If you engage with corporate America at all, you'll find that Microsoft is not only relevant, but immutably ingrained into the DNA of the company. Office, SharePoint and SQL Server are not to be trifled with in corporate America - do not make the mistake of discounting their relevance or significance in how work gets done in the VAST majority of companies with >1,000 employees here.
> Microsoft is not only relevant, but immutably ingrained into the DNA of the company.
For the current generation, perhaps. There was a time Microsoft reigned pretty much alone, where there were no other viable options. During that time, Microsoft defined what a PC was and dictated what everything around one looked like.
That's not the case anymore, and it hasn't been for quite some time. Where you find Microsoft is much like where you expected IBM mainframes to be in the 90's - in high-inertia systems. It's too difficult (and, frankly, not that cost-effective) to convert your documents to other formats or to cloud-based office apps. What you gain from it is not enough. It's too difficult to move your AD users. It's too difficult to port your apps to use other databases after you fell for writing stored procedures in TSQL for everything.
Mainframes are not dead yet and will stay around for a while. Microsoft will stay around for some time too, but it will never again dictate what a computer is.
After all, if you look at a chicken really close, you'll realize dinosaurs are still around too.
