[slavapestov]

Times are changin’. All you young whippersnappers wouldn’t believe that back in my day, Microsoft was evil, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Google was the scrappy upstart who prided themselves on not serving ads and irrelevant fluff on the search results page.

[manuelabeledo]

If you go back enough, Microsoft was the scrappy upstart, sort of. They were this small software company loved by most, the creators of Windows and Excel and all that.

The amount of fuckery going on the background never saw the light of day back then. People seemed to be happy with them bundling more and more crap in their products, a move that killed most of their competition.

They haven’t given up on that, to the point where they still bundle up apps that only play nice to each other.

Google may be terrible, I won’t argue otherwise. But Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack, from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration.

[adventured]

> Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack

> from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration

Apple has the world's most valuable integrated stack. At scale nobody integrates more tightly or better than Apple, and nobody makes more money from that tight integration. It's the foundation of their entire business and has been for a long time.

That's a pretty bizarre premise to suggest Apple is lacking in the integrated approach. That's exactly what they do, very aggressively. Imagine Microsoft building their own processors and then Windows only running on those. You have the integrated salivation inverted, it's the other way around - Microsoft execs can only dream of the business gain they could have if they actually had Apple's level of ownership (over its ecosystem) but over everything Windows touches.

Microsoft doesn't even have a play in mobile OS / mobile app stores. Whereas Apple is one of the duopolists in that critical segment.

[manuelabeledo]

I think you may have missed the point here.

You could start your computer, then your browser, then visit a few websites, and never interact with any product not owned by Microsoft, minus perhaps routers and switches. Your traffic could even be routed through some of the undersea cables owned by them, to ad networks ran in their massive cloud.

> Imagine Microsoft building their own processors and then Windows only running on those.

I’m old enough to remember the amount of leverage Microsoft has with the entirety of the x86 platform, e.g. [0]

Microsoft does not need a proprietary hardware platform, although the hasn’t stopped them from trying to lock other OS out (see TPM).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

[hx8]

Apple's vertical integration really ends at the cloud. There's iCloud, but that's a small offering. Microsoft has Azure, which extends their vertical integration in a direction Apple doesn't even try for.

[manuelabeledo]

iCloud is not even a cloud, just a set of services running mostly on GCP.

[Corrado]

>But Microsoft has and will always try to control the entirety of the stack, from hardware to servers to operating systems to applications, in a way that would make any Apple exec salivate thinking about vertical integration.

I always said that the perfect stack was probably a 100% Microsoft stack. Everything they build (OS, email, mice, keyboards, etc.) works great with everything else they build. The problem is that putting even one non-Microsoft item in the stack causes the whole thing to implode.

Want to use a MacBook Pro on the network? Too bad, now your printers don't work. Want to install Chrome? Now you can't use certain Sharepoint features. Plug in a Logitech webcam and now Teams hates you.

[foobarian]

Well. They were proud of no fluff on the home page. But they had ads on SERPs, though they were text only ads with strict styling. This was good because they replaced evil Flash ads.

[its_a_random_ac]

Great, now I'm thinking of my edgy teenage days calling them Micro$oft or just M$ on Gamefaq's forums.