Regardless of the merits of the platform, avoiding a monoculture itself has benefits such as encouraging open standards. Every competitor platform that has die

Regardless of the merits of the platform, avoiding a monoculture itself has benefits such as encouraging open standards. Every competitor platform that has died has harmed the long term health of the ecosystem of open standards. Microsoft's OS itself was not open source, of course, although MS has turned around into a very open source oriented company across much of their stack. However, their data vacuuming is also high as they are hoping to compete with Google. And if you do what they want, and install lots of microsoft apps on your Android or iPhone, then rest assured they will vacuum all the data just like the other guys. Trusting any of these companies on that front is naive.