[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....