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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

It does look pretty tragic at this point. But it’s worth noting that every tech business so far was talked about as if it’s taken over the world, forever, and without 5-10-20 years they were overtaken. IBM, Intel, Microsoft.

I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.

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I'd argue that they tend not to lose on their home turf, but rather the ground moves under them. Google only increased it's hold in the web as Facebook took the new territory of social media.

Likewise Microsoft still is a massive player in enterprise software even as AWS became a virtual synonym for cloud computing.

Azure actually has significant market share.

An interesting thing I have noticed is that Amazon has made staggeringly little progress at user facing SaaS -- think salesforce.com. I went to an AWS conference years ago and the gap between the speaker's enthusiasm for zocalo and the crowd that couldn't care less (e.g. The crowd that was pumped for IAM and T2 instances) was striking.

Microsoft is overtaken by who exactly?

In desktop & laptop Windows still holds a 87% market share.

Back then Windows is >90% of all consumer computing devices. Right now it's 87% of just desktop & laptop.

I don't think it's a fair comparison. Microsoft still dominates the exact same market they did before (desktop & laptop), with roughly the same market share. What you're describing is a new market bundled with the old market.

"Consumer computing devices" is such a vague market. If you study markets at such a big scope something like Texas Instruments wouldn't even make a blip while if you're paying more careful attention you'll find they absolutely dominate the scientific calculator market.

Microsoft are an absolute beast, their revenue is diversified across so many areas in b2c and b2b, and they are selling real products / services that solve problems that people actually need and pay for. Contrast that with fb/google who are selling ad space for others to buy to fill with actual products, it’s clear who’s driving real value.

I would bet that MS will outlast all the other tech giants by a long way.

I'm by no means Google's biggest fan but this definitely misrepresents things it offers such as gsuite

Most orgs switch to MS once they get over a few hundred users. G suite has 6 million paying customers, Microsoft office has over a billion users.

I'd say that still provides value to those that aren't over a few hundred users.

(edit/sidenote: along with SSO - my org has thousands of users.)

So another large company will take them over. We need to legislate this now to avoid this endless cycle

Why?

Because monocultures are intrensically unhealthy. Ironically though they're very profitable for as long as they last.

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