Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon? That is a woefully inadequate list of competitors. Here's a slightly more (but by no means fully) complete list, including some

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon? That is a woefully inadequate list of competitors. Here's a slightly more (but by no means fully) complete list, including some companies that are no longer around: Oracle Salesforce Mozilla Sony Nintendo Samsung Blackberry IBM Heroku Rackspace Sun Novell Red Hat Jetbrains Not to mention, open source projects like Apache, Linux, Open Office, etc that attempt to commoditize their products. That is an incredibly huge list by any standard, and many on that list are giants themselves. Now, given that Microsoft has competed, on average, successfully against all these rivals, many of whom give away competing products for free, would you still consider their lack of success against a select few to be a huge shortcoming? (Edit: typos, fixes, adding more rivals as I think of them)