[dmonitor]

My concern is that breaking up Google without breaking up Microsoft will basically just be giving MS a huge advantage in the multitude of categories in which they compete with each other, so we'll be left in an even worse situation than before.

[ocdtrekkie]

Microsoft is categorically incompetently run at this point. They chose to cede both the web and mobile platforms entirely to Google for free. They couple some of their most impressively engineered OS releases with things like preinstalling Candy Crush to ensure that any gain of respect their engineering deserves is immediately burnt goodwill from shoddy behavior.

Apple is mostly too dependent on vertical integration to truly take over a market. If they allowed their OS on other hardware or something, they could pull Google power but they are entirely built around being their own unique bubble.

If Google finally gets broken up, you'll probably see hardware manufacturers like Samsung and LG truly start doing interesting things again.

[dmonitor]

Giving Microsoft the market despite their incompetence is exactly what I'm worried about. They seem to have taken the "pay Washington and slowly become mandatory on every computer" strategy over "make a product people want to use" strategy, and it's paying off.

[ocdtrekkie]

Eh, I don't think Microsoft is leading in a long-term success direction. In the enterprise IT space, the shift to largely cloud services has totally undermined their monopoly: While many are on Azure, yes, the need for users to be on Windows desktops is nearly gone, and Azure is a commodity that can be easily replaced by competitors' services without end users even noticing.

Google will even with a break up, continue to control search and probably the web as a whole. Microsoft would be starting from scratch trying to build a mobile ecosystem again to compete with whatever's left of Android. And largely outside of the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft has repeatedly failed to buy control over the developer ecosystem. (All they need is one dumb PM to tick off the average GitHub user, and they're sunk there too.)

[fragmede]

Folding phones are interesting things to use.

[robertlagrant]

Yeah. Google is far less locked in than Microsoft. Gaming across Windows and Xbox vs Sony/Nintendo. Office is used by almost every org in the world. Azure locked in via clickops IT staff always wanting to pick it; you have to make a big case to use GCP or AWS in a lot of companies vs "just" using Azure.

Google's search advantage could be taken away with another website that's better. There's no installed base or corporate lockin to contend with. Same with email. Same with maps. While Google uses data from each of these services to better target ads at you, the services are not very tied into each other, and you could easily grab one of those services away from Google if you just provided a better standalone service.

To me, that's not a good case for breaking up Google.

[rafaelmn]

Is Microsoft gaming relevant that much these days ? Admittedly I'm not gaming that much but I own PS5 and Mac and I don't really feel I'm missing out on any titles I'd want to play. Big stuff comes out on PS5 and Steam - I did see Microsoft buying a bunch of studios but the impact of that feels irrelevant in grand scheme of things.

Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).

Working for big corps these days I see that supporting Apple devices is pretty standard.

I'd say Microsoft is way less entrenched than it was 10-15 years ago technically - but they do a great job of selling Azure to enterprises. And even there AWS is a huge competitor without Google.

[dmonitor]

From a platform perspective, Microsoft's Xbox has been playing third fiddle to Nintendo and Sony for nearly a decade now. They are likely to phase out the hardware division.

Windows, on the other hand, is a very strong platform, but Valve has been chipping away at it recently by supporting efforts like Proton to play Windows games natively on Linux. Shipping a game on PC is synonymous with shipping on Windows, Mac is an afterthought, and Linux is a pipedream. Microsoft doesn't directly profit off gaming on Windows by charging a platform fee at the moment, but they have tried in the past and could in the future at the drop of a hat.

Windows's hold on gamers at this point is less about playing the games themselves and more about secondary applications, like Discord, having subpar Linux support.

On the publishing side of things, Microsoft just recently became the third largest gaming publisher in the world by buying the fourth largest gaming publisher in the world. Microsoft owns World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Call of Duty, and (for a while now) Minecraft. They own an absurdly large portion of the gaming market despite creating not a single successful franchise in-house.

[robertlagrant]

> Is Microsoft gaming relevant that much these days ?

Hyper relevant I'd say, although the Microsoft corporate touch seems to kill every studio they buy.

> Office/GCloud does feel like the two big players but I'm sure competition would creep up here if GSuite went away (and I doubt it would, even as a standalone company).

Office is orders of magnitude bigger than GSuite. It is gigantic. Governments release documents in Word format instead of OpenOffice. It's so big. GSuite is still a minnow in comparison.

[shiroiushi]

I have the exact same concern, but instead with Apple.