The Monopoly Discussions [2021]

MS wont buy everyone don't worry. I think there is one more large purchase and then a mid size purchase that they are looking into and might happen. Any other purchases will be smaller companies under 1B

MS wants to fill out game pass and is working hard on that , part of the strategy is buying some studios. They are also not the only ones buying studios. Sony bought the spiderman studio not to long ago.

In video games Sony would be closer to a monopoly than MS . Heck you could consider Sony and Nintendo a duopoly .

The only monopoly MS has is windows os if you count only personal computers but pretty sure ios and andriod are larger operating systems now.

 

yup and its why MS is making the moves now because if game pass is sucessfull it could end up being a long time before they can buy another game developer. So they need to buy the right companies now.

 

In all honesty new studios pop up left and right. Not of them are able to create AAA games these days but tons of studios out there.
And I until MS is dominating the market it is not a monopoly.

Even with all those purchases MS is not even close to have a huge market influence. As long as MS publishes the games on Steam it can easily avoid any issues with influences or monopolies.

I am not sure. I mean IPhone is certainly popular and famous franchise but Android is everywhere - it is just very fragmented as people own Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Google Pixel etc.

 

Well lets look at things here

Amazon continues to grow snuffing out the small businesses that covid didn't kill. Now if you want to exist as a seller you need to be on their platform. They have their hands in everything from phones and tablets to smart speakers to "tv" content to book sales and so on and so forth. They have a monopoly on game streaming. They are also the market leader in web hosting

Apple has vertically integrated everything and has left a slew of broken companies behind them. They use their absolute control of the app store on their platform to copy competition products while being funded by them and ultimately replacing them. They are doing what amazon is doing by having their own "tv" studios and music platforms. They also now cut out chip suppliers and are now using dominance in phone sales to gain a competitive edge in other markets. Apple and Google are a duopoly in terms of phone OS and tablet OS companies.

Google again has over 70% of the search market and are the over whelming market leader in phone os. . They are the defacto web video content platform with youtube.

We saw all 3 of them work together to stifle and drive out Parlor. Parlor while right leaning did not have any content worse than what was on twitter a company that conveniently signed a hosting deal with Amazon not too long ago. Now the fastest growing competition for twitter was kicked off aws with only 30 hours of notice vs the required 30 days. Apple and Google also both removed the app from their stores. I don't think the USA is going to do anything to thse companies because ultimately it helped the ones in power right now. But there are plenty of countries that have already spoken out about this including Merkle who is the head of Germany and basically the EU.

What power does Microsoft control that is anything like that anymore ?

What is Microsoft % of the market that they have for video games ? Microsoft is making these purchases now but they wont even fully pay off this generation of consoles. So microsoft could have half a decade or a full decade before they gain enough market share that anyone bats an eye.

Steam just broke its record of a 120m users and had 24m users online at one time recently. Nintendo is currently selling gangbusters and switch is going to end up their best selling console ever compared to MS who sold what 50-60m xbox ones ? Sony I believe also broke 100m ps4s and is right now out selling the xbox series with the ps5 by 2.5-1.

It will take a long time for Microsoft become a monopoly in gaming if they ever do. But I doubt they care. Bing is far from a market leader but still brings in billions upon billions for them. Its the same for surface . It makes billions for them but is far from a market leader in the pc side. Game pass will become the same. Using the pc , phone and xbox platforms game pass will bring in billions upon billions for them.

 

Most of those fears about Microsoft monopolizing game distribution through UWP are nonsense though, Tim Sweeny was essentially making things up, it was always possible for other stores to use UWP and it was and still is an open standard. The point of UWP is to make programs much more easily managed when installing/uninstalling and more secure.

heres microsofts response to the article that you quote

Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows at Microsoft, issued the Guardian the following statement:

Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required.

We want to make Windows the best development platform regardless of technologies used, and offer tools to help developers with existing code bases of HTML/JavaScript, .NET and Win32, C+ + and Objective-C bring their code to Windows, and integrate UWP capabilities. With Xamarin, UWP developers can not only reach all Windows 10 devices, but they can now use a large percentage of their C# code to deliver a fully native mobile app experiences for iOS and Android. We also posted a blog on our development tools recently.

 

Liams gave information to you about your claims. But here is more , at the time of that article Sweeny was preparing to launch his own store on the platform. Notice that the epic store is available on Windows and unlike apple or google MS makes zero dollars off that store.

I think i broke down the companies pretty well and how much influence these companies have on the market. Microsoft is no longer a company at that level. They don't have a platform that can currently be abused. The windows store isn't even the dominate store on their platform !

 

I think people just look at market capitalization of MS, compare to Sony's and complain about "abuse" and "monopolies".

But it is incredible that MS has such a big market cap despite not being a leader in any area (except Office).

 

I wouldn't sleep on their revenue from Windows, either. The money they collect from Dell, HP, and other OEMs must be pretty substantial. The retail PC market is fairly large, especially when you take into account the non-gaming market. I know ChromeOS has eaten into this lead, but I don't think it's overtaken it yet.

 

Probably much larger then the console/PS market share.

 

on the order of 250m per year

 

monopoly laws only apply to companies that abuse their market position, so all that potential is irrelevant to the conversation.

 

Because they all control market segments that are relevant and have recently been used to destroy another company.

As for Microsoft they could do all that but they don't. Until they do what will happen ? Like I said epic recently launched their own store on the platform and unlike other platforms Epic pays 0 dollars to microsoft.

You claim microsoft is the worlds largest software company but is that even true anymore ? Wouldn't Apple with IOS or Google with Andriod be the largest software company ? I think apple is the largest hardware company.

 

I don't think it will, because it already passed that stage in 90s and early 2000s. Learnt a lesson.

 

I understand what your getting at, and do agree with you that there are likely anti-monopoly law reinterpretations / new laws on the way, but I just don't think Microsoft is going to be the focus of those expanded/reinterpreted laws. This isn't just me saying that because I like Microsoft to be clear, just look at the recent congressional hearings that involved big tech, there wasn't a Microsoft in sight. And I understand that you cant be pulled over for speeding and say 'but officer, everyone else was going just as fast/faster than me!', but I think its clear that there are other things that will be focussed on.

To compare Microsoft gaming ambitions to becoming the Disney of games I think is somewhat analogous, although xbox will never get to the market share that Disney has, in 2019 Disney accounted for 40% of the US box office. As a comparison in 2019, xbox had roughly 8% of the global gaming market revenue, at ~$11B, but that includes the revenue for hardware sales, so the real percentage is lower than that. There is no scenario where xbox has 40% of the global gaming revenues, no matter who they acquire.

The US government, who would be enforcing any of these expanded laws is completely comfortable with where Microsoft is right now, and that's not because the US government is a big customer of Microsoft.

With Microsoft being the largest software company in the world, they are also the most diversified, who else is doing so many different things in software? Its not like the windows team has 150k software engineers on it (sometimes I wish it did lol, we might finally get a consistent UI everywhere). the googles and facebooks of the world only have 1 product basically, with google its advertising, and with facebook its social networks, they don't need as many engineers to support that.


I wonder if the US government would define a monopoly based on revenue as a proxy for market share? the apple app store had an estimated revenue of ~$72B dollars in 2020, compared to the google play stores ~$22B. Installed devices is imo a poor metric for market share, as it doesn't account for how actively the device owners actually use the store. Plus Apple is imo actively abusing its market position by not allowing game subscription services that arent its own apple arcade to be sold through the app store, they obviously have ambitions to bolster apple arcade and are ensuring that they will eventually have success with it by stifling competition. If installed devices were all that mattered then the windows store would be doing a lot better than it currently is.


A few disjointed points but you get my idea.