There are a lot of assumptions about Microsoft in this thread and they basically all boil down to people not understanding what it is Microsoft does.

They sell solutions to non-IT enterprise organisations, and while it’s reasonable to assume that a lot of HN simply aren’t in touch with this world, it’s one of the largest markets for IT software there is in the world, and the only real competition Microsoft has in this area is AWS.

With several decades worth of experience in enterprise organisations in the European public sector, and quite a few years in the European financial private sector, Microsoft has been the sole business partner in terms of IT that has always been a solid pick. There seem to be this notion that Microsoft sells shitty products by manipulating IT managers, and that is just wholly untrue. They sell the software people want, and they sell it in a package that includes real world telephone support with their actual headquarters. Not some chat-bot or forum like Google, not some outsourced call Center like Apple, but real phone lines directly to Seattle. When something big goes wrong on any of our user facing solutions, which is basically anything office365 including sharepoint Microsoft will call us, on the hour, every hour, with updates unti things get resolved. This is essentially the most valueable thing to any IT manager in an organisation of 20.000 employees where maybe 50 are IT related, because it lets you tell the organisation exactly what Microsoft is doing to resolve the issue that is currently stopping your business.

The reason Azure was capable of sneaking past AWS and securing itself a healthy market share wasn’t only that it makes sense to live in Azure when you already have Office365, it was that Amazon didn’t realise how much of a deal phone support meant to the European Enterprise market. They very quickly picked up on it though, and are now in some areas like HDPR a better option than Azure.

Mean while a company like Google had office365 before there was office365 and have some arguably interesting services in Google Cloud, but they will never sell anything to enterprise because Google still doesn’t understand how to sell things to enterprise. It doesn’t seem like Google really cares in terms of gsuite or Google Cloud, but they do care about education, and, still they struggle with delivering what we want from them even though they ask us and we tell them. Apple is in a somewhat similar boat, except they don’t really care what we think. They do things the Apple way and never reach out.

Anyway, the result is that Microsoft is a great business to business partner. Especially in recent years where they have inhoused more and more of their services so you almost never have to rely on some 3rd party “gold partner” or whatever they call themselves that essentially all suck and always have sucked. The only partner we have currently is for licensing, and even this is an area that I hope Microsoft inhouses because it’s just such a stupid mess.

In my eyes a lot of what Microsoft sells to private customers is know how. They don’t give Office365 to students because they are nice, they do so because it means that every hire we onboard already knows excel. This means it’s incredibly hard to compete in the office space. Similarly everyone we hire knows windows, some of these people can’t tell the difference between an android or an iOS devices when they call IT support (no I’m not kidding) but they all know windows. I know that a lot of techies want Linux to be a competitive choice for users in areas like the public sector, but those are the people who would need to use it, you can’t imagine how expensive retraining 20.000 employees who can’t tell an Android and an iOS device apparat to use Linux.

So as private users, we’re not really Microsoft customers. I mean, we are, but not really their primary customers. Because Microsoft makes their money in enterprise, and that position has probably never been more secure than it is today. Because what is the alternative to office365? Nothing. And when you already have your AD and licensing tied up to AzureAD and all the other integrations between Azure and windows + office365, then the business case to not use Azure as your cloud environment dwindles. It sometimes does make sense to use AWS, as I stated earlier, but not often.

As such Microsoft along with Apple (who have the private market of non-techies locked down) are probably some or the safest stock in the world of technology. I’d still rather invest in green energy though. Who doesn’t need energy?