Microsoft is the most diversified tech company of the top tech companies. They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools.

> if you're a Linux or Mac developer who never touches a single Microsoft product, and pays no heed to whatever Microsoft is talking about or doing, you're probably perfectly fine doing that.

The interesting thing now is that you can be a Linux or Mac developer and actually be able to use many Microsoft products. VS code is my favorite editor or any platform (actually I use it more on Linux than on Windows). I'm working on a project right now in .NET that will run as well on a Raspberry Pi as it does on Windows.

I think that the market grown so significantly that no company is ever going to have the tech leadership that Microsoft had in the 90's and early 2000's. But I think Microsoft is positioning themselves to great things after fumbling though the last 5-10 years.

"They have cloud, software, hardware, game consoles, search engine, development tools."

IBM did exactly the same thing.

And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows. They make money on exactly the same things they made money on 20 years ago, but the pie is so much bigger they make a lot more of it.

Depends. In corporate environments, which is still a massive market, they are the central vendor. At it seems they're actually making even more headway there. Microsoft hasn't really lost influence, it's just the market is so much bigger now that influence isn't total. And they're making in-roads in those other markets.

Microsoft missed out on mobile but that's a new market rather than a loss of their existing market. And now that's a growth opportunity for them.

> IBM did exactly the same thing.

I think you're point is to say that Microsoft is the new IBM but I don't think that follows. IBM has always been IBM even when they owned much more of the market. Even Microsoft hated working with them.

> And FWIW, the overwhelming bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from enterprise sales of Office and Windows.

Less than 50% now (see my other comment).

Most of their dysfunction seems to be driven by monetizing legacy products, but there was a time when they didn't have any legacy products.

And about the overwhelming bulk of their revenue veing from the same sources as 20 years ago, it seems their operating revenue is 60% cloud services, admittedly a lot of that is office 365 but let's not forget azure revenue which although lumped together in statements must be huge.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/azure-revenue-continues-to...

Must be nice having 64% growth be a worrying number.

Microsoft went all in marketing Azure, this isn't too surprising to me. They don't mess around when they launch products/services. Their marketing to corporate CTO/CIOs is a well tuned machine.

They even tried to hit up startup devs which didn't go over as well.

I think Amazon is probably far more diversified than Microsoft. Unless they are so diversified that they aren't even considered a "tech" company anymore.

And none of those make significant amounts of profit besides cloud, Office, and Windows

Bing and gaming alone makes almost as much as Windows. Devices and LinkedIn makes half as much as Windows and a 1/3 the revenue of Office. These aren't peanuts.

Anyone can sell $1.00 for $0.95 as long as they have a means of getting money from other sources.

i see what you did there

I think your description of them on the development front is accurate. But I think that’s on purpose. With Azure they don’t really care if we use .Net anymore because that’s not what they need us to do to sell us cloud. Node very quickly became a first class citizen in Azure for instance, integrating well with stuff like application insights and other Azure DevOps features. Sure we could take our Node apps to AWS, but that doesn’t really make sense when we’re already buying into the Microsoft cloud with Office365.

I’m sure tech-heavy companies can afford to ignore Microsoft, but the public sector of Europe is a billion dollar industry for tech companies and Microsoft owns it.

As to Azure cloud, they are okay and probably worth it in some circles. I think AD and O365 in Azure are absolutely worth it. I'm, however, unsure if Azure as a whole is as worth it. It looks like k8s is winning the core infrastructure war and allows you to do things wherever you want. And while I think Azure Storage services are absolutely great to work with compared to competing cloud offerings, they are all a bit of a lock in.

Best to stay as close to open and portable as possible, or go all in on a single cloud. Everyone's use case is different.

Microsoft is a clear number two in marketshare, you really cant discount how much of enterprise america would rather do business with Microsoft than other vendors. https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/CIS_Q119.j...

I think that "technology" especially languages and toolkits and such are super overrated. They're just a means to an end. The functionality contained in the executable in what matters to the actual end-user, not the technology or the platform. And all this is ofcourse super obvious and many companies get this. And yet I don't think any company comes close to providing the level of backwards compatibility and platform stability of Windows. Just a couple of months ago, one of our older WinXP PCs shit the bed, and we replaced it with a W10 box. I was kinda half-expecting the software compatibility for 20 year old software to be a complete shitshow, but we ran the setup and everything just worked out of the box. Thats just once anecdote of course, and there is nothing technical that prevents other platforms from doing the same, except that people don't want to work on boring tasks like keeping stuff working and ticking along, because it doesn't challenge them. But I think that is the secret sauce that makes them the big bucks.

You can? I assume you don't work in Global2000 Enterprise IT?