Matisyahu's Blog

There has been a lot reporting on the big technology companies being challenged by regulators regarding how they integrate products together, the business model regarding requiring software sold through an app store having to use the app store payment system for in-app functionality such as subscriptions etc. Arstechnica has written an interesting article regarding the FTC in the United States investigating Microsoft’s bundling of services together (link).

The problem I have with the line of thinking being employed by the FTC is this, at what point do you draw the line between a product being bundled because there is an expectation to have that functionality built in versus including it because they’re wanting to crush the competition. For example, many years ago back when SCO was called Santa Cruz Operations and sold UnixWare and OpenServer you had to licence components that most people would consider core operating system features such as a TCP/IP stack. When it came to Windows 3.x there was Trumpet Winsock (link) that you had to purchase if you wanted to get on the internet then the functionality was built into Windows 95 as customers expected that functionality to be built in out of the box. This can also be said for Internet Explorer – how are you going to get onto the internet to get a browser of choice if you don’t have a browser built in to enable you to do that? appears like a chicken and egg scenario (keeping in mind that the anti-trust case against Microsoft over 20 years ago was more than just a matter of building Internet Explorer with Windows – it was about agreements with OEMs and much more complex stuff that is outside the scope of this blog post).

Let’s fast forward to focusing on Microsoft focusing on improving their security and part of that included not just improvements to their code base and changing the way in which Windows did certain things but also included bundling into Windows Microsoft Defender. Yes, Microsoft does provide paid for enterprise enhancements but the bunding of Defender into Windows was addressing a long standing issue that end users wanted addressing so that out of the box their Windows computer is secure rather than having to purchase a third party piece of software to do what most people would consider a core competency of an operating system (macOS also has anti malware builtin called XProtect which was made available in 2012).

What used to be ‘nice to haves’ eventually become something that customers expect to be included as part of a product – something that used to be taken care of by a third party now becomes a core essential part of the software. What customers also want is value for money and integration which is why customers are attracted to suites – Microsoft provides a one stop office suite which includes everything from spreadsheets to documents and everything in between then throw on top of that collaboration tools such as Teams with everything integrating in with everything else. To hear companies complain makes me laugh given that nothing has stopped them from expanding their portfolio of applications beyond a single application because ultimately you need to address the demand of the consumer, if the consumer wants a suite of applications then that is what you need to provide them – Salesforce integrates with Office 365 and at my own work we choose to use Slack over Teams for any sort of messaging to each other (personally I think Salesforce needs to expand beyond CRM to start offering their own suite of applications similar to what Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365 can provide).

What I do hope is that whatever the outcome is that it doesn’t undermine the ability for businesses to provide more functionality to customers or expand what they have to offer. I have two pieces of advice to businesses: 1) If you build a business that is based around ‘filling a hole’ then you better make sure that you have a business plan once that hole is filled by the parent company. 2) Making your whole business dependent on one product is a recipe for disaster – businesses tend to prefer keeping their list of suppliers short and if what you have to offer is up against a company who provide an end to end solution then you’ll tend to find that the business will prefer that end to end solution rather than trying to create a hodge-podge of multiple vendors then trying to link them all up to work together.