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Comment by geeostation | Hacker News Reader

its strange to Microsoft still in the race after loosing web, search, mobile and much of the developer mindshare

I'll give you mobile, but how did it lose any of the others in your list? Edge + IE maintain about 25% of browser market share compared to under 10% for Firefox on desktop. Bing is somewhere around 30% of the US search market depending on whose stats you believe and generated $1.8B last year, and growing. And .NET + visual studio are still very popular in the large enterprise space. Azure (not in your list) is also doing quite well in the cloud space, taking market share away from AWS to get to about 20% last quarter.

If your measure of "losing" is "not #1" then everyone is a loser in at least one of your categories, especially Apple.

Does browser market-share really mean much in terms of market capitalization?

Windows is still the de-facto standard x86 and x64 OS, powering everything PC-like from home desktops and office desktops to industrial control PCs, kiosks, ATMs, cashier systems and so on. I don't see this changing in the next 20 years, unless Microsoft make a concentrated effort to completely break Windows.

Yep. Microsoft has a huge dominance in personal computers and office suits, two of the most profitable product lines of the past 25 years, and this does not look like changing anytime soon.

They are a fairly close 2nd in cloud computing, and growing faster than AWS.

And remember that Oracle is an enormous company just by focusing on enterprise, but MS is way larger just in enterprise. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc.

And even though they are a very distant second in search, that product alone produces more revenue than most companies can ever dream of. It is actually a huge financial success.

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