With GitHub, TypeScript and VS code I'm probably using more Microsoft products than before.
Sure, the investment was quite sensible, although I don't think they can change it for their ambitions too much.
Microsofts conquest against open source was of course a wrong strategy of Balmer.
they are way better at buying and selling software than ideating and creating it.
successful microsoft products are acquisitions.
I think, up to a point, and especially in the US where antitrust is pretty lax, it's a very safe investment to just buy other already sucessful companies.
with enough money, you can fund your investments to strategically take down every mom and pop.
amazon can’t take on every consumer vertical simultaneously, but they used their funds to drive diapers.com into the red, because as a parent you’re scrwed either way and comparing food to diapers, will buy the cheaper diapers instead of the cheaper food.
amazon wanted diapers.com
diapers.com said, we’re good this isn’t a billion dollar enterprise, but it pays the bills.
amazon bought it after making sure they couldn’t actually use it to pay the bills.
cool, how much money have you paid to Microsoft to use those?
Except for Github (which they bought, by the way) probably not much. And github has some serious competitors (Gitlab which is just great and to a lesser extent, bitbucket).
They've been quite clear about this. The one platform/OS was Windows. The new platform/OS is Azure/Cloud. It's almost like saying Google doesn't make any revenues from search, only from selling ads.
So I see VS Code as a slight moat, also in its promulgation of dotnet-isms. So I think VS Code drives some revenue Microsofts way in a pretty diffuse but real way.
That pain existed under macos and linux as well, but to such a lower extent as you could do so much more locally.
While Jetbrains does it too, VSCode being strong guarantees it stays a viable path in the future.
MS Office is the real moat, as is Windows XP/7. Everyone use MS Office because Google Slides/Docs/Sheets is a silly contender to the MS Office suite. Windows XP/7 because that's what a huge percent of the human population using computers grew up on today, so they're most familiar with it. And let's be honest, that's not going away, even as MS enshittifies Windows 11, simply because no Linux build can apparently mirror the Windows XP/7 UI (for some reason, not even Mint) while Apple is hell-bent on doing its own thing on the sidelines.
The day MS breaks Office suite is the day Microsoft goes down, but that's unlikely because the current crop of devs at MS don't even know how to get started. Microsoft could literally not do anything and still make tons in revenue.
Windows 10/11 does a really bad job at emulating XP/7 UI. It is about as foreign to XP users as Debian or whatever.
I made a XP VM the other month to run some insane software I had to run at work.
I felt so much at home. It was so nice. Everything was awesome. The control panel was awesome. The distinct buttons were awesome. The start menu was awesome. The 'My computer' at desktop root was awesome.
All in muscle memory, still.
Then I am back out to 10 and can't figure out where my app shortcuts are without knowing their name or what of the 3 or 4 different control panels I am supposed to use.