Well, MS makes the platform/tools so that others can do cool stuff with it. So even if you don't touch a MS product, because of the massive scale of the platfor

Well, MS makes the platform/tools so that others can do cool stuff with it. So even if you don't touch a MS product, because of the massive scale of the platform, you're probably right in the middle of stuff created using MS tech. Maybe your company accountant does taxes on windows or your ATM runs some gimped version of Windows (shudder! :)), or maybe the movie you saw was post processed on some windows machine, or maybe the factory that built stuff you use daily uses windows software for their SCADA system, or in our case all of our equipment (biotech) is controlled through windows software, etc. I think that "technology" especially languages and toolkits and such are super overrated. They're just a means to an end. The functionality contained in the executable in what matters to the actual end-user, not the technology or the platform. And all this is ofcourse super obvious and many companies get this. And yet I don't think any company comes close to providing the level of backwards compatibility and platform stability of Windows. Just a couple of months ago, one of our older WinXP PCs shit the bed, and we replaced it with a W10 box. I was kinda half-expecting the software compatibility for 20 year old software to be a complete shitshow, but we ran the setup and everything just worked out of the box. Thats just once anecdote of course, and there is nothing technical that prevents other platforms from doing the same, except that people don't want to work on boring tasks like keeping stuff working and ticking along, because it doesn't challenge them. But I think that is the secret sauce that makes them the big bucks.