Comment by still_grokking
4 days ago
I'm not sure where you are but at least here Microslop is still ruling more or less everywhere besides the online ad market.
They are big in everything that is mass scale developer oriented with things like GitHub, VSCode, or all their libs, tools, and integrations (they "own" in large parts for example Python, TS, and Rust). Governments and public services are all running on Azure. So do a lot of companies; more or less all small and mid sized. They are still dominant in the gaming market, and get stronger there with every year.
Microslop was always, and still is the same Microslop. They are very successful with what they do since decades. Whether one likes that or not.
They haven't been dominant in the gaming market for a long time now. Since the beginning of the last generation (Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch), Microsoft has had the worst selling game consoles. And they are getting weaker with every year: the Xbox director was fired just a few weeks ago.
They still control PC gaming. Even Valve has long given up on disrupting DirectX and the Win32 API in general and is just translating whatever APIs Microsoft decides we should have.
That only grants market control so long as Microsoft keeps releasing new APIs, otherwise the people reimplementing them like valve/wine will catch up.
I think Valve’s play isn’t to steal tons of Microsoft’s gaming market share; their play is to just get enough of a market that game developers are incentivized to code to the APIs that work well in Proton, not whatever the latest and greatest in Windows is. If we cross that inflection point, Microsoft’s PC gaming chokehold will be on life support.
I noticed you didn't mention any consumer products except gaming. That's because they no longer dominate there.
Github and VS Code are kind of consumer products aren't they?