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.
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?
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.
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.
Find any definition of "monopoly" and it should be pretty clear that it's not merely marketshare but the active manipulation of markets and market conditions to produce that marketshare.
> A monopoly 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.
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.
> Microsoft knows this, and they make business decisions to maintain and expand this position
For the edification of the readership, please share how Microsoft's business decisions are being made to maintain a monopoly in your space. Are they buying out competitors? Are they using contract terms that forbid the use of other vendors? Are they under-pricing their product relative to the market?
If the cost of migrating results in "minimal gain", doesn't that mean that they have a top product and the market has other competitive products by definition?
If you can provide some evidence of how they actively use business practices to maintain a monopoly, it would go a long way to advancing this discussion instead of showing long-held biases and I'm sure some lawyers out there would be ready to make a name for themselves.
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.
The most reliable way you get ahead is boring: small levels of effort, done consistently over time. You don't notice the progress day-to-day. You don't get much to brag about on social media. But it adds up.
I think it boils down to knowing what your values are. If you're constantly saying "no" to your team or organization (or vice versa), then that's a sign of a values misalignment. At that point, your options are to push to change your environment's values, realize your values aren't actually what you think they are, or leave.
It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)
The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office.
I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”.
But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work.
Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.
The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.
It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how many group policies we can implement and just disregarding the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making everyone's life more difficult. Systems password management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.
Parking apps don’t seem to care much for that. They know you’ll jump through their shoddy UIs and data collection because they have a local monopoly. Often with physical payment kiosks removed and replaced with “download our shitty app!” notices.
i'm currently disputing a bill with a parking company. there's a kiosk at the movie theater served by the parking lot, so that you can get free parking if you see a movie. the kiosk has an option for you to describe your car if you forgot your license plate number. i did that and they sent me a bill for unpaid parking.
customer service is unable to acknowledge why that feature is offered and can only assert that if you park you gotta pay. after threatening to complain to the BBB and my state AG they have graciously offered to drop the ticket to $25.
Plenty of people on here looking to disrupt a market with tech...c'mon guys, get on it
Edit: On second thought, there is a perverse incentive at work (and probably one of the "lowest friction" ways to get money), which is issuing government enforced fines.
Turn time wheel? How do you know in advance how long you stay? Where I live, you start and when you leave, you click stop. You also get reminders in case you forgot to stop.
Not GP, but I guess I'm using the same app. You guess (and then it gives you the price up front). 10 minutes before it expires it asks you if you want to extend it. There might also have been a detect if you drive away and stop feature (don't recall).
Mostly these days all paid parking has registration camera's, and it just starts and stops parking for you automatically. However, there are like 3 or so apps that compete here so you need a profile with all of them for this to work and you also need to enable this on all the apps.
There is no way this is not a degradation compared to a physical meter accepting cash plus whatever. My country doesn't really have parking apps yet here and paying for parking is never a friction.
(Shrug) No, I'll just park someplace else. I probably need a good walk anyway.
There's no such thing as a monopoly when it comes to parking. If there is -- if every single parking spot within walking distance is locked behind a shitty app -- then you need to spend some quality time at your next city council meeting making yourself a royal PIA.
You should read about the Chicago Parking Meters scandal. The City of Chicago leased all their meter rights to a private corporation on a 75 year lease for a bit over a billion dollars. The private company made it back in the first decade. The city even has to pay the parking company when they have to do construction or throw events that blocks the parking as revenue compensation.
Sometimes I think, it should be illegal for these government contracts to last beyond 5 years for exactly this reason. Who know what kind of deals are being made. Some administration could sign away the whole country on their last day.
It's straight up corruption, pure and simple. The UK is also full of this crap. The officials and executives who've facilitated and profited from this robbery should be jailed.
LOL. All the city parking spots around here are managed by PayByPhone, and pretty much all private parking spots are DiamondParking paid through ParkMobile.
I raised the issue with my local city council rep. She didn't care.
Eh, it's way simpler than that. AI doesn't know when to STFU. When I write an email or document, I don't need modern-day Clippy constantly guessing (and second-guessing) my thoughts. I don't need an AI sparkle button plastered everywhere to summarize articles for me. It's infantilizing and reeks of desperation. If AI is a truly useful tool, then I'll integrate it into my workflow on my own terms and my own timeline.
For anyone still in school, networking is easy for students who take initiative. This doesn't mean going to networking events. It means actually doing things with actual people: get involved in undergraduate research, sports, arts, Greek life, volunteering, on-campus part-time jobs, etc. Universities have those low-barrier low-risk things going on that you can just try out. Students who do this get the inside track on opportunities that aren't broadly advertised, so they face far less competition and are likely better fits for those opportunities due to the experience they got by being involved.
Stop applying for jobs and get involved in Greek life, sports, arts and working part time in the cafe serving food? You will meet so many people who are involved in your field and you get labelled as something other than a programmer.
This is terrible advice. Apply, cold call, create projects, job fairs, get co-op opportunties and ambush are better ways. Hackathons, github projects or small businesses can help. 9/10 CEOs will ignore your cold outreach but some won't.
Getting too busy making friends at the Greek houses will land you a marketing role if you are lucky. People need to associate you wish your craft. If they know you as a social guy you will get social roles. Any developer too social is suspect for many and ends up at best a pm.
When I was coming up people went into hardware/certifications to bridge the gap but moving from hardware to software was a gap too big for many as they became typecast.
Alexa is in the same boat. Compared to old-fashioned finger-and-screen interfaces, maybe voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case. It's inconvenient, unreliable, and even if it works quite slow. Yet you see companies continue to chase the dream in the current generative AI craze.
I get the sci-fi "wow" appeal, but even the folks who tried to build Minority Report-style 3D interfaces gave up after realizing tired arms make for annoyed users.
> voice simply isn't a great way to interact with computers in the general case
You know I have talked to chatGPT for maybe a 100 hours over the past 6 months. It gets my accent, it switches languages, it humors. It understands what I am saying even if it hallucinates once in a while.
If you can have chatGPT level of comprehension, you can do a lot with computers. Maybe not vim level of editing, but every single function in a driving car should be controllable by voice, and so could a lot of phone and computer functions.
I think the utility of voice commands is marginal at best in a car. In isolation, voice commands don't make sense if you have passengers. You basically have to tell everyone to shut up to ensure the car understands your commands over any ongoing conversation. And in the context of old fashioned knobs and buttons, voice is seriously a lot of complex engineering to solve problems that have long been non-issues.
Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.
Modern cars have several microphones or directional microphones and can isolate a speaker.
I think well-done voice commands are a great addition to a car, especially for rentals. When figuring out how to do something in a new car, I have to choose between safety, interruption (stopping briefly) or not having my desires function change.
Most basic functions can be voice-controlled without Internet connectivity. You should only need that for conversational topics, not for controlling car functions.
> Not to mention the likely need for continuous internet connectivity and service upkeep. Car companies aren't exactly known for good software governance.
I don't own a car but rent them occasionally on vacation in every one I've rented that I can remember since they started having the big touch screens that connect with your phone, the voice button on the steering wheel would just launch Siri (on CarPlay), which seems optimal—just have the phone software deal with it because the car companies are bad at software.
It seems to work fine for changing music when there's no passenger to do that, subject to only the usual limitations with Siri sucking—but I don't expect a car company to do better, and honestly the worst case I've can remember with music is that played the title track of an album rather than the album, which is admittedly ambiguous. Now I just say explicitly "play the album 'foo' by 'bar' on Spotify" and it works. It's definitely a lot safer than fumbling around with the touchscreen (and Spotify's CarPlay app is very limited for browsing anyways, for safety I assume but then my partner can't browse music either, which would be fine) or trying to juggle CDs back in the day.
How I miss old fashioned knobs and buttons. The utility of voice commands goes up when all your HVAC controls and heated car elements are only accessible on a touchscreen that you can’t use with the mitts you need to wear when it’s cold.
Again, I disagree. I almost entirely use Siri to get directions to places using Google maps with my voice when I’m on CarPlay. I also use Siri to respond to texts in my car, not as frequently but often enough.
It's great interface when your hands are doing something else so I do see the appeal.
Just that... nobody is willing to pay much for a thing that will do some basic search, dictate a recipe, or do unit conversion, or add a thing to a list.
Strong disagree. I would say 90% of the text I “write” on my phone is speech to text. I wouldn’t use ChatGPT nearly as much if I had to type out paragraph prompts every single time.
Maybe it’s just my imagination, but it seems like text to speech in the ChatGPT prompt window uses the context around it in the paragraph to fix what I’m saying so it is inordinately accurate compared to the rest of the iOS system.
Alexa has gotten significantly worse with the "Alexa+" AI updates. I used to be able to say stuff like "Alexa, set the lights to 5" and it would turn the lights to 5% in the room I was currently in. Now half the time it tries to start a conversation about the number 5, or the northern lights, or other random nonsense. Absolute garbage.
It basically boils down to "I want the external validation of being seen as a good writer, without any of the internal growth and struggle needed to get there."
I mean, kinda, but also: not only are someone’s meandering ramblings a part of a process that leads to less meandering ramblings, they’re also infinitely more interesting than LLM slop.
People use MS Office because other people use MS Office. It's network effects.
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