Android, DoubleClick, Google Maps (Where 2, ZipDash), Google Earth (Keyhole), and Google Docs (Writely, 2Web, Tonic, DocVerse, Quickoffice) were built of acquisitions, not new Google products. Chrome, too, in a sense (WebKit).

Thought experiment: what if Yahoo!, not Google, had acquired all those companies instead?

How are their other acquisitions doing?

I remember in the mid aughts, when I had been working exclusively with linux for some time, I started to see my peers, peers who wouldn't be caught dead with a windows laptop, carrying around os-x laptops.

Compared to the ThinkPad of the day, the macbooks were terrible pieces of hardware; they were obviously designed by people who believed in style over substance, and their keyboard was mush. But... OS-X? OS-X mostly worked, something that could not be said for windows or linux laptops, not without a whole lot of effort.

The turn around happened before.

Plus, while they are what they are now, you can't necessarily deny open-source contributions in the past. YUI is impressive in its scope, for one.

Intel and IBM come to mind.

Might not be the most glamorous turn around but compared to yahoo...

Microsoft is simply alone in its class as a large, pure-play, shrinkwrap software company. Adobe might come close.

IBM, Oracle, SAS, PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, PeopleSoft, and many other firms bundled software with at the very least consulting services. IBM, along with Sun, HP, Digital, and other vendors sold (or leased) both hardware and software, along with consulting services.

Smaller software companies have existed, but have been notoriously fickle.

Novell existed as a network services company, doing well for a while, but ultimately faltering.

EDS is probably the closest thing to a precursor to today's SaaS / XaaS companies, and was ultimately in the services business and bought by HP IIRC.

I've been looking at this question for nearly two decades, and the most substantive conclusion I've come to was that Microsoft was a unicorn, a lone star, a singleton. And yet everyone's tried to emulated them. Or at least did until Google came along and cracked a different market.

Microsoft have been trying to get out of this for quite some time. Back when I worked for a very large revolving credit transactions processor, the stated goal was to get into the online payments game (this nearly 20 years ago now). Microsoft Passport was among the products aimed at this effort, which ultimately failed, attributed by many at the time with the lack of trust any other business had at getting in bed with Microsoft standing on their revenue stream.

Windows (which also, up until now, included Surface, which contributed $853 million to the total in fiscal 2013)

Windows Server

Windows Azure

Office (client)

Xbox

SQL Server

System Center (client and server both, so includes Windows Intune)

SharePoint

Visual Studio

Dynamics (CRM and ERP)

Online Advertising (search and display both) Office 365

Client-access license (CAL) suites (formerly known as desktop access)

Enterprise Services (including consulting)

Enterprise communication business (Exchange plus Lync)

[http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-16-billion-dollar-bu...]

Not too bad, eh?

They also have exceptionally good technical execution on backbone infrastructure. I'm impressed by how good they are, I really am. As well as at not fucking up upgrades to software that runs on top of that.

But their understanding of, and attitudes toward, end users really, really, really stinks. Perhaps not massively worse than the rest of the industry, but certainly no better.

Is Yahoo a software company? They don't claim to be (I think it's currently a media company).