Pretty much everything is down (checking from the Netherlands). The Cloudflare dashboard itself is experiencing an outage as well.
Not-so-funny thing is that the Betterstack dashboard is down but our status page hosted by Betterstack is up, and we can't access the dashboard to create an incident and let our customers know what's going on.
Yep that's also my experience. Except HN because it does not use *** Cloudflare because it knows it is not necessary. I just wrote a blog titled "Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don't Need To" [1].
No, since they're simply too many. For an e-commerce site I work for, we once had an issue where some bad-actor tried to crawl the site to set up scam shops. The list of IPs were way too broad, and the user-agents way too generic or random.
Could you not also use an ASN list like https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list and add blocks of IPs to a blocklist (eg. ipset on Linux)? Most of the scripty traffic comes from VPSs.
Thanks to widespread botnets, most scrapers fall back to using "residential proxies" the moment you block their cloud addresses. Same load, but now you risk accidentally blocking customers coming from similar net blocks.
Blocking ASNs is one step of the fight, but unfortunately it's not the solution.
Hypothetically, as a cyber-criminal, I'd like to thank the blacklist industry for bringing so much money into criminal enterprises by making residential proxies mandatory for all scraping.
Its not one IP to block. Its thousands! And they're also scatter through different ip networks so no simple cidr block is possible. Oh, and just for the fun, when you block their datacenter ips they switch to hundreds of residential network ips.
Yes, they are really hard to block. In the end I switched to Cloudflare to just so they can handle this mess.
Wouldn't it be trivial to just to write a uwf to block the crawler ips?
Probably more effective would be to get the bots to exclude your IP/domain. I do this for SSH, leaving it open on my public SFTP servers on purpose. [1] If I can get 5 bot owners to exclude me that could be upwards of 250k+ nodes mostly mobile IP's that stop talking to me. Just create something that confuses and craps up the bots. With SSH bots this is trivial as most SSH bot libraries and code are unmaintained and poorly written to begin with. In my ssh example look for the VersionAddendum. Old versions of ssh, old ssh libraries and code that tries to implement ssh itself will choke on a long banner string. Not to be confused with the text banner file.
I'm sure the clever people here could make something similar for HTTPS and especially for GPT/LLM bots at the risk of being flagged "malicious".
Belated response as I called it a night over here in sunny Australia!
The image scraping bots are training for generative AI, I'm assuming.
As to why they literally scrape the same images hundreds of thousands of times?
I have no idea!
But I am not special, the bots have been doing it across the internet.
My main difference to other sites is that I operate a Tourism focused SAAS for local organisations and government tourist boards. Which means we have a very healthy amount of images being served per page across our sites.
We also do on the fly transformations for responsive images and formats.
Which is all done through Cloudinary.
The Bytespider bot (Bytedance / TikTok) was the one that was being abusive for me.
Bad actors now have access to tens of thousands of IPs and servers on the fly.
The cost of hardware and software resources these days is absolute peanuts compared to 10 years ago. Cloud services and APIs has made managing them also trivial as hell.
Cloudflare is simply a evolution in response to the other side also having evolved greatly, both legitimate and illegitimate users.
Yes, I never understand this obsession for centralized services like Cloudflare. To be fair though, if our tiny blogs anyway had a hundred or so visitors monthly, does it matter if it had an outage for a day?
Interesting. I've done a lot of manual work to set up a whole nginx layer to properly route stuff through one domain to various self-hosted services, with way to many hard lessons when I started this journey (from trying to do manual setup without docker, to moving onto repeatable setups via docker, etc.).
The setup appears very simple in Caddy - amazingly simple, honestly. I'm going to give it a good try.
Cloudflare explicitly supports customers placing insecure HTTP only sites behind a cloudflare HTTPS.
It's one of the more controversial parts of the business, it makes the fact that the traffic is unencrypted on public networks invisible to the end user.
1. DDOS protection is not the only thing anymore, I use cloudflare because of vast amounts of AI bots from thousands of ASNs around the world crawling my CI servers (bloated Java VMs on very undersized hosts) and bringing them down (granted, I threw cloudflare onto my static sites as well which was not really necessary, I just liked their analytics UX)
2. the XKCD comic is mis-interpreted there, that little block is small because it's a "small open source project run by one person", cloudflare is the opposite of that
3. edit: also cloudflare is awesome if you are migrating hosts, did a migration this past month, you point cloudflare to the new servers and it's instant DNS propagation (since you didnt propagate anything :) )
It’s that time of the year again where we all realize that relying on AWS and Cloudflare to this degree is pretty dangerous but then again it’s difficult to switch at this point.
If there is a slight positive note to all this, then it is that these outages are so large that customers usually seem to be quite understanding.
Unless you’re say at airport trying to file a luggage claim … or at the pharmacy trying to get your prescription. I think as a community we have a responsibility to do better than this.
I always see such negative responses when HN brings up software bloat ("why is your static site measured in megabytes").
Now that we have an abundance of compute and most people run devices more powerful than the devices that put man on the moon, it's easier than ever to make app bloat, especially when using a framework like Electron or React Native.
People take it personally when you say they write poor quality software, but it's not a personal attack, it's an observation of modern software practices.
And I'm guilty of this, mainly because I work for companies that prioritize speed of development over quality of software, and I suspect most developers are in this trap.
I think we have a new normal now though. Most web devs starting now don't know a world without React/Vue/Solid/whatever. Like, sure you can roll your own HTML site with JS for interactivity, but employers now don't seem to care about that; if you don't know React then don't bother.
You aren’t cloudflare’s customer in these examples. It depends on the companies that are actually paying for and using the service to complain. Odds are that they won’t care on your behalf due to how our society is structured.
Not really sure how our community is supposed to deal with this.
“We” are the ones making the architecture and the technical specs of these services. Taking care for it to still work when your favourite FAANGMC is down seems like something we can help with.
> If there is a slight positive note to all this, then it is that these outages are so large that customers usually seem to be quite understanding.
Which only shows that chasing five 9s is worthless for almost all web products. The idea is that by relying on AWS or Cloudflare you can push your uptime numbers up to that standard, but these companies themselves are having such frequent outages that customers themselves don't expect that kind reliability from web products.
If I choose AWS/cloudflare and we're down with half of the internet, then I don't even need to explain it to my boss' bosses, because there will be an article in the mainstream media.
If I choose something else, we're down, and our competitors aren't, then my overlords will start asking a lot of questions.
Yup. AWS went down at a previous job and everyone basically took the day off and the company collectively chuckled. Cloudflare is interesting because most execs don’t know about it so I’d imagine they’d be less forgiving. “So what does cloudflare do for us exactly? Don’t we already have aws?”
Or _you_ aren't down, but a third-party you depend on is (auth0, payment gateway, what have you), and you invested a lot of time and effort into being reliable, but it was all for less than nothing, because your website loads but customers can't purchase, and they associate the problem with you, not with the AWS outage.
In reality it is not half of the internet. That is just marketing. I've personally noticed one news site while others were working. And I guess sites like that will get the blame.
Happy to hear anyone's suggestions about where else to go or what else to do in regards to protecting from large-scale volumetric DDoS attacks. Pretty much every CDN provider nowadays has stacked up enough capacity to tank these kind of attacks, good luck trying to combat these yourself these days?
Somehow KiwiFarms figured it out with their own "KiwiFlare" DDOS mitigation. Unfortunately, all of the other Cloudflare-like services seem exceptionally shady, will be less reliable than Cloudflare, and probably share data with foreign intelligence services I have even less trust for than the ones Cloudflare possibly shares them with.
Unfortunately Anubis doesn't help where my pipe to the internet isn't fat enough to just eat up all the bandwidth that the attacker has available. Renting tens of terabits of capacity isn't cheap and DDoS attacks nowadays are in the scale of that. BunnyCDN's DDoS protection is unfortunately too basic to filter out anything that's ever so slightly more sophisticated. Cloudflare's flexibility in terms of custom rulesets and their global pre-trained rulesets (based on attacks they've seen in the past) is imo just unbeatable at this time.
The Bunny Shield is quite similar to the Cloudflare setup. Maybe not 100% overlap of features but unless you’re Twitter or Facebook, it’s probably enough.
I think at the very least, one should plan the ability to switch to an alternative when your main choice fails… which together with AWS and GitHub is a weekly event now.
Why do people on a technical website suggest this? It's literally the same snake oil as Cloudflare. Both have an endgame of total web DRM; they want to make sure users "aren't bots". Each time the DRM is cracked, they will increase its complexity of the "verifier". You will be running arbitrary code in your big 4 browser to ensure you're running a certified big 4 browser, with 10 trillion man hours of development, on an certified OS.
And if you do rule based blocking they just change their approach. I am constantly blocking big corps these days, barely any work with normal bad actors.
What do they even have an spider for? I never saw any actual traffic with source Facebook. I don't understand either, but it's their official IPs, their official bot headers and it behaves exactly like someone who wants my sites down.
Does it make sense? Nah, but is it part of the weird reality we live in. Looks like it
I have no way of contacting Facebook. All I can do is keep complaining on hackernews whenever the topic arrises.
Edit:// Oh and I see the same with Azure, however there I have no list of IPs to verify it's official just because it looks like it.
5 9's is like 7 minutes a year. They are breaking SLAs and impacting services people depend on
Tbh though this is sort of all the other companies fault, "everyone" uses aws and cf and so others follow. now not only are all your chicks in one basket, so is everyone elses. When the basket inevitably falls into a lake....
Providers need to be more aware of their global impact in outages, and customers need to be more diverse in their spread.
These kinds of outages continue to happen and continue to impact 50+% of the internet, yes, they know they have that power, but they dont treat changes as such, so no, they arent aware. Awareness would imply more care in operations like code changes and deployments.
Outages happen, code changes occur; but you can do a lot to prevent these things on a large scale, and they simply dont.
Where is the A/B deployment, preventing a full outage? What about internally, where was the validation before the change, was the testing run against a prodlike environment or something that once resembled prod but hasnt forever?
They could absolutely mitigate impacting the entire global infra in multiple ways, and havent, despite their many outages.
They are aware. They don't want to pay the cost benefit tradeoff. Education won't help - this is a very heavily argued tradeoff in every large software company.
I do think this is tenable as long as these services are reliable. Even though there have been some outages I would argue that they’re incredibly reliable at this point. If though this ever changes the costs to move to a competitor won’t be as simple as pushing a repository elsewhere, especially for AWS. I think that’s where some of the potential danger lies.
> and judging by the HN post age, we're now past minute 60 of this incident.
Huh? It's been back up during most of this time. It was up and then briefly went back down again but it's been up for a while now. Total downtime was closer to 30 minutes
Not saying not to do this to get through, but just as an observation, it’s also the sort of thing that can make these issues a nightmare to remediate, since the outage can actually draw more traffic just as things are warming up, from customers desperate to get through.
I'm already logged in on the cloudflare dashboard and trying to disable the CF proxy, but getting "404 | Either this page does not exist, or you do not have permission to access it" when trying to access the DNS configuration page.
And I got a 504 error (served by CloudFront) on that status page earlier. The error message suggested there may have been a great increase in traffic that caused it.
Maybe that's precisely what Cloudflare did and now their status page is down because it's receiving an unusual amount of traffic that the VPS can't handle.
Could always just use a status page that updates itself. For my side project Total Real Returns [1], if you scroll down and look at the page footer, I have a live status/uptime widget [2] (just an <img> tag, no JS) which links to an externally-hosted status page [3]. Obviously not critical for a side project, but kind of neat, and was fun to build. :)
This is unrelated to the cloudflare incident but thanks a lot for making that page. I keep checking it from time to time and it's basically the main data source for my long term investing.
1- Does GCP also have any outages recently similar to AWS, Azure or CF? If a similar size (14 TB?) DDoS were to hit GCP, would it stand or would it fail?
2- If this DDoS was targeting Fly.io, would it stand? :)
I actually spoke too soon, and accept I have egg on my face!
Apparently prisma's `npm exec prisma generate` command tries to download "engine binaries" from https://binaries.prisma.sh, which is behind... guess what...
So now my CI/CD is broken, while my production env is down, and I can't fix it.
Seems like workers are less affected and maybe betterstack has decided to bypass cloudflare "stuff" for the status pages? (maybe to cut down costs). My site is still up though some GitHub runners did show it failed at certain points.
Pretty sure they went down for a while because I have 4xx errors they returned but apparently it was short-lived. I wonder if their workers infra. failed for a moment and that let to a total collapse of all of their products?
When its back up, do yourself a favour and rent a $5/mo vps in another country from a provider like OVH or Hetzner and stick your status page on that.
"Yes but what if they go down" - it doesnt matter, having it hosted by someone who can be down for the same reason as your main product/service is a recipe for disaster.
Definitely. Tangentially, I encountered 504 Gateway Timeout errors on cloudflarestatus.com about an hour ago. The error page also disclosed the fact that it's powered by CloudFront (Amazon's CDN).
Been using Cachet for quite a while before inevitably migrating to Atlassian's Statuspage.io. I'm a huge fan of self-hosting and self-managing every single thing in existence but Cachet was just such a PITA to maintain and there was just no other good alternative to Cachet that was also open source.
I don't get why you need such a service for a status page with 99.whatever% uptime. I mean, your status page only has to be up if everything else is down, so maybe 1% uptime is fine.
This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover...
That's am understandable perspective but wouldn't this more or less apply to any product any large company is selling as part of a bundle?
e.g. selling Word/Excel/PowerPoint together is hurting any start-up that might want to enter the document processing/spreadsheet/etc markets? Free browsers killed the entire market that was starting to appear in the 90s etc. etc.
Should office suites be banned? Should Adobe be only allowed to sell subscriptions/licenses for individual apps?
At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.
> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.
Focusing on short term repercussions for consumers has significantly hurt long term consumer interests and there is evidence that it hurt the economy in general. In the decades preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and that extreme power concentration (as we e.g. see today in the IT sector) is hard to reconcile with efficient markets and political freedom.
See [1] for details, here is an excerpt:
> An emerging group of young scholars are inquiring whether we truly benefitted from competition with little antitrust enforcement. The mounting evidence suggests no. New business formation has steadily declined as a share of the economy since the late 1970s. “In 1982, young firms [those five-years old or younger] accounted for about half of all firms, and one-fifth of total employment,” observed Jason Furman, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. But by 2013, these figures fell “to about one-third of firms and one-tenth of total employment.” Competition is decreasing in many significant markets, as they become concentrated. Greater profits are falling in the hands of fewer firms. “More than 75% of US industries have experienced an increase in concentration levels over the last two decades,” one recent study found. “Firms in industries with the largest increases in product market concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins, positive abnormal stock returns, and more profitable M&A deals, which suggests that market power is becoming an important source of value.” Since the late 1970s, wealth inequality has grown, and worker mobility has declined. Labor’s share of income in the nonfarm business sector was in the mid-60 percentage points for several decades after WWII, but that too has declined since 2000 to the mid-50s. Despite the higher returns to capital, businesses in markets with rising concentration and less competition are investing relatively less. This investment gap, one study found, is driven by industry leaders who have higher profit margins.
What makes this so difficult is that it would be hard to fix even if there was agreement on the problem.
If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines, it would effectively stop all investment in disruptive technologies because any real disruption most likely infringes on some of these laws.
If you stop large companies from expanding into neighbouring industries, e.g by bundling new stuff with their existing offering, you stop them from becoming bigger but at the same time you are reducing competition. The risk is that you might end up with smaller companies but even less competition.
I'm not ideologically opposed to government intervention. I just don't know how to do it. All discussions on how to break up some tech giant quickly reveal how devilishly complex the problem is. And it's different for each of them and for each industry.
What would be a general rule to prevent growing concentration without damaging innovation, ossifying existing market structures and make impossible demands on the political system in terms of keeping all those detailed rules up-to-date and fit for purpose?
>> If governments were to parcel up markets and stop companies from crossing rather arbitrary dividing lines
>There is absolutely no need to do this until you become Microsoft's size and no government has or will.
I'm not so sure. Debates about how to break up the tech giants often revolve around which particular activities shouldn't be under the same roof because there is an intrinsic conflict of interest.
For instance, some of the accusations against Amazon appear to be pointing to a potential solution where Amazon would no longer be allowed to compete with Amazon Marketplace traders or with publishers. Not sure if Lina Khan has anything like this in mind or not.
We also had many debates about whether media companies should be allowed to be internet access providers or operate internet backbones. Net neutrality is supposed to stop any misuse of power, but net neutrality itself is under constant fire from deregulators.
The thing is, it doesn't make much sense to break up a specific company because doing both A and B causes a conflict of interest but then let other companies do A and B. That's why in my view any such breakup implies a need for defining boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed.
> boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed.
This only applies to dominant companies/ monopolies.
But there is merit to the idea - like should investment banks be allowed to profit from taking a position against the position of their customer, even if that was done on their advise?
> defining boundaries between markets that cannot be crossed
So basically entrenched companies in specific markets would be extremely hard to challenge unless you have very large amounts of capital just laying around doing nothing? Even start-ups would struggle a lot more to get funding because no established company outside of that specific market would be allowed to purchase them. I'm not sure overall that would benefit consumers that much (IMHO the complete opposite but it's debatable).
Of course it depends on how the boundaries are defined, but just in tech:
Apple (being a computer company) would have never been allowed to develop the iPod/Phone/Pad without spinning them off into independent companies?
Google (being an OS provider) wouldn't have been able to sell Pixel phones themselves, but that wouldn't be an issue since Android probably wouldn't have been a thing in the first place.
So we'd be permanently stuck with Symbian and Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Blackberry/etc.
Same applies to MS, which is a great counterexample, despite all their resources and power they completely failed to leverage that in the mobile market. Then you have Intel vs ARM, Google and social media, even Kodak to an extent.
Having a lot of money, resources and great engineering is not necessarily such a huge competitive advantage when trying to enter an adjacent market. You must also be capable of developing competitive/innovative products while not being afraid to cannibalize your current revenue streams. Especially if we're talking about major public companies. Pouring billions into some (potential) boondoggle without any immediate return is hard to pull off without generating a severe backlash from your investors.
Having a seemingly "perfectly" competitive market (i.e. margins are close to the "risk-free" rate of return) doesn't necessarily lead to a lot of innovation because companies in such markets can't afford to make risky investments and tend to just focus on maximizing efficiency of current technologies. e.g. yes Google being able to fund Waymo with their Search/Ad revenue/etc. is not exactly fair to their potential competitors but IMHO preventing that would have significantly slowed down any real progress in the field.
That's exactly what worries me. So if something is done to prevent growing market concentration it better be something that doesn't rely on this sort of fine grained market segmentaion.
One alternative that could work is to mandate open APIs and a requirement for large platforms to carry all legal traffic and content. I know this is incredibly tricky as well. Who pays for the infrastructure? What about security and privacy issues? It raises many questions but it seems more promising as a direction of travel.
Yeah I don't know how you would break up Microsoft Office or regulate that. There are competitors but it's so pervasive, most companies use it. You'd have to create a public API that other competitors could use, and the HR lady is going to be pissed!
> preceding the 1980s it was generally understood that competition itself is a necessity for effective free markets and that extreme power concentration (as we e.g. see today in the IT sector)
Yet Bell wasn't broken up until 1982 so I'm not sure if it was a such a turning point. IMHO allowing AT&T's monopoly to exist for that long was much more detrimental to consumers than whatever MS, Apple and other tech companies are doing these days.
But yeah I certainly overall agree that competition has generally been the driving force behind most of human progress and economic growth at least over the last few hundred years. It's just not entirely clear what measures should governments use to maximize the competitiveness of markets without introducing inefficiencies and costs that slow down economic growth and technological progress (while not providing that many benefits to consumers either).
I fully believe we lost more than we gained from the breakup of AT&T - local access prices went up significantly, and while long distance rates declined, it did so roughly linearly with the decreasing cost of bandwidth.
In the end we pay about as much as we ever have in aggregate - but at a loss of all of the benefits the AT&T monopoly - subsidized general science research from the labs, a plethora of union jobs, and an overall loss of US manufacturing capacity.
My belief having working in the sector, anything that looks like a utility is better off as a tightly regulated monopoly than being open to the winds of competition.
I was a teenager at the time, and what I remember, above and beyond pricing alone, was just how firm a grip Ma Bell had on our entire civil communications infrastructure. The Carterfone decision was still a relatively-recent thing with radical implications -- you mean I can plug stuff besides phones into the wall socket?! -- and it was definitely time for things to open up further.
Intra-LATA calling between neighboring towns got a bit more expensive for a while, yes, but long distance almost immediately became much cheaper. It was like the move from film photography to digital -- suddenly everybody was taking photos freely, because the marginal cost was almost gone.
Post-breakup long distance calling became something people weren't inherently reluctant to use, and that was a big deal. Especially with the concurrent rise of BBSes. There's no way I'd ever agree that we were better off with the status quo.
> At the end of the day it should only matter if Microsoft's practices are hurting consumers rather than their competitors.
On the one hand that's a broadly reasonable goal, however the point of having laws preventing anti-competitive behaviour is founded in the logic that one company unfairly preventing there being competition from other companies is in itself a form of consumer harm due to the fact that it both prevents consumers from having choice, and also therefore in the longer term allows the monopolistic company to raise prices without consumers having any option other than to pay more or go without.
So in reality the harming or competitors can be considered the harming of consumers.
However, this is an interesting problem. By nature of competition, every customer a competitor takes is a customer missed. So when is competition anti-competive?
In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?
Market concentration is really the underlying problem. Microsoft should never have been allowed to buy GitHub. Microsoft Windows should have long been split into a separate company to Microsoft Office etc. If there wasn't this one gigantic business, then whichever smaller business made Teams would have a much more equal footing with other competitors, as they would not be at an unfair advantage for integration into other currently-Microsoft-owned products as well as the aggressive bundling Microsoft does with Teams.
The number of anti-Microsoft people that still use Github is astounding to me, and then just blame Microsoft for buying it.
At some point, if people want an alternative to Github, perhaps it starts with people not using Github and switching to alternatives.
Honestly, it would seem people like market concentration. I don't think people like having to use multiple repository management websites. However, I do wish it was centralization in experience over a federated system, rather than what we have noe. e.g. a "source control browser" that normalizes github, bitbucket, sourceforce, sourcehut, etc. into a single seamless interface.
But even that doesn't seem to be high on anyone's list.
> "The number of anti-Microsoft people that still use Github is astounding to me, and then just blame Microsoft for buying it."
Voting with your wallet (or with your attention & time for free things) makes sense if there's an alternative you can choose that's as good as the one from the company you dislike, or if you consider the impact on you of any deficits in the alternative to be less important than sending a message by voting with your wallet/time.
But it's completely understandable, and very common, for people to be in a situation that while they want to boycott a company/product because of how they act in some way (from software UI decisions to using child labour in sweatshops to...) but are faced with the choice between using/buying one of their products or suffering from what they consider to be a significantly worse and/or more expensive product.
And if you wish that one or both of Microsoft selling / giving away Github, or MS changing how they run Github, would happen, then why not publicly express blame in the hope that enough similar complaints build pressure, regardless of whether you're avoiding it or feeling you need to use it?
(Personally I don't feel I use Github enough to be a useful voice on how MS have handled it since the acquisition, but I feel like many people have expressed being pleasantly surprised that they've broadly let Github be Github, at least compared to worst-case fears of how much they might try to make it more Microsofty.)
Network effect. Especially for open source. The thinking is basically that GitHub is where developers find your project so if you don’t use GitHub you won’t find developers.
I think this ignores just how much better GitHub is compared to its competitors — at least from my experience of using bitbucket at work. GitHub rightfully should have more market share.
I'm not sure that's so obvious these days at least. The era of tech mega corps just being able to buy up all the competition seems to be mostly over(ish) for now (.e.g Figma, ARM, Broadcom/Qualcomm, Visa/Plaid)
Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams. That's actively harming customers, because they didn't get the choice to pay less and only buy what they wanted (which is just Office).
Once customers bought Office+Teams the cost of using Teams is 0, because they paid for it. How can competitors make a cheaper product then? You can't get cheaper than that! Even if someone wanted to use your product they most likely would still have to pay for Teams by buying Office.
> Microsoft forced anyone wanting to buy the Office suite to also buy Teams
True, but that also applies to every other single app and service that they are bundling with the subscription. I only want Excel but I'm also forced to pay for PowerPoint. And how deep should we go? Should they be forced to turn Edge into a paid product you have to buy separately? They crippled if not outright killed the consumer anti-virus industry by starting to bundle Windows Defender/(whatever it's called)? That certainly wasn't fair to McAfee/Norton/Kaspersky/(any other shovel ware provider) but did it hurt consumers? One might argue this would also apply to [File] Explorer and every other basic app.
How is the situation with Teams at all different and where exactly do we draw the line?
When it's a separate application I think the line has already been drawn.
I don't think you should have to turn Edge into a paid product similar to how I don't think grocery stores should be forced to charge you if you use a shopping cart. If Microsoft wants to include Windows Defender for free but if they're increasing the cost of a Windows License to accommodate that development effort then it's not ok.
Microsoft can offer you a volume discount for buying say Excel + Word + X but bundling is anti-competitve (see every complaint about TV bundles ever).
But bundling exists everywhere. Why is Microsoft the only offender?
Like you pointed out with cable, if I want just Disney Kids on cable, I need to buy all of Disney's channels, including ABC, etc. This is because that's how the cable provider has to buy it from the networks.
Why aren't they being told they have to unbundled channels from each other? I can't pay per view sports games - they offer subscriptions that bundle the entire season. The NFL is the worst on this. Why can't I just pay a few bucks to watch one game?
It seems like if bundling Teams with Office is that big of a deal, then customers should stop using Office, and use a competitor, just like I avoid cable.
> But bundling exists everywhere. Why is Microsoft the only offender?
You can't regulate every offender at the exact same time. Who you go after and when is always a political decision. This is basically the claim everybody was making when Android was in anti-trust trouble and everybody was like "How can you go after Android when Apple has a walled garden" and now Apple is in a hot seat.
Look how long it took for TicketMaster/LiveNation to get into the hot seat. Yes, it's not really fair that people get to cause problems for so long before being punished but that's life and it doesn't mean you should give people a free pass since you can't go after them all at once.
> Why aren't they being told they have to unbundled channels from each other? I can't pay per view sports games - they offer subscriptions that bundle the entire season. The NFL is the worst on this. Why can't I just pay a few bucks to watch one game?
I wouldn't argue that Panthers v Patriots is a different application than Broncos v Buccaneers.
Although I think I was fairly clear in my other post that I think the cable bundling is anti-competitive.
> Why can't I just pay a few bucks to watch one game?
You could argue that preventing this is a positive bundling. e.g. the Cup final game doesn't exist without the first round games and quarter-finals, and the other league matches that you don't want to pay for. They need to be subsidised or the whole thing might not work or won't be as good.
But "you can't buy x without y" where x and y are in different markets is (ahem) a different ballgame.
> In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem?
If Microsoft start providing kickbacks and bribes to CTOs for choosing Microsoft, many competitors won’t be able to keep up. Is that Microsoft’s problem?
No, it’s our problem. We get to decide what they are allowed to do, whats fair and what isn’t.
MS could devote resources to making MS Teams more useful, but they don't have to, so they don't.
It's not competing with Slack on features and usability or fun. It's competing with Slack on "you get a chat app and hey, it's free (with office)" and that makes the board happy.
I dont disagree with that. Honestly, I think chat should just go away in favor of emails and meetings (and meeting minutes). I've had too much business knowledge disappear into the Slack or Teams void that I can never get back.
> In the story above, a competitor to Teams couldn't "keep up". Is that really Microsoft's problem? Should Microsoft have made Teams more useless, more expensive, or less integrated so that competitors that couldn't make their own cheaper or better version had a chance to keep getting customers?
Well, they should at very least make Teams interoperable like every other goddamn service should be - or be forced to do so.
As someone who uses both I still contend that Slack is superior. The messiness seems to come from too many channels being made and needs to be actively pruned by management and company practices around Slack need to be communicated to employees.
When I changed from a Slack-using employer to a MS Teams-using employer around 2 years ago, I found it impossible to argue that the usability of MS Teams was even close to the usability of Slack. Slack was significantly better in this regard.
MS Teams had better integration with some other MS services such as OneDrive. That's obviously going to be so, that's what it's for.
We use Slack for text comms and Teams for video meetings. Seems like a decent balance, Slack video calls seems very unpolished compared to the Teams video experience.
It's extremely easy to argue that Slack is much better than MSTeams, but now the market does not exist for anyone who wanted to make something better than Slack.
The issue is a ton of companies already had Office subscriptions. Versus Teams being an added cost, so its a no brainer to just go "Well why the heck do we need Slack if we are getting Teams at no additional cost?" and now any startup in said space is competing against Office proper, which is a losing battle and a lot of added requirements to get your product off the ground.
If I were Microsoft I'd reconsider bundling Loop, since it's going to disrupt tools like Notion. I mean, why would I bother using Notion, if I can just use Loop? : - )
Companies intentionally trying not to hurt their competitors can't really be described as anything else than a cartel (even if it's not explicit) that's almost invariably horrible for consumers (.e.g. telecom companies, banks, etc. in many countries).
Ideally you always want to see companies trying to run their competitors out of business by undercutting them and offering better products at lower prices. The issue when the playing field isn't level e.g. what MS is doing here is basically predatory pricing. But even then it's not exactly clear cut, e.g. did Uber running out many taxi companies out of business (or destroying their profit margins) was a net-negative or a net positive to consumers?
Net negative. Long term it's gonna be net negative due to lower competition, as now there are usually only 2 players in town. Inevitably they are going to raide prices for customers and reduce earnings for drivers
Compared to taxis? Well I guess it depends on where you live, but I wouldn't' generally agree.
It's also a highly commoditized market with little real barriers to entry (at least on the local level) and drivers/users can pretty much instantly switch to a different app so I think it will be reasonable hard for Uber/etc. to do that without someone undercutting them.
> due to lower competition
Still better than no competition and prices being set by a legal cartel (i.e. how taxis worked/work in many places)
> I think the real problem is that MS can cross-subsidize its Office bundles.
Wouldn't this apply to any company that sells more than one product or service? Amazon uses Aws margins to subsidize a bunch, including r&d. A lot of biotech companies use profits from one drug to subsidize bad sales in another trying to break into the market.
> Kill the competition, raise the price. G-MAFIA/FAANG playbook
This is a solid business strategy, but it also falls prey to entrants back into the market when the large player raises its prices.
Last time I checked, they also arbitrarily excluded Firefox, which works fine on other WebRTC platforms such as Google Hangouts or Zoom.
Furthermore, I have always needed a Microsoft account to join a Teams meeting, as they want to make sure you get sucked into their ecosystem.
Aside from that, resource consumption on Chromium is totally crazy. Zoom or Hangouts are fine, but Teams makes my old NUC overheat during simple audiocalls.
"Some browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, don't support Teams calls and meetings. Unfortunately, some important features won’t be available, including: Video, Audio, Desktop, window, and app sharing."
That's been within the last year I think - I too have been using Linux and Firefox for calls in Teams meetings from 2020 to last year when I had to move to the Teams Linux client (which they're deprecating, so having to move to Chrome or Edge).
Everyone I work with is constantly badmouthing Teams. It's buggy and flakey and they killed Linux support which my company actually made use of. Either way, it doesn't matter since it's bundled. Literally killed any chance of competition getting a fair shake at our usage.
Teams doesn't have to be better, they're just bundled.
The company I work for used Slack, we were happy, but higher ups were looking to cut costs and they noticed they had Teams for free, so guess what... bye bye Slack.
The customers I'm thinking of are in the public sector and quite non-technical, from us they learn that there are better options and realise that the tooling they have are causing them pain. Together with GDPR cases tightening things up on what software you can use I expect this to make a difference.
there's two kinds of teams calls. the kind attached to a meeting is hosted on an actual server and the one where you call someone directly is some p2p mess that is a lot less reliable (and doesn't work on those browsers).
I do too and I'm not sure what happens in your case but they do block Firefox _for calls_ arbitrarily (it's not that it doesn't work but that the moment it thinks you are on Firefox it refuses to try to work.
Do you maybe only do calls through Chrome? Or maybe you have a user agent spoofing extension (or similar) installed in Firefox?
It is (was?) much worse than that. Last time I was forced to attend a Teams meeting roughly a year ago I used Firefox. The UI greeted me with two grayed out toggles informing that neither video nor microphone are usable. Out of morbid curiosity I enabled the responsive tester mode which, amongst other things, allows you to temporarily set the user agent string. I looked up one for Edge, grabbed the first I could find, reloaded the page, and... it worked. Joined the call with full features.
You can not convince me Microsoft isn't an evil company.
Also Safari, for years it wasn't even possible to sign-into Teams (even to chat), let alone calls (all while apps like google meet had no trouble to provide both features).
I mean, on Windows with the official Teams, I see "Person is visibly talking, but there's no audio (and did not mute themselves accidentally)" multiple times a week. So, yeah, going from that baseline, that's surely "supported".
Eh Firefox doesn't work fine with at least Google Meet in my experience (which covers both Firefox on macOS aarch64 and Firefox on Linux amd64). It's alright in the beginning, but if Firefox has been open for a while, the out-going audio gets choppy and the recipients don't hear anything. Restarting Firefox fixes it, but this is enough of a problem for me to have Chrome installed on every computer where I may have to do a video call.
Firefox doesn't seem to be intentionally blocked by Teams in my experience (or at least not anymore?), but maybe it should be.
I haven't had that experience, but then when it comes to audio there can be so many e.g. device (hardware+various OS parts) specific issues that only some of the browsers might have workarounds for that it's quite viable (but AFIK not the norm, and not limited to works on Chrom but not Firefox, the other way around is possible too).
Either way it doesn't matter much because:
- jitsi meet even when they still was a small startup managed to provide high quality video calling on all browsers/platforms
- MS Teams has more then enough resource to make things work, they just don't want to (same for properly maintaining their Linux app, which given that it can be a local deploy of the web-app a very little other code could be a 1.5 person job (the +.5 person in case the first is sick)) and have a good reason not to (they have been pushing edge hard, including using inappropriate means like deceiving windows users into using it when they clearly signaled they want to use another browser)
You're right that when it comes to audio, there can be hardware + OS specific issues. But we're talking systems as different as aarch64 MacBook Pro running macOS with built-in mic and speakers on one hand a amd64 desktop running Ubuntu with a USB headset on the other hand both consistently exhibiting the exact same issue, but only in Firefox (not Chrome, not Discord, not TeamSpeak). My money's on that being a Firefox issue.
And the issue in Firefox across both those wildly different systems is present in Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and (I believe) Slack's Huddle.
Microsoft has the resources to make it work, sure, but I'm betting "making it work" here means fixing the issue in Firefox.
I've used Firefox on Linux to regularly attend multi-hour meetings for the last at least 5 years without issues from multiple devices and it has always worked smoothly for me. The only issue I have had is that in the last year sometimes the joining screen says that I have no camera and mic for a while (maybe 20s) before letting me join.
I regularly use Meet, Zoom and Jitsi on Firefox and Meet has been the only one that always just worked for me and my guests.
I am confused by this comment. Was your startup not affected by the previous 10+ years of Microsoft chat products? Examples: Office Communicator, Lync, and Skype for Business. I fail to see how Teams was the "nail in the coffin".
Because companies were already paying for it. Where I work now moved to Teams and they openly said it's not as good as Zoom, but we need to move because we're already paying for Office and so it doesn't make financial sense to pay for an additional duplicate service.
That seems to be the reason for a lot of services. Amazon/YouTube/Apple/etc. Music don't need to be better than Spotify, but just good enough that someone won't pay for a competitor. This limits the competitors potential revenue and helps keep them from growing into stronger competition.
Plus, you use your market incumbency to stifle competition in other ways (e.g., putting advertisements for Apple Music in settings).
Also you can just wear your customers down over time apparently. I wish I could make Apple Music's subscription nag screen go away for example, I have local music I sync to it iPod-style for when I'm travelling through areas with poor data reception and every single time I open the app it whinges at me that I'm not subscribed.
What will it take to make these companies realise I'm perfectly happy with my current music streaming service and I don't want theirs regardless of the price it's offered at? I find it very disrespectful as a user when software can't take 'no' for an answer; my 'no' isn't 'maybe if you wear me down with enough nag screens' it means 'no I'm not interested please go away'.
Unfortunately because you're not a customer, they'll never stop.
Often times they won't stop even if you are a customer as in the case of Microsoft insisting that I backup all my files to their OneDrive that came bundled with Office. I get constant nag notifications to "finish setting up backup" even though I have alternative backup solutions and only want to use OneDrive as an offsite storage, not as a sync system.
I would love to tell the software to "never bug me again", but instead we only have options of "Yes!" and "Not now, please bother me again".
Oh, Apple is way more forceful than that. I keep finding myself in the situation where I pause YouTube on my headphones, speak for a while with someone, click to unpause and instead of resuming on YouTube that starts Apple Music playing the same U2 album. I'm still refusing to set that damn thing up, much less have it be the default recipient of the play button.
To be fair, this is mostly due to Youtube and their very strict "no video playback when the app isn't open" policies. If you were using any other app, anything from Spotify to really niche audiobook apps, you wouldn't have that problem.
Hi. I use Spotify in a web browser (at the office), on Linux (at home), and Android (mobile). To me, the Spotify UI has barely changed in 3 years.
You wrote:
> The product has gone to hell
Can you provide some specifics? To be clear, I am not defending Spotify. One big thing that is lacking: They need a plug-in system like modern web browsers. This will allow them to offload a lot of the UI innovation to tech savvy users. At the moment, only Spotify can make changes to the UI.
Close the client, try to get back to the track you paying right now... Pick a big list will it get you back to the track. There used to be a few ways to do this, now there is one (and it's ugly).
Is there a rhyme or reason to show or not show the tracks of an artist that I have liked/followed? Is that display consistent?
Why are we mixing liked artists and liked playlists now. Why is "like" some global list. Albums, songs, Artists are not the same thing. Globing these preferences together is like telling the waiter you like ice cream when he asks for your drink order, at breakfast on a Tuesday.
Why do I have to click into an album to find the publish date of a track? They have this whole right panel now with half assed track info and nothing useful.
The UI needs burned to the ground and an adult, who likes music needs to tell them what they need to show...
Anecdotally, Teams has a lot more penetration compared to Lync and co, since it kinda took over Slacks marketshare once that was an established thing to use.
It's why we need the full context before believing everything these "serial entrepreneurs" say whenever they cry "wah-wah #BIG_CORP killed my product", so we can be the judges if indeed big corp killed it, or if it was just a DOA product coasting on the pandemic IT spending boom fueled by zero interest rates, like the other thousands of unprofitable startups of the time that are now under.
Since the OP refused to provide any further details or answer any questions people sent towards him, I tend to believe it's the latter.
I think it's way more necessary to note Microsoft's aggressive use of market leader to stifle competition in previously unrelated industries, than to theoretically award anything to this founder in our court of opinion.
I was going to say...as long as you're happy with, say, the current state of Windows, you should have no problem with whatever user-hostile changes their cloud offerings make over time.
Yeah I'm not fully buying a startup lives or dies based on packaging deal of a long-embedded mega corp.
Unless his startup was VC funded and was already seriously penetrating enterprise and then couldn't get round C of financing because their 100+ person sales team couldn't make the high growth math make sense.
Otherwise usually your value prop can't be closely tied to *relatively* minor accounting decisions in the early days or you're already DOA when facing an entrenched opponent whose team can easily undercut you well beyond generic bundling deals (whether via strong existing relationships, making wider non-standard sweetheart deals that wouldn't be under regulatory scrutiny, and marketing budgets).
Don't get me wrong this can harm markets generally, and megacorps should be held to higher scrutiny, but usually it's not that simple.
My best guess is that the pandemic is what happened — if this story is true.
The bundling didn’t matter when no one needed a large amount of seats for an in-office workforce.
But during COVID and currently, there was no better pricing than what Microsoft is offering for all the things (ex. Azure + 0365 + GitHub).
The market shifted from Slack, Zoom and <insert anything else here> to Teams for large enterprises when they recognized that no one was coming back into the office.
Source: I bought enterprise software for a Fortune 20 during COVID until I launched my startup.
In Enterprise settings, I have never seen anything than MS bundling over 20 years for that many clients.
To my European eyes, Slack and Zoom have been always an US centric or Linux first small companies centric tools.
Zoom became a major business because of Covid and Slack benfited majorly. Neither were powerhouses like Microsoft before then.
Whether a small European startup would have won out locally without Microsofts market position + price advantage idk. But without details I'm not sure the financial decision making of a Fortune 20 matters in this conversation which was part of my point.
Once your sales team is competing on price vs Microsoft it's basically over for young companies. Your value prop has to be much more than that until you're a mature business.
I have first hand seen Teams eat a whole bunch of better product's lunches. Overnight Meet Slack Zoom all got poopoo'd by finance because the company was already paying for MS Office
Technically Netspace wasnt a startup, they IPOd early and were bought by AOL for 4 billion in 98. They were real large scale contenders where such a dynamic could really be do or die.
There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.
Teams was the first tool from Microsoft on this space that was "good enough". The tools you mentioned were mostly for calls and instant messaging, not so strong on collaboration. With Teams Microsoft is really building a collaboration platform. They would like work to take place inside the Teams app.
The difference is that no one was using those. Since companies already pay for office and Teams is bundled, managements are forcing workforce to use it.
All of those products were actually rather difficult to implement, to the point that they were job creators. It's honestly a case study for saas dominance: some ornery cludgery dying to 'it is a website'
I don't think it's end users asking for it though. I haven't met anyone who likes it. Seems to me that it is more of a "good enough for the cattle" decision by the IT department.
for anyone that has been spared, teams is the kind of product where you have to make an appointment for an ad-hoc meeting, or you'll be stuck in some unreliable p2p skype call that doesn't work on anything but chrome or edge.
I know that a lot of companies (I’ve worked for and colleagues worked for) were asking Microsoft for an all-in-one solution like slack that would integrate with their office and share point systems. They didn’t like that Microsoft had similar products but as different apps.
It is an unfortunate state of the world is that those can use unethical moves to quickly crush others will live to fight another day. By the time the law catches up, they have made their billions.
Is Microsoft making billions from Teams? I assume they only made it to enhance the value of their office suite/subscription.
It's a bit like saying that that them bundling PowerPoint together with their other apps is unfair towards any startup potentially wanting to enter that market. Which very well might be true but what's so special about Teams? MS and other companies have been bundling apps together since forever...
As a product manager myself, it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product. And I mean free as in if you are already paying for a subscription, and it gets added without aditional cost. I have worked at companies that payed for either Google Workspace or Office 365, and they also payed for Slack.
> it means that the value that people got from your app, was not enough to fight a free product
The problem you have is that the people making the finance decisions are often far-removed from the ones making value-based decisions.
The ones making the decision from a finance-perspective look at the offering from Microsoft, realise that it does video and chat for free (well, they're paying for O365 anyway) and that's it.
They don't care (or know!) that it's a resource hog, buggy etc. The value from the OP's product would not even be a consideration even if it was 100x "better" (use your own definition of "better" here!)
So I think it's unfair to use that comparison in this case
That’s how monopolies get formed, make it unsustainable for competition to exist, and then jack up prices when they all die.
That lower cost people pay upfront thanks to monopolies, is then drained back with interest, using higher prices, reduction in social mobility (of new founders/startups), reduction in innovation & increase in rent-seeking behaviour.
Breaking up monopolies has been long overdue, it’s a good thing its starting now.
You can choose to also use slack, or the OP app, if you think the beneffit you get by using the app is greater than the value of paying for it. Nobody is preventing you. Since MS included it for free, is not like you can not pay for the other app because you used the money to pay for teams. I personally don't see the value on slack, but like I said before, I have worked at companies where we had both, office/slack or gw/slack.
Yeah but nobody minded not having to pay for web browsers, file manager, antivirus software and bunch of other stuff.
Companies have been bundling their different software products together since almost forever and while there are some disadvantages arguable this has benefited consumers overall. At least I wouldn't be too glad about having to buy separate licenses (or pay separate subscriptions) for Excel, Word and PowerPoint (or any other product bundle like Jetbrains IDEs for every language etc. etc.).
Most people would also not rather get a non-functional barebones OS whenever they get a new PC and have to chose and install all the basic apps themselves.
I worked in a company that also sold a collab solution and we had technical champions all over the place that 1000% agreed that our product was better than Teams in every single metric, including performance, UX and productivity. Yet they couldn't secure a budget since the higher-ups knew they got Teams for free in their E5 license.
So they couldn't make a good case for the value of paying for that product vs using the free one. You know how many products die because people don't see the value?
I don't want it to look like I'm picking on you here (see my other comment above) but that's a naieve take on things.
Not sure you realise but in the corporate world it's about politics and money. People (above entry-level staff) do things to look good to their boss. That's it! And saving money is a great way of getting promoted: "Look boss, I just saved us $500k a year in license fees!".
Saving $X per year using a "free" tool from Microsoft will always trump anything you pay for especially if you are all in on Azure, O365 already. It's a no-brainer.
Not only that, once the decision is made, it will likely never be changed until the higher-up that made the decision moves on, quits, or is fired, no matter how wrong or bad the decision was (well, within reason, of course!)
I'd love it to be as simple as making a good case for the competition, and I've had to make that case many times over the years, but the reality is that a bundled product from Microsoft will win in a place that uses other Microsoft stuff, vs a paid product thats 100x better, faster, stronger, whatever.
Maybe an unpopular statement but I don't think Jira is that bad by itself. It's just a very flexible and configurable system which ultimately ends up reflecting structure and complexity of the host organisation.
is it actually free? or are we collectively paying for it by allowing the big business to gain control of an otherwise competitive market and jack up prices
individuals are not pricing that in. coordination is needed. that's why we regulate the market
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but this seems to more-or-less read as,
"As a product manager myself, I believe that the use of an advantageous market position to strengthen vertical integration is a reasonable practice, so long as the bundle cost of the final product to the consumer remains the same."
The problem with this, and the reason we we anti monopoly laws in general, is that this practice can be self-reinforcing, and allows for the capture of an entire market, extinguishing all competition. This then allows pricing for the good on offer to be set at whatever arbitrary price the monopoly deems reasonable.
My company switched half the development from Gitlab to Github after many years of being happy customers because they bundle Github pricing also with the rest.
I'm not even talking about azure and the anti-competitive shit they do there. Teams is but a drop in the ocean.
Microsoft Teams inclusion did not kill your product.
If a single customer dropped you because he now has Teams for free your product was a failure for that customer anyway and he just suddenly realized you offered him no value.
Just look at https://taskulu.com/ and tell me how Teams even competes with you. Your real competition was Jira and customers dropped you because Jira was a superior product and integration with Teams gave them everything you offered and a chat application separate from project management is an all around better option as there is a single chat for all employees, regardless of them using the project management tools.
> This move by the EU is good, but too little too late
Not to say damage didn't occur or that MSFT has a good track record of adhering to rulings, but it's potentially not too late for those in the future who could benefit.
I mean, if someone is physically harmed it is also too late, but still the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.
> the law has the perpetrator pay potentially huge amounts or for the rest of their lives.
As long as the law already existed
Either a law is inherently useful, or it is not. No need to cry about abuses in the 1800 regarding laws being passed today. The proposal is to fix a situational problem, not a physical one.
> On the other side of the ocean bundling office and teams
So is bundling office and PowerPoint which killed a massive number of presentation apps before they were even born. How is this particularly different? Should bundling any apps/sofware/services together be illegal? Should that only apply to specific companies?
The US is too invested (literally) in Big Tech right now, as it gives them a geopolitical advantage. That's why they have not broken up anything for real lately. But this feed-the-giant policy is already, though slowly, starting to crack. Look at how Congress is caught by the balls by Microsoft (“The US government’s dependence on Microsoft poses a serious threat to US national security,” says US senator Ron Wyden. [1]), and yet they cannot do anything about it because they have no alternative; a self-inflicted wound from decades of inaction.
Like the other comment here, it's ironic that it is the EU pulling from the market/capitalism playbook now.
What was the product? How did teams bundle kill your growth? Office already bundled Skype and teams was a natural progression for Microsoft in response to slacks and zooms growth in taking Skypes market share. I don’t think Microsoft is innocent in this, but still think it made sense from a business point and from what companies wanted from Microsoft.
I am amazed the EU is being more capitalistic and breaking up monopolies. WE should be doing that. This is how capitalism thrives. Break up large companies in different markets. Also break up Amazon and AWS already.
Your idea is flawed. If you split off AWS from Amazon, you have TWO monopolies. That's a useless move. What you need to do is split it down the middle: create Amazon 1 and Amazon 2 each with half the people, hardware, and 100% of the IP.
Obviously not him, but it is trivial to find out. His profile links to his current company, which has his real name, which Google links to https://taskulu.com/ unless he has another startup doing communications.
That doesn't look like a failed startup to me since it's still active and the poster has several startups under his belt seemingly being a "serial founder" so I was curious to know which of his startups was the one that he claims got killed by Teams to see if it holds water.
Basically, users got a good enough product at no additional charge, greatly reduced costs and operational overhead, and you want the government to force users to pay more?
The exchange rate used to get to the $236 amount is the "official" exchange rate stated by the government which even the government itself doesn't use. 10 million rials is $20.28 based on the real exchange rate used by literally everyone inside the country (see bonbast.com for the real rates - also, as an aside, "bonbast" means deadend in Farsi, which aptly describes the current economical situation in Iran).
For context, the minimum wage is $152 per month (around 75,182,000 rials).
The economy has gone to shit in the past 10 years. The minimum wage was around $425/month, or $2.4/hour back then, compared to $0.86/hour now.
The Rail has lost much of its value since then but the salaries haven't increased enough to cover the brutal inflation, resulting in extreme poverty for the majority of the population and situations like the one explained in the article.
And to top it off, disabling auto recharge doesn't prevent Twilio from charging your account. They won't charge your card but they won't stop processing requests when your balance reaches 0. We were just hit with toll fraud and even though auto recharge was disabled, they continued processing requests until our balance reached NEGATIVE 4,000 USD and then suspended the account. We received to emails in total:
1. Your balance is running low at -65 USD
2. (30 seconds later) your account is suspended, I checked the account an hour later when I saw this email and the balance was -4,000 USD
I asked support why they continued charging our account even with auto recharge disabled, but they just ignore the question.
Support says it's our fault, asks us not to dispute the charge (although there has been no charge yet as we disabled auto recharge), and said it will take 10 days for finance to issue a partial refund (that was 24 days ago).
I have some similar experiences. Especially with people saying "let me do what I love" or "give me a position where I can learn new things".
People like variety - the initial love doesn't last long. After a few weeks/months it gets boring and repetitive. Learning the shiny new tech is only fun until you you've figured out how it works, but the project doesn't end there and you have to deliver a product in the end. But for most people who exclusively want the "position where they can learn new things" fixing the bugs and doing the finishing touches is no longer fun once they've figured out how the underlying tech works - they leave for the next position where they can learn another shiny new tech and you're left with a half-finished project (usually with subpar code quality because this was the first project they did using the new tech).
But this is my personality. Given repetitive work I become depressed quite quickly. I say this as a 40 yo who understands themselves well. Yes I can struggle through, but this career has brought me to the brink of suicide on two occasions. Working to the grind of an agile development cycle is poison to me, it drains all color from the world. I'd rather break my bones. Where is the space for people of my color? Who dry up and die if asked to write boiler plate crud code and unit tests for fizz buzz UI elements.
Unless I'm solving a problem that's genuinely intellectualy stimulating then I have 0 interest in coding.
Most of us hide the misery because we know that the only outcome of airing it is dismissal either in the short or the long term.
There is no role for us in this career but having sunk so much time into it we have no other option but to keep on going.
You have to do your own thing ... usually that's bad advice but for people with the temperament you describe I think it's reasonable.
Also a lot depends on expectations and finding good partners. In a previous job I worked with another guy as a team. I would start projects and get an MVP out and delivering value - then move on to the next thing. He would go through and essentially rewrite them to be high quality, solidly engineered products, well integrated with the rest of the stack.
We both got to do what we enjoyed and were good at: I am very fast at breaking new ground and delivering new value, and find engineering a bit boring. He was very good at improving existing systems, but too slow and plodding to try out new ideas effectively.
i have the unmet rambling dreams of the first person, and the anxiety-driven perfectionism and revulsion to poorly written code of the second person... so i'm unhappy thinking about unfulfilled ideas, unhappy writing new programs, and unhappy fixing old programs.
"i can only do so much and of course it's never enough"
i want the perfect programming language, the perfect gui library api and theme, the perfect program, the perfect ide... and i can't accomplish a single one
and of course C++ is an all-devouring Cthulhic monster that does everything but poorly, Rust has immature gui libraries and doesn't fully align with my values and desired features (I want linear typing, strong typedefs/subclasses of integer types, polymorphic variants/anonymous unions, prioritizing iterator generators over async), qt is basically legacy code and Qt Widgets is mostly unmaintained but difficult to fork (to build, create Windows installers, and convince Linux distributions to accept behavior-changing bug fixes), and my personal dream project (https://gitlab.com/exotracker/exotracker-cpp) is vaporware no matter how much i burn myself out making it (trying to both explore new ideas, and engineer them well, at the same time).
I don't think so, most teams never do the last 10% on any project ever. They pick the low hanging fruit with the first 80% and if they are thorough they might bring it up to 90%, but 100%? I've never seen such a software project.
> Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. The current version of TeX is 3.141592653; it was last updated in 2021.
Personally I love doing the finishing touches but I'm usually not allowed to because the feature or product is considered good enough. It's hard to find a job where everyone really care about quality.
For side projects, I think there is some value in not being concerned about finishing them. If you're doing them for enjoyment then they shouldn't feel like a job.
But I find defining exactly what done will be on a personal project helps a lot to get completed. I define features are the minimum necessary and once I reach those features I immediately switch to trying to release it. Releasing is always a lot of work so it's easy to put it off forever while constantly iterating on a product. But actually releasing gives a good feeling of accomplishment.
Here's a couple of thoughts. Sometimes not following through might not be about feelings or at least not directly. If you do a project to learn some new tech then the project is not about what it does but about how to do it. So make sure you pick side projects that you think need doing. Find a partner or a group to do the project with or create some way that you make yourself accountable for it's completion. Who are your projects for? If it's for yourself, then is it something you really want or maybe just an idea? If it's for somebody else or some group then create a connection to that group or some people so that you know who you're making it for and include them in the project. That way you have someone to deliver it to and to continue to support. Lastly, maybe it's a decision issue. Maybe you just never really completely decided to do it. How do you know when you've decided to do something?
When I get stuck on projects that are very meaningful to me, I chip away at the pieces I don't want to do and allow myself to take as long as I need to complete them.
When I get stuck on projects that are not so meaningful to me, I reduce scope.
IMO the Google vs Apple, Apple vs Epic Games and all other similar cases are secondary. My main issue with Apple is that it is violating user rights - the users, who owns the device - should have the freedom of doing any thing they want (including installing any app they want) with the device. It's not Apple's place to arbitrarily decide what I can or cannot do with my phone.
I think so too but I don't buy Apple in that case. I have spend < 10$ on apps from stores and it was mostly just a test for me. I don't like smartphones as software platforms at all, I think we could have done much better than what the market supplies but I have niche expectations the common companies cannot fulfill. That said, the casual users in my circle don't spend anything on apps either. That isn't a good solution as well, since the alternatives finance themselves via adds.
Before app stores, you could actually get real free software that didn't use customer data to finance themselves. Sustainable as a business? Perhaps not, but certainly an advantage to users.
I don't buy Apple either but its getting frustrating when they take the best talent to build the best chips. Good for them but what if the trend continues such that the alternatives are at a serious hardware disadvantage?
There is the danger that users aren't educated and would accept everything the app does. I'd say casual users want and expect some kind of protection.
Is that fine? If yes, I guess we'd need to make the "install anything" option sufficiently inaccessible to the regular user. Is that ok? In this case is Apple's Dev Program an acceptable solution?
I'm asking lots of questions, because I genuinely wouldn't know how to approach this. What this difficult is that I'm fine with the current state. I don't use my phone for hacking and I'm happy that someone else monitors apps, even if it means that I have to pay more or go through additional steps to run my own code.
Windows and MacOS have a different user base (I'd guess most non-tech users prefer mobile for personal use).
Android's big scary full screen warnings didn't seem to work, people allowed weather apps to read their messages. I was referring to this in my earlier message:
> There is the danger that users aren't educated and would accept everything the app does. I'd say casual users want and expect some kind of protection.
> It's not Apple's place to arbitrarily decide what I can or cannot do with my phone
This is a good way to kill Epic's fight.
If I want a hackable general-purpose computer, I can get one. I have one. The iPhone is not that. That's made clear at the time of purchase. It's a tradeoff between freedom and specific utility, and it delivers the latter in droves.
As a result, most Americans are fine with it. "Free software" is a great mantra from an important minority or Americans. But it's a minority nonetheless.
Big tech antitrust, on the other hand, is going mainstream. Epic's fight is riding that wave. Muddying it with an old and weaker argument is not helpful.
Then make the case. I think there should be general purpose computers. But not every computer need be one. There are advantages to a locked-down ecosystem.
> But not every computer need be one. There are advantages to a locked-down ecosystem.
I agree with it. But I think game consoles should be locked but smartphones shouldn't. Finally I predict that smartphones to be the Computer for citizen.
Not only are there Islamic/Arabic and Jewish themes, there are also Persian themes. Padishah in "The Padishah Emperor" comes from Persian and means king.
Not-so-funny thing is that the Betterstack dashboard is down but our status page hosted by Betterstack is up, and we can't access the dashboard to create an incident and let our customers know what's going on.
Edit: wording.