I agree but I'm not sure it's just microsoft- meta's instagram, whatsapp and quest are all acquisitions of already sucessful products. Oracle are similar.

I think, up to a point, and especially in the US where antitrust is pretty lax, it's a very safe investment to just buy other already sucessful companies.

The most glaring example in recent memory would be the amazon monopoly and the evidence i submit is diapers.com

with enough money, you can fund your investments to strategically take down every mom and pop.

amazon can’t take on every consumer vertical simultaneously, but they used their funds to drive diapers.com into the red, because as a parent you’re scrwed either way and comparing food to diapers, will buy the cheaper diapers instead of the cheaper food.

amazon wanted diapers.com

diapers.com said, we’re good this isn’t a billion dollar enterprise, but it pays the bills.

amazon bought it after making sure they couldn’t actually use it to pay the bills.

Hell, even Sql Server wasn't originally developed by Microsoft. They have taken it a long way since though.

Same story with Azure. All the good services are acquisitions, rest is low quality feature catch-up with AWS augmented by a terrible IAM system.