Comment by 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.
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.
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.
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.
That's fine, but that doesn't meet the definition for a monopoly; that's just inertia.
A monopoly is measured in a given market by marketshare.
Ofcourse the existence of 10 alternatives is meaningless if they count for 0.01% of given market section. Lol
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I'd argue it's more than "just inertia." It's that end-users don't have any real meaningful choice. If you deviate from the standard in your field (MS Office in my case), you take on immense costs for minimal gain.
Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position. They may not be a monopoly in the strict sense (and I never said they were), but they're not a passive player either who accidentally fell into this situation. We don't need to give trillion-dollar companies the benefit of the doubt here.
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None of that really matters when we are assessing whether something is a monopoly or not.
Well, I don't know how you define it, but here's Wiki's first paragraph[0]:
And Merriam Webster[1]
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
You are using the dictionary definition of monopoly, not the legal definition according to any particular nation’s laws or looking at how it has been enforced/on what basis, which is the only version that really matters in this discussion.
I imagine everyone on HN knows that simply linking Wikipedia is generally considered little more than a snarky, passive aggressive response. I don’t need the dictionary or Wikipedia definition of a monopoly for this conversation. I didn’t ask for it and you know that it wasn’t necessary or productive.
If you want to have an actual discussion I’m all ears.
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