> and they’re desperately trying not to be microsoft, even though that’s what they mostly are.

Mostly because Microsoft became more like Google in recent years. :P

You mean old Google?

They're doing some seriously good things in the dev space.

They are embracing a lot of technologies because that is how they gain market share and then extinguish them.

and spamming users with ads left and right, Google style, too

Hmm. In Chromium Edge, my new default browser, AFAIK the UO plugin will still work perfectly unlike in Chrome, meaning I rarely if ever see any ads.

The closest thing to an ad in VSCode or for that matter Terminal would be .. I guess hints at ease of Azure cloud services? Never found it intrusive myself, and I do AWS.

It's hard to understand your message, but... ads in VSCode? Is that a thing now?

I was kind of trying to say I haven't seen any ads, just non-intrusive integration with other MS services, in response to the ads reply I got. Sorry that was actually rather vague and roundabout.

You can use VSCodium, it's a fork of VSCode without Microsoft's telemetry.

> small town high school football star

That's odd thing to call the biggest software company* in the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_software_c...

* Alphabet

That wiki doesn't justify your statement. It's leveraging a list from 2017, but using Alphabet's market cap from 2019? And regardless, the actual market caps on that page would say Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world.

I have no idea what Forbes is using for its ranking but it is obviously not by valuation.

EDIT: And it should arguably be Apple, but for some reason neither Apple nor Amazon are software companies?

The Wikipedia article sorts by sales. Not sure why the years are like that, but the relative values are similar in 2019. [1] [2]

> for some reason neither Apple nor Amazon are software companies?

Because they aren't software companies? Or at least principally software companies.

Amazon is categorized as an retail company. [3]

Apple is categorized as a computer hardware company. [4]

Nitpicking aside, I think my point stands about a $800B+ company.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/companies/alphabet/?list=global2000#5...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/companies/microsoft/?list=global2000#...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/companies/amazon/?list=global2000#2c4...

[3] https://www.forbes.com/companies/apple/?list=global2000#3d04...

And market cap while it measures investor sentiment, doesn’t measure fundamentals. If it did, Uber wouldn’t be worth anything.