Let's see some more cola hypocrisy 1834

Microsoft has become the great consolidator of technology on the desktop and server. This is a clbuttic role that large corporations have always performed and is a necessary function, IMO, for technical progress. It is true that new ideas and trends in software are usually developed outside of Microsoft and the other large software companies. These innovations produce a flash of acceptance and come to the notice of the large companies that are in the same fields. The normal course of events is for the large companies to pick the winners in these markets and adopt the technology and promulgate it to the broad middle market areas. That provides a source of ready reward for the innovators and a vehicle for effectively distributing the technology to the entire market.

In doing so, the price naturally comes down. In the case of Microsoft, it is usually incorporated into the Windows infrastructure and serves to keep the overall Windows pricing stable.

High-sounding, but not very descriptive of reality. Government funded and academic funded initiatives abound in software technology and many things that are common today had their start in these roots. However, there are many things that have not been adopted by Microsoft or other large companies that remain today in disuse, abandoned and forgotten. Someone has to pay the piper for playing a tune loud enough to be heard by all and that role has always been the commercial, for-profit company that recoups its expenses by selling the technology to the market. The hairy-eared crowd has repeatedly told themselves that they are the true innovators, but they would wither and die on the vine without the rest of the story being told to all. The innovators are naturally introverted and lack the skills to bring their inventions to the people who can use them. That takes marketing.

Microsoft was unique mostly because there was no large company interested in taking the personal computer software platform to the broad middle market as a product. There was no one ready to pay Microsoft a few hundred million bucks for their DOS business, so they had to evolve it themselves and the rest is history.