> but from a wider viewpoint Microsoft has few competitors in the "one stop shop for your big business needs" sense.
This is the big thing that keeps Microsoft lock-in alive. No where else are you going to get: Full office suite, both online & desktop apps, hosted exchange/email, Identity w/ MFA & Conditional Access, EDR, file storage, chat/collab, AI chatbot w/ your Microsoft data as context, and MDM all for $22/user/month (if you have less than 300 users, otherwise you're looking in the range of $35-$50/user/month which is still dirt cheap for what you get). Not to mention all the data protection (purview)/e-discovery stuff also included.
Google Workspace is the next best thing, and doesn't offer all of what MS does for the price.
MS (365) is the only game in town where you can get everything you need for 1 price/subscription.
Microsoft's services are rarely the best at anything, but they are all "good enough", well integrated and will check any and all compliance/regulatory checkboxes you want them to check, and you can generally hammer any of their offerings into whatever you want. Similar to Windows in a way, it wasn't the best at anything in particular, but had everything you needed, and could be made to do whatever with some effort with the benefit of integration into all of MS's enterprisey stuff by default.
> Similar to Windows in a way, it wasn't the best at anything in particular, but had everything you needed, and could be made to do whatever with some effort with the benefit of integration into all of MS's enterprisey stuff by default.
macOS could be better looking and more well-rounded consumer OS but Windows is definitely the best when it comes to providing the most functionally complete APIs. It is also the best when it comes to well-designed future-proof APIs. The backwards compatibility isn't just keeping the functions untouched. It is designing data structures and APIs that can be seamlessly upgraded.
Linux can have DBus etc. but it doesn't go anywhere close to the unified feeling that Win32 and COM APIs provide. Each type of hardware under Linux requires some completely different style (some more functional, some more async, some subsystems are more object-oriented, some APIs are pure text-based the others are IOCtl minefields).
There is a reason CAD software is often Windows-only while many buyers have always been able to buy Macs too (Power, x86 or ARM).
It’s been awhile since I’ve compared, but their office apps mostly are the best at everything. Windows is/was the best at many things.
When someone has that level of success they’re the best at many things, they just may not be the things you appreciate.