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Meh, if I had a dollar for every time someone said "this time Microsoft is gonna fail for sure", I'd be richer than Elon. People were singing Microsoft's funeral at every new Windows or product launch and assumed it would burry them for good. Turns out, despite many failures, Microsoft is still among us, still growing, buying new companies and IPs, branching in new areas and firing on all cylinders despite all the haters and doomers predicting otherwise for the past 3 decades. Maybe individual products will die, like Windows, but Microsoft as a company will survive, as it grew to be a lot more than the Windows/Office company.

My point is, people are generally bad at making accurate predictions into the future and competent CEOs are good at turning things around.



They had something like a near-death experience under Ballmer. Nadella brought them back from it. For a long time, people really did give them up for dead.


My point exactly. If they survived those harsh falls, I doubt they're in any danger anytime soon.


Well, there are no hard-and-fast rules to follow. If they'd stuck with Ballmer, he might have flown them straight into the mountain.

Did they have unique advantages even in the bad times? To my mind, they still had the allegiance of the big companies, which can be pretty sticky.


Microsoft produces critical infrastructure. Could it dwindle to become a sort of legacy supplier, keeping the lights on at thousands of industrial facilities?

As soon as the millions of niche use cases on the low end of the compute market get absorbed by ChromeOS or MacOS, which is not likely soon.




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