They have to compete now, and their software should sell on its own merits, not because of platform lock-in network effects. This will make Microsoft a better company with a higher quality product.
It's always easy to see who's in the bubble.
My mum hasn't touched her PC in several months.
Most people have a computer in their home. If they graduated to mobile devices, they didn't just chuck the thing in the trash, they kept it around. They still probably get photos off their camera or print coupons on it, because AirPrint and whatever Androids 4.4 printing thing is are barely known about, crummy, and only supported on a fraction of devices
Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work.
Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)
Windows is not the dominant computing platform, because PCs are not the dominant computing platform. Smartphones have been outselling PCs since 2011 – not even considering tablets. Windows is obviously still the dominant PC OS, but unlike the 1990's, that doesn't make it the dominant platform.
This is an article about Microsoft releasing Office for smartphone and tablet OSes. To ignore them from your evaluation of the "dominant platform" seems foolish.
I'm sick of Outlook on OSX (it's the only Office app I use), I can add rules, but I can't add notifications so I miss all of my emails. Now I've turned it off I have to manually order things.
On top of that I'm stuck with Calibri as the default font. The default can't be changed.
Excel had a pretty nasty regression on the Macintosh in Office 2004/2008 (to the point at which I no longer used it on the Mac in 2008, it was pretty horrid) - but they returned it to (mostly) feature parity as of Office 2011.
Sharepoint, on the other hand, is complete crap on a Macintosh. It's almost like it's been designed to be bad.
Afaik, it was a deal that Jobs made (with some other parts) because Microsoft had been found to have code in its Windows' video software that came from Quicktime.
I googled this:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-m...
It's kind of funny, though. Jobs was pragmatic enough to realize that it was better to get Microsoft to "open up" than to win the lawsuit. It's hard to say, but I definitely think it paid off.
Apple made their money selling proprietary hardware, first computers, then mobile devices.
Microsoft made their money selling proprietary operating systems while commoditizing hardware (PCs).
Google made their money selling proprietary advertising on commodity software on commodity devices. Browsers were already a commodity, they're commoditizing operating systems by doing everything through the web browser, and they're commoditizing mobile devices with Android.
Now Microsoft is trying to get into the mobile device market, after Google already commoditized it, a strategy that's doomed to failure.
They're also trying to get into the data center and IaaS/PaaS market, but that's already been somewhat commoditized by Amazon, Google, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc.
The companies that are still making money off a proprietary platform, are doing it because they haven't allowed it to be commoditized yet. MS still makes most of their money from platform lock-in in the corporate market, but as soon as that product gets commoditized, their goose is cooked.
So sure, Microsoft doesn't want to become just a software shop like Adobe, but then, it doesn't look like they really have much of a choice in the matter.
Adobe sells to an industry niche of creative professionals. That's a substantially different situation. A lot more computers have Word installed than Photoshop.
