Microsoft (MSFT.O) will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.
Microsoft (MSFT.O) will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.
Capitalism has a lot of problems, but the freedom given to a seller to set their prices to whatever they like and watch the buyer decide it is not a fair price and go buy from someone else is not one of them.
This is a win for everyone.
Are you familiar with the concept of a captive market?
Its only freedom if there’s actual choice involved.
The scale at which these sales are made has nothing to do with the average consumer. Its just mega corps crunching numbers.
And that really only has to do with share prices, none of it trickles down to the actual workers.
This is just rich people having slap fights.
this is all well and good when we’re talking about a properly elastic market (eg food)
however, the supply of hosted enterprise video conference software is extremely limited (teams, zoom, google meet) and the demand is extremely high
moreover, switching providers and reeducating the staff will also be highly expensive
you can’t exactly go anywhere else, you just have to agree to whatever msft is doing
The problem with that is when a company like Microsoft has used and abused its position for such a long time that the only possible competition is another megacorp. No real choice there, only an illusion of choice.