alt Hacker NewsA business man at a prior employer sympathetic with my younger, naive "Microsoft sucks" attitude told me something I remember to this day:
Microsoft is not a software company, they have never been experts at software. They are experts at contracts. They lead because their business machine exceeds at understanding how to tick the boxes necessary to win contract bids. The people who make purchasing decisions at companies aren't technical and possibly don't even know a world outside Microsoft, Office, and Windows, after all.
This is how the sausage is made in the business world, and it changed how I perceived the tech industry. Good software (sadly) doesn't matter. Sales does.
This is why most of Norway currently runs on Azure, even though it is garbage, and even though every engineer I know who uses it says it is garbage. Because the people in the know don't get to make the decision.
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But that also means that if you as a user/customer can make choices based on technical merits, you'll have a significant advantage.
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My lesson was when European companies followed US tech into offshoring, and how quality doesn't play any role as long as the software delivers, from business point of view.
Especially relevant when shipping software isn't the product the company sells.