Microsoft’s best pitch (and Google benefits from this too) is that contracts are annoying and take forever to execute. If you can sign a deal for Outlook and Teams it’s so much easier than separate contracts for Outlook and Slack. You’ll get very far with that logic alone.

Its all about Excel. It really is the best spreadsheet, and everyone knows how to use it. But that comes in an Office bundle that includes Teams. And that is why we must suffer.

I find it fascinating how they are able to sell their crap software.

> And somehow, they have figured out how to do it too

You say this like it was a mystery to start with. When you own 90+% of the user base, you can create trends with any changes implemented

>"Microsoft's entire business model for decades has been to shove shoddy products down people's throats."

I remember this one. In the 90s MS reps would come to our company and sing about how their Visual Basic was superior to Delphi. When pointed to countless features that proved the opposite all they were able to say is that the MS has bigger dick.

Their recommendation was to have 2 developers instead of one we had. One would code GUI / front end in Visual Basic and the other write DLLs that would do all the meat.

People here are mostly too young to remember but the original Microsoft business model was this:

Find a software market currently addressed by high price products; create a reasonably good product for that market; sell it for significantly less than the incumbent. Sell much higher volume of said product than the incumbent, thereby make much more profit. Repeat/rinse.

The Windows lock-in, embrace extend etc came after this. You can't lock in customers if they didn't already willingly buy your product.

Microsoft's entire business model has been tying. Countless millions are forced to use Copilot because their IT department has contracts with Microsoft, and those same contracts are why they use Office, Teams, and so on. Their developers use Visual Studio, deploy to Azure, and run it all against SQL Server. Their email comes from Exchange.

It has been an incredibly lucrative strategy. We all herald some CEO's prowess in growing revenue when they've been doing the same playbook for decades now, and have been running on the inertia of Windows dominance on the desktop. Every new entrant is pushed out through countless incredibly lazy IT departments that just adopt whatever Microsoft shits out.

It's actually surprising that the one and only area where this really failed was as they tried to lever tying to the mobile market. A couple of missteps along the way are the only reason every office drone isn't rocking their Lumia ExchangeLive! CoDevice.