The first version of either C or C++ I worked with used a Borland development environment. It doesn't matter that Borland is long gone, I suspect that anything I wrote back then would compile either without issue or with only minor correction on a modern compiler. Admittedly my stuff was very simple as it was student code, but I expect that many of the libraries available from Borland had equivalents from other developers.

The Games division is net -300-400M over the last 12 years, up significantly since Q4 2012 where they were net -3B and the XBox One's losses are significantly smaller than the previous two generations at the same point in the cycle despite the recent price cuts. I'm not sure how much knowledge sharing there's been between the gaming division and the Azure division, but if the MS marketing is anywhere near the truth then it's likely that at least some of that groups significant profitability was gained through experience in the gaming division (kind of like how GE can lose money on the generating part of a power plant but make money on the financing or vice versa depending on how they want to structure the deal).

I'll believe it if we get another 20 years of the same behavior, or they lose dominance in total OS market share and release Office, even as a paid application, on open source platforms.

I remember OS/2 Warp ads in print magazines. The ads featured a Robinson Projection map of the world, with arrows to specific areas and a blurb about the OS/2 user in that area.

I mused with my friends, "hey, it's a map of all of the OS/2 users in the world!"

So you're saying that they learned from Digital:Convergence and the Cue Cat Scanner debacle?

Once the thing is no longer in one's possession there's a loss of a certain amount of control. Microsoft avoided this becoming epidemic by not handing out Xboxes for free, as most people weren't going to pay several hundred dollars to immediately wipe and install a different OS on it, but absolutely would have if they'd been free. People would have convinced anyone and everyone they knew to get a free one to give to them.

This would have made the Cue Cat fight look like nothing.

Huge technical companies used to run incubator programs in-house to do this kind of development. Most of our now-stable development tools and platforms originated in just such incubators. Palo Alto, Bell Labs, IBM Research, all paved the way for robust tech without forcing it on the public before it had at least been Alpha-tested.

Now Alpha versions are released as something to try to use, and Beta versions are sold. That's just not right.

IBM went through this in the eighties and nineties, when they ultimately lost the PC market. Obviously PCs if we include all devices that run PC operating systems are still going strong despite this. If we include things that aren't considered PCs like keyboard-lacking tablets and phones, then it's absolutely roaring.

Computing will survive Microsoft losing its dominance over multiple simultaneous markets.

Viewing documents is just about the only thing that web browsers excel at. That web browsers have been a critical vulnerability in security against malware and viruses is proof that how they're implemented is terrible.