Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.
On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.
On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.
Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.
Don't agree at all. Microsoft originally hoped that other vendors office type offerings would be good enough, they weren't (lotus notes) so Microsoft did it themselves.
Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.
There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility. Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.
> by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics
> Google Workspace, and it's missing features
Sounds like Microsoft got there by having the features.
>extremely aggressive bundle pricing
I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler
Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will convert laptops to linux or chromebook.
You see it as malicious, but well, even Google have trouble in this space. Because it is hard.