[theturtletalks]

But can really say any of their products are top of their respective niches? Windows, Xbox, Azure are not the gold standard. They had the lead or close to it in these niches but floundered that.

I never understand these takes like they did this much in revenue. OP acknowledges that, they have enterprise down and are too big to fail. What’s to say they couldn’t be doing more revenue? Or even better year over year if they played their cards right. Don’t get me started on GitHub and VSCode. Popular projects are leaving GitHub and VSCode wasn’t able to monetize itself where many forks were able to do so.

[wan23]

If Windows isn't the gold standard having 70% of the market, then what is? Azure is in second place not by far after AWS. And these are huge, HUGE markets. I wouldn't say your local grocer is dead because it's not Costco, and of course by this logic Costco is itself dead because it's not Walmart.

[theturtletalks]

Maybe we are jumping the gun on Windows. My echo chamber is tech people and they seemed to have lost faith in windows after they Windows 11 introduced ads and plugged every hole that allowed to bypass needing a Microsoft account. Gaming and anti-cheat not working on Linux will keep that market share high for a while.

[dafelst]

You don't need to be the gold standard to make obscene amounts of money. Product quality and financial success are only loosely correlated at best.