| Well, capturing profit in tech is all about commoditizing your proprietary product's complements, without allowing others to commoditize your product. Apple made their money selling proprietary hardware, first computers, then mobile devices. Microsoft made their money selling proprietary operating systems while commoditizing hardware (PCs). Google made their money selling proprietary advertising on commodity software on commodity devices. Browsers were already a commodity, they're commoditizing operating systems by doing everything through the web browser, and they're commoditizing mobile devices with Android. Now Microsoft is trying to get into the mobile device market, after Google already commoditized it, a strategy that's doomed to failure. They're also trying to get into the data center and IaaS/PaaS market, but that's already been somewhat commoditized by Amazon, Google, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc. The companies that are still making money off a proprietary platform, are doing it because they haven't allowed it to be commoditized yet. MS still makes most of their money from platform lock-in in the corporate market, but as soon as that product gets commoditized, their goose is cooked. So sure, Microsoft doesn't want to become just a software shop like Adobe, but then, it doesn't look like they really have much of a choice in the matter. |