With meaningful competition, the game is elevated for everyone. Those competing must win on merit, and those watching and consuming get the best output. When M

With meaningful competition, the game is elevated for everyone. Those competing must win on merit, and those watching and consuming get the best output. When Microsoft was the dominant software Goliath, they were winning in business and personal computing. The internet was new and they wanted to win that - not necessarily by being the best, but by using their leverage. In the current environment, Microsoft is still winning in a lot of areas of business - competitive if not dominant. They have meaningful positions (but also competitors) in cloud hosting, operating systems and productivity software. In my opinion, we're in a good place for a lot of these vectors. Cloud has Azure, AWS and GCP (though I don't know how well GCP is competing.) Operating systems have the classic gorilla in Windows, the polished closed system macOS and the persistent open source varieties of Linux. They are all meaningfully competitive. Mobile is probably the weakest area, in my opinion. I wish Microsoft was still competing with Windows Phone here, because I don't love my Android and iOS options. They are good and they do what I need. I'm not confident I could switch between them easily (the way I am mostly confident I can switch between Windows, macOS and Linux). (Online advertising is clearly the realm of Facebook and Google.) I'm not sure how to summarize, but I don't think Microsoft is the same 800-pound gorilla that stuck us with Internet Explorer 6 for way too long. They'll (as long as they can) always be ambitiously seeking dominance in profitable software-related markets. They'll never be 100% charitable or philanthropic. And neither will their competitors. Is there a useful rubric or framework to think about all this? What are personal decisions you can make that aren't too painful, but matter on the grand scale of these massive companies?