6 ms·
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, IM
by CharlieDigital 10mo ago
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_2048 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...
- IAmBroom 10mo agoSwitching 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 10mo agoPlus finding another email provider and client, finding a chat app, cloud storage, etc
- jimnotgym 10mo ago>my kids are growing up on Google Docs and Canva and will never know Office. Sure they won't use it at school?
- CharlieDigital 10mo agoSchool 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 10mo agoAnd 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 10mo ago> 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.