>The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy.
Sure it does, but when some of the profit increases are made by deliberately decreasing contrast of the background of the ads and avoiding borders to increase ad clicks, especially from old people who are unable to see contrast [0][1], that's when it crosses the line into "decline" of the user experience. They(along with other search engines) got smacked by the FTC [2], it's an interesting read.
That plus shoving Google+ down the throat of people and making them literally cry [3] (yes I mean literally) in an effort to compete with Facebook at any cost leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and reminds me of how Microsoft got it's M$ moniker.
Micro$oft leveraged their market dominance to stifle competition. Google leverages their market dominance to... get more people to create more data with real names.
Microsoft leveraged their market dominance to distribute more copies of Windows and Office, not to stifle competition. Your statement makes it sound like you don't understand the profit motive.
Distributing more software is how they earn more money. The $ reveals what you think of Microsoft, and going by that, one would have to assume you think Microsoft's goal was to optimize profit. Optimizing profit would require distributing more copies of their software.
Maybe you're older or maybe you know something more than me but Micro$oft I remember already won the Windows and Office game. It was Borg Gates by my time. They then used that market dominance to handicap, break, or deny entries by anyone else into the platform. They also used it to make Internet Explorer a thing.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say about the profit motive either. Distribution doesn't necessarily means profit nor driven by profit.
They could have tossed Windows on to blank CDs and threw it out of helicopters if they want but it serves no purpose when they were making fat margins licensing Windows to Dell.