Because PCs and Office productivity software are a niche, and it’s hard to argue their market leadership in a niche is being illegally exploited to take over ot

Because PCs and Office productivity software are a niche, and it’s hard to argue their market leadership in a niche is being illegally exploited to take over other markets. What markets? Well, the only one that matters right now is cloud, as it’s gradually eating the entire enterprise software and hardware industry, with hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. Put another way, Microsoft certainly bought their #2 position in cloud with Azure by being early to market relative to Google, but also by having a huge sales field with Microsoft Windows/Office licensing true-ups to use as discount incentive to buy Azure credits. Is this illegal? It would be a difficult argument to say so. Given Google’s position with search and Android, Amazon’s market position in cloud, Microsoft is a middle pack player everywhere now. Huge, but middle of the pack. The only argument that holds some water (per this article) is that Microsoft is big, and big is bad for consumers, therefore, they shouldn’t be big. But it’s vague and really would depend on the judge hearing the case. Amazon has the same argument against it as with Microsoft, but it would be hard to prove they’re harming consumers. Windows use has very little ability to drive Azure adoption beyond pure financial sales games - you give me a few percentage points more off Windows and Office and I’ll buy some of your Azure. That’s common in any sort of industry transition. Oracle is doing the same thing just very late, with a questionable service and with less success. IBM too. What’s interesting is most posters in this thread are still fighting 20 year old battles. PCs are maybe 27-28% of the market of computing devices these days. The battle has moved on to cloud services (Amazon being the far away leader) and mobile devices (mostly setted there too, by Google, though Apple’s iOS business alone is larger than all of Microsoft).