Is Microsoft the most important company in the world?

Question

Microsoft is the developer of the Windows operating system, which powers almost every PC on Earth. It is also the creator of Word and Excel, which are critical tools to almost every organization.If Facebook collapsed overnight, the world would not be very different.If Netflix collapsed overnight, the world would lose a large number of movies and shows.But if Microsoft collapsed overnight, the consequences across the economy would be felt by everyone.Thoughts?

theandrewbailey · Accepted Answer

Probably not.Microsoft runs Azure, and that underpins quite a bit of internet-based services. But Google seems to be the king of internet services and most smartphones, and Amazon (along with the world's biggest store) has AWS, which owns even more backends than Azure. (Remember US-East going down? What if that was permanent?)I'm struggling to find analogues to other industries. If a big oil company shut down tomorrow, the world would be in a lot of hurt, but other companies would likely buy the existing operations and infrastructure and resume operations. If Tesla or Toyota were gone, people would buy some other brand.

compressedgas · Answer

But only now as they have forced everything to be online. Before the continued existence of Microsoft as a company was not a requirement for the software they had released to continue to work.

tgflynn · Answer

Good open source alternatives exist for everything you mentioned. There would be some temporary pain if MS disappeared but the world would adapt and move on.

dotcoma · Answer

Google or Amazon (AWS) are probably more important.