from Hacker News

An Economy of Godzillas: Salesforce, Slack, and Microsoft

by toothbrush on 12/8/20, 2:32 AM with 105 comments

• by cafed00d on 12/9/20, 8:04 AM

  > it gave away its new product for no or low cost to existing clients, and bundled it with existing product lines. In a society with functional antitrust laws, such activity would be illegal. But alas.

  I find this statement highly suspect. What kind of world do we want to live in where regulators delineate product areas.

  I see Microsoft integrating Teams into their productivity product bundle as feature; not a bug. Otherwise, we run the risk of creating separate product areas and none of them working well together — it’a going to be a minor pain in the butt to email <user@outlook.com> with the pdf tchalla@ shared on Slack; deal with formatted paste/copy & whatever else issues.

  I mean, products being integrated is the whole MO of companies like Apple, Tesla and literally every other company making physical things. Sure, you can sacrifice the integration for other features like breadth of choice, specialized user needs etc, but proposing regulations to keep them distinct and separate?! That modesty sound right, imho

• by jakozaur on 12/9/20, 3:40 PM

  I'm not sure who is benefitting those mega managers other than executives or shareholders.

  We need to find a way to discourage mega-mergers. Either through antitrust law or progressive taxation on mega mergers starting at few $1Bln.

  1. The economy is a whole losses efficiency due to lack of competition.

  2. Less competition for talent.

  3. More fragile economy (e.g. too big to fail).

  https://www.economist.com/special-report/2018/11/15/across-t...

  https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...

• by ralph84 on 12/9/20, 7:49 AM

  The article vastly underestimates the desire of large enterprises to deal with only a handful of IT vendors. Sure, no enterprise wants monopoly pricing, but they also don’t want dozens upon dozens of different IT vendors to deal with.

• by moltar on 12/9/20, 6:49 AM

  Substack = Medium x LinkedIn

• by kieranmaine on 12/9/20, 5:59 PM

  If people are interested in getting more data on why monopolies and monopsonies are bad I'd recommend "The Myth Of Capitalism" (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/40751646-the-myth-of-...).

  It made a compelling case for breaking up large corporations in the interest of reducing inequality (via more competition and reduced consumer prices). However, it's the only book I've read on the subject so am unsure if it's a widely held and reliably informed view.

  For commenters that are wondering what world we'd be living in with functional anti-trust laws, the book suggests we look to the US between the late 1930's and the early 1980s.

• by willyg123 on 12/9/20, 2:08 PM

  Matt Stoller has published dozens of whiny posts about supposed monopolies. Yet, he has yet to once mention the "consumer welfare standard" [1] because it would blow the thesis apart in every single post.

  [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amattstoller.substack....