Microsoft's customer base is huge and their advertising targets the non-technical and "hip" crowds and it seems to me to be doing a decent job. Their advertising generally doesn't target us.
That’s because it is. There’s Consumer Microsoft and Enterprise Microsoft. Enterprise Microsoft products are mostly really great. Anything that’s tied to the consumer side can’t make its returns on fat B2B contracts, so they are forced to extract value otherwise.
Of all the big players in 2014, none are as diversified as Microsoft - they have Windows, XBox, Enterprise, Office, Mobile, Azure - all of which would be huge businesses even on their own. Hence you could argue they are a lot less vulnerable than people assume them to be.
Microsoft's success is closely related to piracy. Piracy helped Windows to become the majority. This is no different and IMO Microsoft intentionally don't fight against those apps very strongly to help their store to succeed.
Microsoft, for all their other flaws, usually keeps out of the business of selling their consumers. Perhaps it's because they have better (internal) monetization possibilities.
Microsoft’s PR department is seriously doing the best job, it‘s insane.
Anecdotal evidence suggests they are now almost beloved. In the tech community as well as enterprise (where they have always been). They are almost never mentioned in Antitrust discussions. Many seem to hate/distrust Google, Facebook and to some extent Amazon.
All the while MS has the highest market cap and is integrating and consolidating right, left and center.
I can only imagine it is because they have fewer touch points with consumers. They rake in insane amounts of cash with Azure, almost automatically. They don‘t have to deal with republicans accusing them of “liberal bias” or end user privacy in general. Even though WIN10 has telemetry just as deep as Android.
Life sure is nice when your main source of revenue is enterprise.
Nobody wonders why Microsoft is still around. Selling a technically inferior product is not a problem if you can find customers. There can be many reasons. Markets are far from perfect.
BUT... it's so easy for corporate IT dept to buy into. Each different vendor is a different nightmare - but with MS you have only one. And they have it all. And it's maybe not best in class, but good enough. You can see why they are so successful.
It's because MS have had their run from >10 years ago, and now act less like they used to. Certainly not zero, but certainly nowhere near the F/G/A realms of monopoly and cartel like behavior that we see today.
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