Remember Embrace Extend Extinguish, R.E.E.E for short.

Like COD, the best selling game on every platform it’s on every year?

How bout you take your half baked brain back to investing in FTX.

Corporations are not your friend stop acting like they are, or ya investing in microshit too?

You're right. A company should be allowed to create and acquire other companies, no doubt in that.

The problem, as I listed above in the very long post, is unique to the big tech players where they can create such synergetic businesses that it's pretty difficult for anyone to compete or break free from that.

What you're saying makes great sense. Xbox indeed needs more and more IPs and more importantly much better quality control to compete with Sony. They lost the last generation, and they need to do everything in their power to course correct. After ABK, they would match Sony in number of IPs and maybe surpass them in number of studios. Fair enough. But, as a whole, this gives a lot more power to MSFT, and my question is simply whether it's too much power or not.

Exactly, on their own the products aren't harmful at all. The problem comes when MSFT can leverage their position to undercut prices or shoving their products in other products.

How can slack compete, despite being a superior product, when MSFT puts Teams in the effing taskbar of Windows and sells it for half the price, and bundles it with office?

How can bitbucket or gitlab compete if MSFT integrates npm, GitHub, Azure, GitHub Copilot, VSCode and so many other dev tools so well, for much lower price?

Azure is second, yes, but my company, like many other companies, uses Azure over AWS because MSFT gives a sweet deal where Azure, Outlook, OneDrive, GitHub, Teams are all bundled in such a way that it'll be expensive to use individual companies for each, and also a big hassle. And when MSFT becomes an incubator for a startup, it's even better deal for the startup. How can digital ocean, for example, compete with that?

I mean that's what happened with Internet Explorer. Netscape couldn't compete coz MSFT could give IE for free and bundle it into the operating system. Google did something similar by getting other softwares to bundle Chrome with them in the installation process, and also asking users to use chrome on all Google properties. Firefox can never compete with IE or Chrome or Safari, as long as these big companies can integrate their services and products so seamlessly.

So you're absolutely right, individually none of the products are harmful, infact some of them are really good deals for consumers, but due to them all being under one umbrella, it's hard for competition to thrive.

This is what I’m hearing too, but I’m skeptical. Someone in government, fighting against corporations on behalf of the people?!

Correct, but unfortunately she’s not a big fan of picking her battles well either.

It’s all well and good to “go after big tech”, but you should only go after them when you’ve got a leg to stand on, otherwise you’re going to be made to look stupid by the ludicrously highly paid big tech lawyers. Under khan the FTC has lost almost everything they’ve tried, and most of the times you could take 1 look at their case and know they had no chance in hell.

The Microsoft/ABK case is a perfect example. There’s no lt even the slightest hint of a monopoly or anti-competitive behaviour. Then the ftc basically made their entire argument about poor old market leader Sony potentially being hurt.

Whoever advised them of their strategy in this case should have their credentials stripped. Who thought fighting for the market leader to maintain their dominance and to keep last place in last place was the angle they should take? They’re supposed to look out for consumers and competition, but this case did the opposite.

No lol. Sony was crying as well.