VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs
Buy out of github, owning the devs
Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use
OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals.
Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
- Video games: Activision/Blizzard, ZeniMax, Double Fine Productions, Obsidian Entertainment, inXile Entertainment, Playground Games, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Mojang
- Developer ecosystems: npm, Dependabot, GitHub, Playfab, Deis, Xamarin, Havok, HockeyApp
And MS practices are not standard business, they certainly understand the rules well, but have have been making illegal moves, it is a fallacy to word it as if illegal moves were part of the capitalism game: Monopolies are to be prevented, that's why anti trust laws were put in place, which MS was already caught breakig.
And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?
https://support.microsoft.com/office/overview-of-visio-for-t...
This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.
C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.