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Comment by the_snooze

2 days ago

That's an incomplete view. Office is a strong incumbent not because it's a good product, but because there's decades of processes built around it. To take a small slice from my world, if you do any kind of government-funded research, you must use Microsoft Office because government funding agencies have in-house templates for budgets and technical reports. They'll reject proposals and contractually-obligated deliveries if you don't use their template. Those templates break in spectacular and unpredictable ways on non-MS-Office suites.

People use MS Office because other people use MS Office. It's network effects.

12 comments

the_snooze

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CharlieDigital  2 days ago 

    > because there's decades of processes built around it

That's not Microsoft's problem; Microsoft isn't broadly writing legislation that compels the use of `.docx` format and PDFs are a thing.

  • Forgeties79  2 days ago

    None of that really matters when we are assessing whether something is a monopoly or not.

    • CharlieDigital  2 days ago

      Well, I don't know how you define it, but here's Wiki's first paragraph[0]:

          > A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, 'single, alone' and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, 'to sell') is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller's marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.

      And Merriam Webster[1]

          > exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action

      Do these hold true for Office? Azure? VS Code? Teams? Windows?

      [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

      [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/monopoly

      2 replies →

  • the_snooze  2 days ago

    I never said it was Microsoft's problem. I'm just showing you that "oh, switch to something else" is a naive view if you actually have real work to do.

    • AuthAuth  2 days ago

      Someones template breaking is not a real problem. The office alternatives work perfectly fine for "real work". If your template doesnt work fix it. You fixed it all those times it broke on office.