Microsoft poised to overtake Apple as most valuable company::As Microsoft stock rises and Apple’s falls over analysts expectation of slowing iPhone demand, the two firms are once more within $100 billion of each other — the smallest gap in over two years.

  • Untitled4774@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    Microsoft is a wonderful success story that being one of the first, and being parasitic, anti-competitive and anti-consumer, all while failing upwards by having some of the buggiest production releases out there on increasingly bloated software, is all that really counts to Wall Street.

    And most of the world is too afraid to split off from it because it’s what they know.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And most of the world is too afraid to split off from it because it’s what they know.

      It doesn’t help that superior choices to Microsoft product keep getting bought by even worse competitors making Microsoft, once again, look not as as it might. Such events like:

      • IBM buying Red Hat and enacting the death of Centos
      • Broadcom buying VMware
      • Avid Amoeba
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        1 year ago

        It’s almost as if there might be a common driver behind both phenomena.

      • ieatpillowtags@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Meh, I think it’s a stretch to blame IBM for the Centos thing. Red Hat did that on their own and themselves deserve whatever criticism is warranted. It’s a wholly owned but independent subsidiary, so not like IBM is in the middle management chain at all.

    • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s the exact opposite.

      Microsoft was arguably the most powerful company in the world when they were hit with the antitrust lawsuit which absolutely crushed the company. It was never going to destroy Microsoft, but it knocked them way down and things were looking pretty grim.

      They cleaned up their act, have been making great decisions for the last 20 years and are now a far bigger and better company than they ever were in the old days. I think that’s proof that being “parasitic, anti-competitive and anti-consumer” was a bad strategy.

      • Untitled4774@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        They’ve learned forgotten more lessons than they’ll ever remember.

        In the last 10 years we still see these behaviours by way of:

        • changing over to a subscription model for office then dropping support for older versions to basically force people to move to their new model, locking many prior VLSC or on-premises exchange features behind very high subscriptions
        • after releasing the new version of the edge browser are now using their integration in their software suite to disregard the user’s default browser choice and open in edge anyway. Having to now go through an extra menu set to tell their software to respect the default browser set in the OS
        • lying about Win 10 being the final version of windows only to turn around and add a TPM requirement which automatically disqualifies a significant amount of hardware from being able to upgrade

        This is just three examples off the top of my head, respectively. We could talk about ads in a paid OS, constant nags to please pretty please use their browser, breaking prior software to integrate “new” versions that don’t add any user improvements but do add significant upgrades to telemetry and usage data, and so on.