Microsoft is Eating the World

Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant past, Microsoft took over our technological lives as we knew them. Windows OS and Microsoft Office were the gold standard for personal and business computers through much of the early 2000s. This sparked a huge need for competition, and Apple showed up for the fight.

After a number of flopped projects, Microsoft began losing popularity and Apple became the favorite child of business and consumer tech. Then in 2011, while the world was distracted by the smartphone craze, Marc Andreessen famously wrote a claim that “software is eating the world", and he was right. Suddenly we lived in a world where software ate everything in its path. Companies big and small were gobbled up, and even entire industries were transformed. The 2010's proved to be the decade of Cloud and SAAS.

Get ready, because now the tech world is being shaken up again. Microsoft has awoken from its slumber and is on a journey to once again take over the world.

We've all seen the recent headlines surrounding ChatGPT and Microsoft's integration into Bing and the Microsoft 365 suite of products, but this isn't the only thing that is putting them at the top of the food chain. Microsoft has been making it harder and harder to justify using other SAAS products for your business.

As an IT leader and consultant, I'm often tasked with selecting a software product to solve a business need. If a company is not already married to Microsoft for its tech stack, it opens a whole marketplace of options.

Here's a common example of what a tech stack might look like for a company that isn't using Microsoft: