Every tech company I’ve ever sold at our biggest competitor was Microsoft, whether it’s collaboration, analytics, CRM, content management,….I’m at slack and we’re getting crushed by Teams. I’m talking to a friend at Databricks (which I thought was relatively safe) and he’s saying there’s starting to get a lot of pressure from Microsoft Fabric? Can anyone stop these guys besides the government? This is getting ridiculous.
I didn't have a workplace before which had MS as a competitor. When I was working at a company which sold image recognition algorithms and related services MS was nowhere in that field. When I was working on self driving car stuff MS wasn't a competitor. When I was working on special multichannel phone for brokers MS wasn't a competitor. When I was working on a CAD software... MS wasn't a competitor. I had a few more workplace, don't want to list everything, MS was never a competitor. Sure MS is big, but they are not everywhere. Btw, I work on Teams, but Slack (and Discord) is a hundred million times better. MS is only winning due to it's connections and bundling.
And that’s exactly the problem. Winning with an inferior product, because of licensing and bundling, isn’t competitive. It’s literally the mark of a monopoly.
Those are very specific industries, msft is trying to overtake all enterprise and cloud software.
It’s ironic that Fabric uses Spark. Open Source was created as an answer to proprietary software from corporations and now corporations used them to create services and to improve their internal proceses.
That's not why open source was created at all and it's codified here https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling under "Free software can be commercial" It's what people mean when they say "free as in speech, not free as in beer"
The answer to this is to do what Elastic did by changing the license on the open source project, forcing the bigger companies to fork the project and continue feature development on their own. AWS OpenSearch is garbage compared to proper Elastic.
Microsoft does to its enterprise customers what Apple does to its consumers: lock them in an inescapable ecosystem. Difference is Apple products are actually good, Microsoft's arent 🤣
It’s because Microsoft locks enterprises in so hard. Even just the fact that all the expenses are on one bill can be a huge factor in why companies choose their vendors. In my previous (F100) company where I was involved in buying software it was almost automated to increase MSFT spend by $10MM/yr but to get a $10MM/yr contract with snowflake set up had to go to chief executives and took months of hard sales at every level to get approvals.
Lots of companies are also locked into very old tech that Microsoft provides custom support for. They literally pay millions to Msft to keep windows servers from 2004 running lol. They just have too much leverage, too embedded in the enterprise for anyone to compete over the long run.
“to keep windows servers from 2004 running” Oh please. And it’s Windows Server 2003, ya moron!
Pressure from fabric is news to me
Oh just wait, it’s only starting 😂
Yes, just like how synapse was supposed to kill Databricks too 🙄
Imo this is a simplistic way to look at it. Firstly you’re assuming that the benefits of going w/ best in class are marginal, I’ve seen customers choose Microsoft even though the benefits of going with best in class over the long run are quite substantial. The key weakness in your argument is that it presumes that customers are doing the proper analysis, they aren’t. Customers mostly have a short term mindset and their leaders will often choose a short term fix to one of their KPIs (i.e. cost reduction) over a decision that is better for the longterm. Microsoft knows this and they’re experts at gaming their customers, which is what monopolies typically do. If the playing field were more leveled it would compel customers to actually buckle down and do the proper analysis on which product is better for them.
Thinking your customers are dumb is surely a great way to get more...
Don’t compete with Microsoft. Partner with Microsoft.
Man, everybody Microsoft competes with started off as a partner 😂 If you go to every Msft competitor you’ll see they once had a “Microsoft better together” campaign lol
I agree. Corporate consolidation/monopolization is never a good thing.. kills capitalism. Microsoft has fixed it's PR to the point where our deals just go under the radar.. good for my stock but not so good for the country as a whole.
Is anybody safe from Amazon? Any shopping I've ever done online always ends with Amazon.
Right? I struggle to buy from any retailer, online or not, other than Amazon who still gets 90% of my business.
Here’s the difference, you can make an argument that Amazon, despite it’s huge market share, is making retail cheaper and more convenient for the customer. The current rubric the FTC uses when deciding whether to go after a company is “what effect does this monopoly have on the end consumer?” Microsoft is OBJECTIVELY bad for end users, they’re using their monopoly position to force end users to use inferior products. Amazon is the opposite, they’re arguably using their monopoly to enhance customer experience. That being said, you can still make an argument to break apart Amazon, but imo it’s not as clear cut as Microsoft which is objectively & clearly damaging consumers.
Concurrency is normal. Slack and Databricks should do their job better
Slack and Databricks are way better products so they are doing their job better,…but they simply don’t have the leverage to give away products for free and basically force customers to use them. End users are now stuck with shittier products. Seems like a classic monopolistic anti-competitive practice.
Yup EU looking into it. Surprised how Microsoft gets away with so much since it’s corporate side