of “office suite” as word processor, spread sheet, presentation, email as it’s been that way for decades? Not sure about “communications”however I think it is a serious argument to consider that a separate product, but not the others, they’re kind of like peanut butter and jelly or Bonnie & Clyde or the three stooges.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      I think that is a very un-serious argument with no consistency. Microsoft has always sold a cheaper "office suite" without outlook. What businesses have historically bundled and not bundled is irrelevant to what is best for society going forward. Surely there were many features that many software businesses add that weren't there before. What if Microsoft relabeled Teams to be part of Outlook? Like they made Calendars part of Outlook. It all feels like starting at the result and working backwards towards a justification.

guerby 2y ago

EU courts ruled that bundling an OS with a machine was ok. https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=191734&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=8756818 https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&do...

halfcat 2y ago

Instant messaging and phones aren’t a big leap from Outlook, plus they’ve been in the space since 2007 with Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business.

nilsbunger 2y ago

The same thing happened to TCP/IP stacks in the 90s (and multiple alternate transport protocols). They were initially separate products, sold by different companies. Then TCP/IP was bundled into the OS in ~Windows 3.1. By today's lens you'd say TCP is part of the OS, but this wasn't the state of the world in the early 90s. If you had disallowed bundling then, we would still be buying separate TCP stacks for our OS!

DANmode 2y ago
...if your idea is to push the market so that Teams is an open standard and protocol, this might have relevance.

chillfox 2y ago

Word and Excel aren't really that related either. The only reason we think of them as part of an office suite is because they have been bundled for a long time. As far as I can tell most people don't really use both, they mostly using one or the other.

daemin 2y ago

(This is written as a thought exercise) Should it actually be anti-trust to bundle various office applications together? Are they actually related enough that they can only be sold as a bundle? Or have we just gotten used to the concept of an Office Suite that we can no longer imagine them as separate pieces of software? Technically you can still purchase the Microsoft Office applications individually, though I doubt that anyone does. Would anyone actually mix and match word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software from different vendors? You cannot buy or use Google Office applications individually though, as it's only available online through an account that you need to setup. This is where the main question of this anti-trust and anti-competative behaviour comes in - how far can a company go in bundling products together? Currently Microsoft (and let's not forget Google) are bundling together more or less a collection of: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Email Client, Database, Diagramming, Note Taking, ToDo List, File Sharing, Chat Communications, Video Communications, Project Planning, File Storage, Desktop Publishing, Data Visualisation, and more. How much further can this bundling go? Would we have a world where you spin up a Microsoft Office which includes access passes, coffee, payment processing, accounting, etc? Where would be the line between using an Office Suite and where would be the line for other companies to provide products and services?