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Leo and the Panel seem to have misread the Microsoft anti trust argument.
It is about including Teams in Microsoft 365. Microsoft pulled it out of new M365 deals and offered existing EU customers a reduced monthly payment, if they didn’t want Teams. But they only reduced it by 5€, not the 10€ that Slack would cost…
On the one hand they are correct, but that MS have reduced it by how much they feel it is worth to them, as opposed to how much the competition costs seems to be the sticking point.
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Always good to hear Cathy Gellis, but one point, a strong case can be made that Chevron deference can lead to more not less regulatory uncertainty. Take Net Neutrality for example, over different administrations we have gone from the FCC likes it but can’t do it, finds a way to do it, gets rid of it and now wants to institute it again. A system with less judicial deference to agencies might limit their ability to flip flop.
Regarding EU vs US approaches to competition. If the EU was effectively maintaining a more competitive market shouldn’t more internationally competitive tech companies have emerged there?
I know that you are trying to make a different point, but I would argue that the issue here is that this should be a law passed by Congress and not originate with the FCC.
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I’m not sure about the whole of Europe, but Germany, where I live, has always prided itself and encouraged “Der Mittelstand” (medium sized businesses). I work for a medium sized chemical company, yet you probably use some of our products on a daily basis - it provides the basis materials for whitening reading paper, for coating it to be smooth and more resilient to water, it provides the component in shampoo that helps it make hair smooth, for example - yet, even though it sells internationally and is expanding internationally as well, it is a small, family run business in the second generation and is not on the stock exchange. Our founder, 85, still comes into the office on a daily basis and talks to the chemists about their product development and checks up on the sales visits to customers, although his children now run the business itself.
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Regarding Ryans’ discussion on Snapdragon and Intel and that Intel still has the server and desktop business, where “power consumption doesn’t matter”, I do beg to differ.
During COVID and now with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have seen energy prices sky-rocket. Our KwH went from under 20c to nearly 50c at the peak, although it is now back to around 30c. It is one of the reasons why I switched from an AMD Ryzen 7 desktop PC to an Apple Mac mini M1, which produces about the same performance (slightly better in some circumstances, Luminar “feels” faster on the Mac than on the Ryzen 7 desktop) for the apps I use, but uses a fraction of the power, the cost of the Mac paid for itself within a year, due to the reduction in used electricity.
The same is happening in server rooms and data centers, the latter especially, companies are looking for the most dense performance per Watt they can get, the amount of energy available is not infinite, but they need more and more performance from the energy available, so the more economical those server processors are, the more they can do for the same amount of energy and the same cost per Watt, just they are doing much more with it.
It is this Laissez-Faire attitude of Intel’s towards energy consumption that caused Apple and Microsoft to look elsewhere for solutions to their laptop problems in the first place, and now server manufacturers are doing the same, they can’t just build more data centers and hope more electricity will be available, they have to tightly budget what they can do with the energy available, so the more economical (performance per Watt) a processor can be, the more attractive it is for those designing new data centers or upgrading old ones. Especially as more and more of that power budget has to be given over to Tensor processors, at best, or GPUs, at worst.
Also, I have a 2016 HP Spectre X360 Core i5 ultrabook, it still gets over 6 hours of battery life, when it was new, I could just scrape through an 8 hour business day on it, without needing to take a charger with me - I’d have to put it in stand-by over lunch, for example, but the actual 8 hours of work were achievable. The new, “better” laptops we get at the moment are lucky to get between 4-5 hours work done on new batteries - and it is essentially the same workload that I was doing back then (Office, email, remote desktop, with the odd Teams call now added to the workload, as opposed to Skype back then).
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I work in the voluntary sector in the UK and deal with many in local government and the National Health Service. Teams is the de facto standard only because it is (or was till recently) bundled in MS365. When demand for video calls shot up during the pandemic Teams was awful but was used as it was “already included” and cost users nothing extra. Teams is now much better than it was - good enough for me, anyway - but it would never have gained traction if MS has not used their dominant MS365 market position to lever Teams into use.
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