Word/Excel is the defacto default across industry. It’s a monopoly. Microsoft is using their monopoly on office suite to get a competitive advantage on chat/video collaboration software.
It’s like when Google uses their monopoly on search to highlight their own price comparisons in the top part of the result section, thus being anti competitive towards other price comparison companies (e.g. Pricerunner)
I have barely touched office over the past decade; been using Google Workspace. My past four employers have used Google. I have been using it personally, at work, for longer. My weightlifting club using Google sheets. My mortgage sheets were Google sheets.
I’ve worked at SAP, Oracle, and a few large consultancies. Most of my customers are in the enterprise size range. Office is used heavily by the larger companies of the world and therefore is used by their software and service vendors.
The only company I’ve ever worked with that was totally google drive was an American startup.
Office is still very much the dominant suite of software across most companies although there are plenty of smaller American companies trying to work without it.
I personally can’t tolerate the the lack of basic formatting that docs offers are how limited sheets and slides are. Just adding section numbers in docs needs an add on and if your collaborators don’t have the same add on they just add new sections without numbering. I can’t imagine large documents without numbering...
I suppose the distance between being the sole provider, or having exclusive control over, office suite software and the 5 million businesses paying for GSuite as of last year? Or the 2 billion active GSuite users?
Lets make the unit of measure a paying business subscription. We will call them business units, or BUs. Microsoft Office is 5MBUs(mega business units) away from being a monopoly.
where do you get this info? the statistics say otherwise [0]:
> The office suite market in the United States is split between Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365, with G Suite being the market leader holding a share of 59.41 percent and Office 365 occupying 40.39 percent, as of October 2020
I mean, maybe old-style orgs still use MS office, but it looks like all the non-IT ones are moving to Google.
Schools in our town use Google calendar and Google classroom. My gym uses google docs and google forms. Many of the random event "sign-up" pages are on google forms.
"Free" is a great price, and many businesses (especially smaller ones) do not want to pay extra for ms office.
I guess I implied that I think they're a monopoly in the area of productivity software, which isn't entirely fair since Google Suite exists. But in my shallow opinion Google Sheets is not really a competitor to Excel.
Five years ago I would say you are right. But Google Sheets is now good enough for all but the most serious Excel power users, and I'm sure they're still improving it.
I'm not sure, but why would they want to? It's a very mature product, with many established competing manufacturers, and not much room for any real improvement or profit margin.
If there were already half a dozen Slacks in use and they were all interchangable and customers were indifferent to which one was on their computer, would Microsoft be jumping in with their own product?
Microsoft is allowed to make more than one product. Microsoft is not allowed to use abuse their market dominance in one product to help them capture another market, with harm to the consumer.
For example, this is why Microsoft was sued for antitrust in 2001. Microsoft was alleged to have used its market power in OEM operating systems (Windows) to sell its browser (Internet Explorer) through bundling. Microsoft settled with the DOJ.
You could allege that in this case, Microsoft is doing the same thing — using market power in office software to sell unrelated chat software. This practice is harming competitors to such a degree that they seek to be acquired by other companies. It's also telling that HN regards Slack as a better product than Teams. The resulting decrease of competition is detrimental to the consumer.
Maybe you want to argue that Teams is being provided for free, so this is better for the consumer. While that nominally might be true, Microsoft must pay for development on Teams somehow. Consumers are likely paying higher prices than if Teams was not being developed. And even if they aren't, we still should consider how bundling can lead to consolidation.
If Slack is marketing their product for businesses and as an office product ("we're trying to kill email"), then it's hardly unrelated. If companies are looking for a solution that streamlines the functionality of SharePoint, Teleconferencing, and collaboration, it seems directly within Microsoft's wheelhouse to include Teams as a part of M365.
Sure you can, but treat them as a standalone product. Currently companies (like Amazon with AWS) are using massively profitable products to dump prices in totally unrelated industries and kill off the competition.
Not to mention companies like Uber using massive amounts of VC money to break laws and social contracts in whole countries despite no goal of actually being profitable. Medium did the same when providing free access and then turning on the paywall after that. There are many more examples.
