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I'm not sure I feel the same way, and I will probably be downvoted for it.

Microsoft's entire existence is largely based on incredibly aggressive, (perhaps) unethical behavior against its perceived rivals. FUD, threats of litigation and patent extortion, etc. Trying to destroy the entire open source movement. Why do they need forgiveness? They are a profit-seeking entity that has tried to crush many things I hold dear. Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do long ago. It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.

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> Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do long ago.

I like to imagine where would we be if Wintel never happened. Would we be running multi-core RISC machines running Unix-like OSs since the mid-90's? Would computers be completely different? Would we be running something inspired in Plan 9 or Smalltalk or Lisp Machines?

> It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.

It's because they were so successful we only got consumer-level 64-bit CPUs in 2003 and multi-core ones in 2004 and it took longer for those to become mainstream.

If you see what an Amiga could do in the mid-80's, what Atari was doing with Transputers, you realize Microsoft was not leading - Microsoft compatibility actually held us back.

I agree with the sentiment in the article because of an important point you mentioned:

> Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do

As DHH points out; and to a similar vein if we swap Google for Microsoft in your quote above, fragmenting the industry is the safest and best way to serve users. Google seems to have succeeded in it's goal to control the worlds information-- and whether you believe this or no; having 3 powerful entities competing with each other is much better than many small ones trying to dethrone a hostile winner.

Small startups will always try and innovate where they can, but there are now different inroads as a single leader can not always banish them.

I agree with you. I agree on the macro-scale. I do not want one company to have the ability to do the things you mentioned. I am sure Microsoft is doing much of this new initiative out of self-interest, but it is good for the community. I like vscode, they have an extremely easy to use && intuitive Azure interface and a massive amount of open courses and docs on how to use it, and tons of other code, docs, resources ect.

I don't want Amazon to be the only cloud provider.

I don't want google to be the only search engine.

I don't want os x/win to be the only 2 operating systems.

I don't want Apple to be the only vertically integrated handset maker.

I don't want a single option for payment/wallet

I don't want a single app store.

All these things are better addressed when there is competition, and the competition between several large players leaves room for smaller companies to enter and innovate.

This is key. It was funny, I was watching Adam Conover's "Election Special" this week, and the big point at the end it came down to was that partisanship was making us dumber. Largely, because of cognitive bias. And my first thought that is was true of our allegiances to tech companies, product stacks, etc. as well.

We need options, we need to be willing to find the good and bad in each company or product we use. And we need to put ourselves in a position where we can easily switch as advantageous.

The difference is, for all those things, there really is viable competition out there.

There's lots of cloud providers besides Amazon (including MS themselves).

There's several search engines besides Google (again including MS's Bing, plus DDG)

Apple isn't the only big handset maker. Samsung probably sells many more units which are arguably much better (they have much better screens for instance, plus SDcard slots). There's many, many more besides them too: Sony, Huawei, LG, etc, and countless models from each.

There's many options for payment besides ApplePay: Google has something, plus you can just use a regular debit or credit card or good ol' cash.

There's more than one app store: Apple has one and Google has one, and there's a few other non-Google Android ones too.

In all these cases, the alternatives aren't some tiny little niche player, they're huge. Apple sells a minority of smartphones today, though they make the most profit.

The big standout is OSes: good luck finding a job that doesn't force you to use Windows. If I want to avoid the big player in each of the other items in your list, it's pretty easy to do. I can easily go without ever using Google Search, or an iPhone, or ApplePay or the Apple app store. It's not that easy for me to avoid having to use Windows; that shuts me out of a LOT of jobs (almost all of them really). (Even worse if I want to avoid using either Windows or OSX. Good luck with that.)

I think you missed the point I was making: diversity of ecosystems is important. Microsoft provides diversity to many of the ecosystems above. Having 2-3 competitors is much better than a single one, and Microsoft has shown that they need to win developers by providing value to the community.

I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough because between Google, Win, OS X & numerous flavors of linux there are a lot of choices. There is also "the web" and Solaris & BSD as well. Google is peerless for search. Leaving aside email, apps & core other services like web infrastructure, there is no replacement for google. It is important to realize that not only is Google peerless, but that all search engines run PageRank. By that I mean, they copy pagerank by creating extremely similar algorithims and using all of the ideas google pioneered. No one has innovated in the search space except google. backlink totals is an utterly meaningless metric and authority/reputation are subjective.

Google has adjusted to their original thesis of course, however everyone else adjusts to google. If you are selling something in a market that speaks English, you want to be at the top of Google. That is it. SEO means google optimization. No one can be better at being google than google, but I would likek to see someone try and be better than them at search.

>I think we agree that diversity is good, I disagree that their is enough. OS's might be the only one I think is diversified enough

Here I completely disagree. In practice, there's only 2 PC OSes, the horribly broken and intrusive Win10 and the overpriced walled-garden OS X. Almost no one uses Linux on the desktop; even Linux fans have abandoned it from what I can tell, to my chagrin (they've all gone to Macs). If you're talking server-side, that's different and is really the only place where there's enough diversity IMO.

As for Google being peerless, DDG works fine for me for most things. For programming help, I use Google though. And everyone knows Google totally sucks for porn.... (Bing is the leader here!)

Otherwise, I do agree that diversity is good, but my point before is that there is reasonable diversity in most of those places. I don't feel any kind of compulsion to get an iPhone, for instance. Android works just fine for me and most people I know, and the iPhone users I know all seem to be deluded by Apple's marketing, and also people who really have no business buying the most expensive phone out there considering their finances.

Addendum: this isn't to say that I wouldn't welcome more diversity in many places. But it's not like people haven't tried: Microsoft still hasn't quite thrown in the towel with Windows Phone, but it sure never went far. Blackberry used to be a big thing, now it's basically dead. There were some other attempts, like FirefoxOS, Meego/Maemo, etc. which all flopped hard. The problem with a platform is that the things dependent on that platform become powerful, so people choose their platform based on what runs on it. If I want access to all the apps in the Google Play store, I need to run Android, not WinPhone, for instance. The same thing has hampered Linux-on-the-desktop adoption enormously (and not on webservers, since that's all standards-based and frequently uses additional stuff like PHP and MySQL which run great on Linux).

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