[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.