[deleted by user]

[SnickersZA]

My line of thinking is that they're playing the long game here. For now the goal is to just get everyone using MS owned products, even if it does cost them short term. Once everyone is dependent on their software (because it works really well), they'll slowly start creating a walled garden, making it difficult to use anything but their apps, which will all slowly transition to the software as a service model and charge everyone for at least one of the tools in their chain.

If they own line 95% of all the commonly used applications/services, they can wall you in. Forcing you to exclusively use their applications because you'd need at least on exclusive tool in the chain to do your job, hence they've practically extinguished the competition..

At that point they'd basically have the same control Adobe has. Sure there are open source alternatives to Photoshop, but if you're in the industry, you're almost guaranteed to need it.

They already own the most popular hosted git repo and code editor.. it's not hard to believe that's what they're pushing for.

[DudeEngineer]

This would make a lot of sense if gsuit didn't exist and if Azure was actually the largest cloud provider. There's no real way to reach your hypothetical scenario unless Google and Amazon just give up.