Abuse of the law to buy a competitor, form a monopoly, and then price fix an entire market. It sounds cute when you say "hug of death" almost like they didn't intentionally seek out this precise outcome.
> It was also available literally everywhere
Funny how that was literally the first thing to get the axe. I guess some "hugs" are like that, huh?
> Rest in peace!
Justice for Skype!
On Hacker News of all places what I think gets lost in the monopoly conversation is that it's not just the consumer market you need to pay attention it's the _labor_ market. I always assumed that would more be more readily apparent here. I am often surprised to find out it is not.
In a corporate setting? "We already have Microsoft accounts for all of our users, do you want us to maintain a separate user list? No way. Teams may be bad, but it's not bad enough to warrant that."
What is better than Teams? I don't love Teams, but it's light years beyond what Zoom provides, and the services that Amazon and Google offer were pretty garbage last time I checked.
I also really like Slacks huddles and Discord VC's (we treated them like conference rooms).
They are working hard now on the Extinguish phase. Linux was set back by systemd and wayland. And what's left of it is available as WSL.
So no, there was never a monopoly, the market share was vastly too low to “price fix an entire market,” and “the hug of death” certainly doesn’t mean making a product better and more used and only shuttering it after 14 years when it’s been vastly outclassed (Skype usage sits at around 1%, and Zoom completely slaughtered it). Most tech fails much quicker.
