> This is a very HN take.

It's something that Microsoft leadership themselves certainly seems to have believed at times. From "developers, developers, developers, developers!" to courting Linux-targeting webdevs with WSL to VSCode, they've done lots to court developers, sometimes explicitly professing it as a central part of their strategy.

I can't disagree with any of the rest, though. Microsoft's (anti-)competitive strategy has never been about excellence so much as positioning worse stuff to win in virtue of network effects and integrations.

> but they'll still hold hostage of the vast swathes of average white collar workers with Office, people that don't care at all about technology as long as they have Word and Excel.

I can't wait for the anti-trust lawsuits. M365 and O365 are already super shady in terms of being able to migrate out or be interoperable with other solutions. "Accidental" roadblocks almost everywhere.

People have been saying that MS was becoming obsolete for at least two decades. And a few times, it did seem heading to obsoletion: first when Google Docs launched, and second when Windows Phone failed.

And yet we're where we are. MS is still one of the most important corporations. Perhaps the most important one if you only count enterprise usage.

Is this even an issue these days ? I thought GSuite was good enough for most office work for a very long time now ?

FWIW I also think an underappreciated advantage is Windows Server (last I checked that was still rock-solid) and Active Directory. Lots of CIOs / CTOs would correctly veto a move off of these, absent a specific technical problem. This is really more of a "hard knocks" lesson than anything fundamental to operating system design or implementation, but: the two Linux shops I worked at got at least a little sloppy about the sudoers list, or got frustrated and gave too much access to a "shared" folder, etc etc, largely because the admins got fed up with all the Mother May-I-ing. It just seemed to inevitably turn into a mess; sometimes that mess is fun and even productive, sometimes it's actually unacceptable.

Even the research hospital I worked at had a proper SELinux setup on the Red Hat installations, but by-quantity most servers were CentOS and it was way more of a free-for-all than it should have been, e.g. I was the fed-up admin when I was really not qualified! I screwed up a lot. Not that big of a deal: this was research-related computing and deidentified data. All the clinical computing was Windows Server. That is not a coincidence, it is really a market difference.

As someone who hates Windows 11... I do like the core Windows kernel, and would much rather do IT on Windows machines than Linux machines. Windows NT is very fussy and a bit bloated, but a huge part of that is an admirable commitment to backwards compatibility; a lot of XP applications run fine on Windows 11, except DPI wonkiness. And Windows' driers advantage isn't just commercial support; the kernel is fundamentally leaner and faster than Linux at real-time IO, and better about cleanly isolating driver processes across privilege levels. Very broadly, compared to Linux I find administering Windows easier to navigate and harder to screw up, especially with handling user permissions. Surely part of this is what I grew up with, but there's also a values difference: a lot of Linux users like how low-friction it can be since the OS doesn't get in your way. I kind of like that Windows makes you turn an excessive number of disarming keys... even when I am frustrated by it.

It does make me quite sad that the only real general-use OS options are the apex of a 20th-century operating system family, Apple's version of that, and a truly 21st-century monolith-microkernel hybrid whose specific design is a mystery to public science.