e.g. selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want to enter the document processing/spreadsheet/etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc.

Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be only allowed to sell subscriptions/licenses for individual apps?

At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.

Focusing on short term repercussions for consumers has significantly hurt long term consumer interests and there is evidence that it hurt the economy in general. In the decades preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and that extreme power concentration (as we e.g. see today in the IT sector) is hard to reconcile with efficient markets and political freedom.

See [1] for details, here is an excerpt:

> An emerging group of young scholars are inquiring whether we truly benefitted from competition with little antitrust enforcement. The mounting evidence suggests no. New business formation has steadily declined as a share of the economy since the late 1970s. “In 1982, young firms [those five-years old or younger] accounted for about half of all firms, and one-fifth of total employment,” observed Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But by 2013, these figures fell “to about one-third of firms and one-tenth of total employment.” Competition is decreasing in many significant markets, as they become concentrated. Greater profits are falling in the hands of fewer firms. “More than 75% of US industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades,” one recent study found. “Firms in industries with the largest increases in product market concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins, positive abnormal stock returns, and more profitable M&A deals, which suggests that market power is becoming an important source of value.” Since the late 1970s, wealth inequality has grown, and worker mobility has declined. Labor’s share of income in the nonfarm business sector was in the mid-60 percentage points for several decades after WWII, but that too has declined since 2000 to the mid-50s. Despite the higher returns to capital, businesses in markets with rising concentration and less competition are investing relatively less. This investment gap, one study found, is driven by industry leaders who have higher profit margins.

[1] https://archive.is/HEik3#selection-1737.0-1737.346 (original: https://hbr.org/2017/12/the-rise-fall-and-rebirth-of-the-u-s... )

If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines, it would effectively stop all investment in disruptive technologies because any real disruption most likely infringes on some of these laws.

If you stop large companies from expanding into neighbouring industries, e.g by bundling new stuff with their existing offering, you stop them from becoming bigger but at the same time you are reducing competition. The risk is that you might end up with smaller companies but even less competition.

I'm not ideologically opposed to government intervention. I just don't know how to do it. All discussions on how to break up some tech giant quickly reveal how devilishly complex the problem is. And it's different for each of them and for each industry.

What would be a general rule to prevent growing concentration without damaging innovation, ossifying existing market structures and make impossible demands on the political system in terms of keeping all those detailed rules up-to-date and fit for purpose?

There is absolutely no need to do this until you become Microsoft's size and no government has or likely ever will.

There was a lot more innovation enabled by the antitrust action against Microsoft in the early 2000s.

Yet Bell wasn't broken up until 1982 so I'm not sure if it was a such a turning point. IMHO allowing AT&T's monopoly to exist for that long was much more detrimental to consumers than whatever MS, Apple and other tech companies are doing these days.

But yeah I certainly overall agree that competition has generally been the driving force behind most of human progress and economic growth at least over the last few hundred years. It's just not entirely clear what measures should governments use to maximize the competitiveness of markets without introducing inefficiencies and costs that slow down economic growth and technological progress (while not providing that many benefits to consumers either).

If I were Microsoft I'd reconsider bundling Loop, since it's going to disrupt tools like Notion. I mean, why would I bother using Notion, if I can just use Loop? : - )

On the one hand that's a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both prevents consumers from having choice, and also therefore in the longer term allows the monopolistic company to raise prices without consumers having any option other than to pay more or go without.

So in reality the harming or competitors can be considered the harming of consumers.

In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?

Once customers bought Office+Teams the cost of using Teams is 0, because they paid for it. How can competitors make a cheaper product then? You can't get cheaper than that! Even if someone wanted to use your product they most likely would still have to pay for Teams by buying Office.

True, but that also applies to every other single app and service that they are bundling with the subscription. I only want Excel but I'm also forced to pay for PowerPoint. And how deep should we go? Should they be forced to turn Edge into a paid product you have to buy separately? They crippled if not outright killed the consumer anti-virus industry by starting to bundle Windows Defender/(whatever it's called)? That certainly wasn't fair to McAfee/Norton/Kaspersky/(any other shovel ware provider) but did it hurt consumers? One might argue this would also apply to [File] Explorer and every other basic app.

How is the situation with Teams at all different and where exactly do we draw the line?

I don't think you should have to turn Edge into a paid product similar to how I don't think grocery stores should be forced to charge you if you use a shopping cart. If Microsoft wants to include Windows Defender for free but if they're increasing the cost of a Windows License to accommodate that development effort then it's not ok.

Microsoft can offer you a volume discount for buying say Excel + Word + X but bundling is anti-competitve (see every complaint about TV bundles ever).

Well, they should at very least make Teams interoperable like every other goddamn service should be - or be forced to do so.

MSTeams hurts users 24/7 around the clock.

They use it because it's effectively free (1), and Slack is not.

It doesn't have to be good. And so it isn't.

1) Free with existing MS Office licences.

I doubt the price covers the costs, especially after they added Teams.

Kill the competition, raise the price. G-MAFIA/FAANG playbook

Wouldn't this apply to any company that sells more than one product or service? Amazon uses Aws margins to subsidize a bunch, including r&d. A lot of biotech companies use profits from one drug to subsidize bad sales in another trying to break into the market.

> Kill the competition, raise the price. G-MAFIA/FAANG playbook

This is a solid business strategy, but it also falls prey to entrants back into the market when the large player raises its prices.

Ideally you always want to see companies trying to run their competitors out of business by undercutting them and offering better products at lower prices. The issue when the playing field isn't level e.g. what MS is doing here is basically predatory pricing. But even then it's not exactly clear cut, e.g. did Uber running out many taxi companies out of business (or destroying their profit margins) was a net-negative or a net positive to consumers?

Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem.

Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during simple audiocalls.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/join-a-microsoft-...

and didn't really maintain for at least the last 2 years either

(it basically ran a often very outdated version of the web app + some AFIK unnecessary and buggy custom audio handling)

So this means that I pull my customers into a competitor product, and they also get to hear me badmouth Teams if I find an opportunity to do so.

Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.

It's better than where we were (Cisco jabber) but also worse than what's out there.

Do you maybe only do calls through Chrome? Or maybe you have a user agent spoofing extension (or similar) installed in Firefox?

Firefox doesn't seem to be intentionally blocked by Teams in my experience (or at least not anymore?), but maybe it should be.

Either way it doesn't matter much because:

- jitsi meet even when they still was a small startup managed to provide high quality video calling on all browsers/platforms

- MS Teams has more then enough resource to make things work, they just don't want to (same for properly maintaining their Linux app, which given that it can be a local deploy of the web-app a very little other code could be a 1.5 person job (the +.5 person in case the first is sick)) and have a good reason not to (they have been pushing edge hard, including using inappropriate means like deceiving windows users into using it when they clearly signaled they want to use another browser)

I regularly use Meet, Zoom and Jitsi on Firefox and Meet has been the only one that always just worked for me and my guests.

Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings).

What will it take to make these companies realise I'm perfectly happy with my current music streaming service and I don't want theirs regardless of the price it's offered at? I find it very disrespectful as a user when software can't take 'no' for an answer; my 'no' isn't 'maybe if you wear me down with enough nag screens' it means 'no I'm not interested please go away'.

Often times they won't stop even if you are a customer as in the case of Microsoft insisting that I backup all my files to their OneDrive that came bundled with Office. I get constant nag notifications to "finish setting up backup" even though I have alternative backup solutions and only want to use OneDrive as an offsite storage, not as a sync system.

I would love to tell the software to "never bug me again", but instead we only have options of "Yes!" and "Not now, please bother me again".

I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify.

The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...

My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true.

The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce.

But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub).

The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office.

Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.

Whether a small European startup would have won out locally without Microsofts market position + price advantage idk. But without details I'm not sure the financial decision making of a Fortune 20 matters in this conversation which was part of my point.

Once your sales team is competing on price vs Microsoft it's basically over for young companies. Your value prop has to be much more than that until you're a mature business.

There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.

It's a bit like saying that that them bundling PowerPoint together with their other apps is unfair towards any startup potentially wanting to enter that market. Which very well might be true but what's so special about Teams? MS and other companies have been bundling apps together since forever...

I'm not even talking about azure and the anti-competitive shit they do there. Teams is but a drop in the ocean.

If a single customer dropped you because he now has Teams for free your product was a failure for that customer anyway and he just suddenly realized you offered him no value.

Just look at https://taskulu.com/ and tell me how Teams even competes with you. Your real competition was Jira and customers dropped you because Jira was a superior product and integration with Teams gave them everything you offered and a chat application separate from project management is an all around better option as there is a single chat for all employees, regardless of them using the project management tools.

Failure to innovate kills those companies.

Just look at the latest "innovation" of the OP: a wrapper around SES (5x more expensive!), like thoudand others exist.

The problem you have is that the people making the finance decisions are often far-removed from the ones making value-based decisions.

The ones making the decision from a finance-perspective look at the offering from Microsoft, realise that it does video and chat for free (well, they're paying for O365 anyway) and that's it.

They don't care (or know!) that it's a resource hog, buggy etc. The value from the OP's product would not even be a consideration even if it was 100x "better" (use your own definition of "better" here!)

So I think it's unfair to use that comparison in this case

"As a product manager myself, I believe that the use of an advantageous market position to strengthen vertical integration is a reasonable practice, so long as the bundle cost of the final product to the consumer remains the same."

The problem with this, and the reason we we anti monopoly laws in general, is that this practice can be self-reinforcing, and allows for the capture of an entire market, extinguishing all competition. This then allows pricing for the good on offer to be set at whatever arbitrary price the monopoly deems reasonable.

That lower cost people pay upfront thanks to monopolies, is then drained back with interest, using higher prices, reduction in social mobility (of new founders/startups), reduction in innovation & increase in rent-seeking behaviour.

Breaking up monopolies has been long overdue, it’s a good thing its starting now.

government should help us coordinate to prevent this Nash equilibria

Yeah but nobody minded not having to pay for web browsers, file manager, antivirus software and bunch of other stuff.

Companies have been bundling their different software products together since almost forever and while there are some disadvantages arguable this has benefited consumers overall. At least I wouldn't be too glad about having to buy separate licenses (or pay separate subscriptions) for Excel, Word and PowerPoint (or any other product bundle like Jetbrains IDEs for every language etc. etc.).

Most people would also not rather get a non-functional barebones OS whenever they get a new PC and have to chose and install all the basic apps themselves.

I worked in a company that also sold a collab solution and we had technical champions all over the place that 1000% agreed that our product was better than Teams in every single metric, including performance, UX and productivity. Yet they couldn't secure a budget since the higher-ups knew they got Teams for free in their E5 license.

Not sure you realise but in the corporate world it's about politics and money. People (above entry-level staff) do things to look good to their boss. That's it! And saving money is a great way of getting promoted: "Look boss, I just saved us $500k a year in license fees!".

Saving $X per year using a "free" tool from Microsoft will always trump anything you pay for especially if you are all in on Azure, O365 already. It's a no-brainer.

Not only that, once the decision is made, it will likely never be changed until the higher-up that made the decision moves on, quits, or is fired, no matter how wrong or bad the decision was (well, within reason, of course!)

I'd love it to be as simple as making a good case for the competition, and I've had to make that case many times over the years, but the reality is that a bundled product from Microsoft will win in a place that uses other Microsoft stuff, vs a paid product thats 100x better, faster, stronger, whatever.

It's because it's being sold to managers and executives who don't actually end up using it, and never have to deal with the consequences of buying it.

individuals are not pricing that in. coordination is needed. that's why we regulate the market

Too big company must announce what it tries to do, then EU replies:

- You are too big, you glutton. We don't allow this. Slim yourself down, now gtfo.

Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.

You should be thankful at all this is happening. On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams is still perfectly legal.

I wonder why nobody at the US antitrust office has said anything at all.

So is bundling office and PowerPoint which killed a massive number of presentation apps before they were even born. How is this particularly different? Should bundling any apps/sofware/services together be illegal? Should that only apply to specific companies?

Like the other comment here, it's ironic that it is the EU pulling from the market/capitalism playbook now.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-government-has-a-microsof...

This is just hostile to the consumer. If I want teams I can install it.

You can turn this off, but last I checked can also set it to stuff like Google Meet, Zoom, WebEx, Facetime, etc if you have the relevant plug-in for Outlook.

Why the fuck would I want to do that?

"Oh sorry, I accidentally joined the Teams meeting instead of the Zoom meeting, nobody was there for 15 minutes so I left"

And if Microsoft wants Teams, Microsoft can install it. Perfect logic according to growth-oriented project managers!

The entire point of private retirement accounts and transferable skills is that you aren't required to stick with one employer. If your employer requires you to use bad tools then find a better employer.

What a clueless and entitled point of view.

Entire industries are almost exclusively Microsoft (basically all those that make the modern civilized world work: medical, transportation, semiconductor, logistics, automotive, industrial, architecture, infrastructure, CAD, etc).

Your choice then is unemployment. Not everyone is an app/web developer who can freely choose employers based on stacks and tools, end even then, not in a bear market. Most people wishing not to be homeless don't have the choice of saying no to employment just because they use Windows.

Your comment is the equivalent of "let them eat cake".

Going through the Windows stack has significant disadvantages to your career as well. Those companies are likely to pay less than their competitors, they are usually less modern and offer less remote options or modern development organizations. It's a lose, lose choice.

Like I said, not every office worker is a front-end dev. In other industries you have no choice but unemployment. Your lack of empathy towards other classes is showing.

>Going through the Windows stack has significant disadvantages to your career as well.

I don't know many but I've never met a .NET or SharePoint dev who's unemployed. On the contrary. All those crusty non-IT corporations seem to pay very well for others to fix their Microsoft stack. Maybe take your head out of the sand and see the real world.

And data science and IT infra/support are different career choices that differ around skills and education rather than choice of OS vendor. Those jobs are not interchangeable.

And where I live .NET jobs are far more abundant and better paid than DS jobs which are few and have loads of coopetition from newgrads due to all they hype they genrated.

Also development is a global market nowadays so that makes it even worse for this kind of jobs since they don't usually offer a remote option. It's telling that you say "where I live", where I live there's just no development job at all actually.

Also, dvelopment careers being "global" is mostly in theory. In practice it doesn't work everywhere. Some countries don't have global remote work opportunities due to tax and labor laws making that very difficult meaning you're stuck with what the local market offers. And those few global remote jobs get hundreds of applications so actually getting one is almost impossible especially in the current bear market.

There's no shortage of full stack developers globally willing to work for cheap. Competing globally in this race to the bottom is no good if you work in a high CoL area unless you score a high paying FaNG or scale-up but getting such jobs is insanely competitive that's not realistic for most people I know.

> There's no shortage of full stack developers globally willing to work for cheap.

That has to be the worst argument here, even Microsoft themselves outsources their own .NET work to India.

If no one complains, not even the entitled who have some power, then the screws continue to tighten down.

I never said that. I said in many industries that choice is none existent other than unemployment and people care more about employment than they do about OS martyring.

Even your use of 'martyring' is bizarre. My avoidance of Windows for the last 20 years is a mild discomfort, not martyrdom.

There is a long history of using one's privilege to help those with less privilege. If hx8 "entitlement" changes the workplace to allow Ubuntu as an alternative to MS Windows, then those with less privilege may be able to follow.

By rejecting hx8's practice, you close off that pathway.

But what is infinitely worse than that is, on top of all of those things still happening, also having a random chance of waking up every morning to discover that someone has very deliberately, specifically decided to make my life worse, not out of personal conviction, but because it makes a line go up somewhere in a board room on the other side of the world. That I can not deal with.

Honestly, Microsoft blurring the lines between meetings and calendar invites was great, in my opinion. I was sad the day they took away some of that functionality (made it a non-default setting). Queue the calendar "meetings" where everyone is scrambling to find a Teams meeting link but it's nowhere to be found because the creator forgot to tick it as a Teams meeting, and everyone only noticed like 1 minute before the meeting starts.

I have to Slack a Zoom link to everyone before the meeting every week.

Antitrusts are too slow to happen.

Being "free" wouldn't have had this effects.

It happened because "they already paid for it" (because of paying for office 356) and because it was "already installed" (kinda).

Also it's one vendor less (some companies care about that a lot).

But IMHO the whole office suite pricing is pretty absurd and unlikely to be based on proper working fair marked, likely even if you remove teams from it.

But what is success? Anyone who has a pre-existing relationship with the customer is going to be able to have the opportunity to inform the customer about their new products, brand trust and convenience go a long way in co-selling.

People that make basic apps frequently complain that they have had their app "stolen" when a, typically larger, competitor releases similar functionality. However was it truly their "idea", or were they just an early entrant that squandered their early lead?

The majority of ordinary computing functions of today started out as 3rd party applications, some churn is expected - I don't see it as innovation if we give companies false monopolies on ideas. If Apple can't protect the iPhone paradigm as a unique combination of features, no one should expect to keep possession of simpler or smaller ideas.

Currently often the narrative is “we have it included for $0, why would we pay $100 per year per employee for a similar product?”

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.

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.

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.

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?

Microsoft wouldn’t have a problem if they provided a choice of Office with Teams and Office without Teams.

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?

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

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?

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!

It's not.

The argument you're replying to is remarkably similar to the ones in the EU+Apple threads: Why should iOS be considered a "general purpose" OS? Because people consider it as such. Why isn't Xbox or Switch a "general purpose" computer? Because people don't consider it as such. The whole thing boils down to circular logic of "it is a general purpose computer because it is".

The same thing is happening here: Why is it ok to bundle Word and Excel, but not Word and Teams? Because people consider the first one ok, but not the second. Ok, but WHY?!?

It's like arguing with a religious fanatic. You are wrong to assume there is any logic behind it.

If you really dig into why Microsoft and Apple, and why not Spotify and SAP, the only real answer is: because the EC defined the boundaries of the DMA to include the types of businesses that are run from America and exclude the types of businesses that are run from European. When you finally back them into a corner, the defenders of the DMA fall back to "well $AMERICAN_COMPANY is a gatekeeper, but $EURO_COMPANY is not a gatekeeper".

Spotify and SAP easily meet the quantitative thresholds that catch MS, Facebook and Apple, but the EC carefully defined that a "gatekeeper" belongs to certain categories of businesses (operating system, social media, etc.) and does not belong to certain other categories (music streaming, business software) so that it does not catch them. And as we saw with iPadOS, the quantitative thresholds don't even matter if the EC feels like ignoring them.

I don't.

No more than I consider NetApp OS or OneFS general purpose, even though both are based/built on BSD (I've SSHed into OneFS CLI often in my last job)

At least with Apple/iOS (not sure about Android), phones and tablets were purposefully designed to be appliances from the very beginning.

I don't see why Spotify is a gate keeper. You have e.g. Deezer or Apple Music and you can switch very easily.

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.

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.

My own company uses office 365, and of all the included programs, I basically only use excel, outlook, and teams. I haven’t even opened word in years, all documents are shared as PDFs. As such, word has no more inherent need for “bundling” than teams.

It just seems arbitrary. I’d be more comfortable just stating that companies over a certain size can’t bundle at all.

Suddenly, you are the loser, while they are selling below investment cost to simply push you out of the market.

So that's the issue.

Similarly, it should probably be made illegal for VC-backed startups to undercut incumbents just to shut them down: that's very similar to me.

I think part of the problem is "what is an OS utility" and "what is an app". All your OS configuration could be done via a REST API, text files or some other well defined protocol. So you could have competing configuration apps that all help you manage your config in their own way and unbundle the control panel. Realistically looking at your average sparse linux distro shows just how "minimal" an OS can be, and even they bundle applications. Yet, I realistically don't thing consumers or the tech market at large would be assisted by a law mandating that all operating systems be as minimal as the linux kernel (no GNU/Linux, that's bundling!). And even if you did go that far, now we get into arguments over monolithic kernels and micro kernels.

sorry, no, that shouldn't be allowed either. as someone who's working on a cloud task scheduler, OS's should be forced to unbundle thread management. Linux needs to be banned in the EU until it doesn't come with a default thread manager.

Although I may be ok with no requiring them to port it to OSes other than Windows. But you should at least be able to gaze at the bytes without buying Windows.

Chrome didn't need a browser ballot to defeat IE. Almost no one bought or shipped the N versions of Windows. Spotify, iTunes et al still managed to come around just fine despite that pesky default install of Windows Media Player!

The only reason to move to the US would be because you really don't want to have a choice, but that would be weird.

You have to admit it sounds slightly ridiculous, right?

Let's take Google services as an example. I'm no fan of Google but their integrated search/Maps/PoI/hotels/directions/flight tickets experience was perfect, my workflow depends on it a lot. Now I can't use it without a US VPN, the only thing I get without it are some useless web search results and a small picture of a map that doesn't show anything interesting and doesn't do anything on click.

Not going "back" BTW, I was born in EU. And of course, it's really not just about the online services. Land costs absurd money, wages are absurdly low, energy strategy is completely idiotic and thus energy prices are absurd, business administration is unnecessarily hard, regulations are hard to understand and navigate, and so on. I don't want to live in an environment where a bunch of ideologists chosen by people out of my own state fight my life at every step. Wanna bet when they try to pass Chat Control again? Why am I required to own a Google/Apple controlled device to do basically anything, like register a car or pay taxes?

I love Github. Before MS bought it I was a CTO at a company where we happily paid for it. Now MS offers it for free. I don't currently pay them anything. We also use Github actions. We don't pay for that either. You get 2000 free build minutes per month. So no need. That's great for us of course. But it's horrible for independent providers of CI services, which I used in the past. How can you compete when big companies like MS just pretend build minutes and hosting the world's software projects costs 0$?

I say pretend here because of course in reality MS spends a lot of money on all that infrastructure needed to do that. But they make their money elsewhere. This is just an anti competitive move to ensure enough customers end up paying them. It's a lock in mechanism. But it's also an anti competitive move. It ensures competitors don't stand a chance. Because how do you compete with free?

Of course the flip side is that a lot of things in software become commodities where the price of something goes to zero quickly after the open source world starts providing free and open source alternatives. Zoom is a great example of a commodity with little intrinsic software value. There's very little in there that you can't replicate with free and OSS components. Most of the real cost relates to infrastructure and networking.

Which of course like Github isn't actually free. So MS is subsidizing the cost of having massive amounts of companies run all their meetings on Teams with money they squeeze out of them elsewhere via unrelated products. That's what the EU called out as anti competitive. Microsoft spends many millions/billions on ensuring people get locked into their free offerings just so they can continue to be valued at trillions because of all the revenue they get from us elsewhere. This is not charity. That's how they became this big.

IMHO Gitlab would have strong case too. They are a European company actually (Dutch originally). So this is a clear cut case of a local competitor being squeezed out of the market by MS spending large amounts of money ensuring there is no market.

Enshittification will follow once they stop getting good training data out of GitHub.

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this just seems to me like treating the symptoms instead of the root cause.

9 out of 10 times I’ve been part of the buy-side, proprietary software has won due to the support. Even more so when the end users aren’t technical people.

If the software doesn’t come with support options from the vendor, you’ll have to look into third-parties for that - which means another entirely own contract, and set of people to involve.

I don't see how tying yourself to a single vendor is advantageous at all.

You can say the market might emerge if the large corporations or government agencies started shifting that way and generated demand for it, but those entities aren't known to take risks.

I do know my mother is a customer with her business

To be explicit, if governments want to use open source software, which seems like a pretty good idea, they of course need to be aware of the fact that lots of it is hobbyist stuff tossed out into the public square with no quality guarantees.

To use open source code, the governments will have to fork and audit the code, and provide customer service for what is now their software. It can be done and it seems like a great way to make this stuff available for the non-technical community, but it isn’t free, of course.

Why would they do this? It’s not like they fork and audit the code that they’re using now. They just trust that it’s safe because they paid for it. Which probably sounds incredibly stupid to anyone who’s ever worked for big enterprise, or just followed the news really.

At least the government can bring the CEO before congress and waste his day.

With open source code the responsibility is taken by the user instead. For me, and probably a lot of people here, we all mostly just ignore that, but it’s fine, because we’re free to ignore our responsibility to ourselves. In the case of a government supplying open source code to their citizens, the responsibility defaults to the provider, that is, the government.

I guess what I suggested might be more intense than what they do, not actually sure what their workflow is. But it seems like the level of diligence that a government ought to apply, right?

The state using FOSS is great but that seems quite orthogonal to preventing monopoly abuse by proprietary software vendors. We can do both.

Edit: I think you may be implying that having a variety of choices available would sufficient to prevent monopolies. That's not true as long as you have multiple companies able to cooperate in doing things like bundling, etc.

AFIK, at least a few countries & research entities over there are using FOSS, at least in part, as well as promoting it.

Hypothetically just because a Government is using FOSS to operate does not mean a company can not still break antitrust rules.

Your idea of what a desktop OS should be feels subjective. I'm using Linux as a desktop operating system for 20 years, I've used Windows before, I use Windows sometimes even today (currently only in VMs dedicated to malware analysis and reverse engineering tools), and - to me - Windows is much more annoying. This feels like personal preference and not an objective statement like you did.