> I’m not sure how Microsoft has managed to escape market discipline for so long.

How would they? They are a monopoly, and partake in aggressive product bundling and price manipulation tactics. They juice their user numbers by enabling things in enterprise tenants by default.

If a product of theirs doesn't sell, they bundle it for "free" in the next tier up of license to drive adoption and upgrades. Case in point, the InTune suite (includes EntraID P2, Remote assistance, endpoint privilege management) will now be included in E5, and the price of E5 is going up (by $10/user/month, less than the now bundled features cost when bought separately). People didn't buy it otherwise, so now there's an incentive to move customers off E3 and into E5.

Now their customers are in a place where Microsoft can check boxes, even if the products aren't good, so there's little incentive to switch.

Try to price out Google Workspace (and also, an office license still because someone will need Excel), Identity, EDR, MDM for Windows, mac, mobile, slack, VoIP, DLP, etc. You won't come close to Microsoft's bundled pricing by piecing together the whole M365 stack yourself.

So yeah, they escape market discipline because they are the only choice. Their customers are fully captive.

Their customers largely aren't their users. Their customers are the purchasing departments at Dell, Lenovo, and other OEMs. Their customers are the purchasing departments at large enterprises who want to buy Excel. Their customers are the advertisers. The products where the customers and the users are the same people (Excel, MS flight simulator, etc.) tend to be pretty nice. The products where the customers aren't the users inevitably turn to shit.

Not really. It's just that the point you have to push people to get them to start pushing back on something tends to be quite high. And it's very different for different people on different topics.

In the past this wasn't such a big deal because businesses weren't so large or so frequently run by myopic sociopaths. Ebenezer Scrooge was running some small local business, not a globe spanning empire entangling itself with government and then imposing itself on everybody and everything.