[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.