Microsoft rewarded for security failures with another US Government contract

Instead, the government should fund competition to lower prices. It seems like Office is still the default for everyone and it’s not really possible for anyone to hire thousands of engineers for a decade or two to compete with them. There’s no functioning competition for a product like this.

Google, Apple, and various, other open and closed sourced alternatives exist for nearly everything in Office. Many of them have been under development for decades by companies that are similar in magnitude to Microsoft.

Lack of competition is definitely a problem in the pricing of some things, but I don’t think this is one of them, people just prefer what Microsoft offers and are willing to pay for it.

In a narrow view, this is true, but from a wider viewpoint Microsoft has few competitors in the "one stop shop for your big business needs" sense.

Google has made some progress here, but doesn't seem interested in a bunch of important spaces (e.g. they have Docs, but don't have anything like Active Directory or Sharepoint that I know of).

Microsoft is also often the default vendor, since virtually every big company has contracts with them for Windows and Office (at least) already.

> but from a wider viewpoint Microsoft has few competitors in the "one stop shop for your big business needs" sense.

This is the big thing that keeps Microsoft lock-in alive. No where else are you going to get: Full office suite, both online & desktop apps, hosted exchange/email, Identity w/ MFA & Conditional Access, EDR, file storage, chat/collab, AI chatbot w/ your Microsoft data as context, and MDM all for $22/user/month (if you have less than 300 users, otherwise you're looking in the range of $35-$50/user/month which is still dirt cheap for what you get). Not to mention all the data protection (purview)/e-discovery stuff also included.

Google Workspace is the next best thing, and doesn't offer all of what MS does for the price.

MS (365) is the only game in town where you can get everything you need for 1 price/subscription.

Microsoft's services are rarely the best at anything, but they are all "good enough", well integrated and will check any and all compliance/regulatory checkboxes you want them to check, and you can generally hammer any of their offerings into whatever you want. Similar to Windows in a way, it wasn't the best at anything in particular, but had everything you needed, and could be made to do whatever with some effort with the benefit of integration into all of MS's enterprisey stuff by default.