Lots of companies reached monopoly status because they were simply better than the competition.
The point of breaking up monopolies is not to make a moral statement about the company, but because we've found that monopolies are generally bad for society.
Is it really though? Bing has been consistently worse than Google over the years. Maybe our definition of vendor lock-in needs to change.
Honestly at this point it doesn't even matter how good Bing is - we've been unconsciously trained to work with Google's algorithm in particular and they just have a de facto monopoly on the mental process a person goes through to formulate a search. Everyone's workflow everywhere will be worse and take more time if they voluntarily stop using Google, that's not what I consider a fair competitive landscape.
I interpreted 'few decades ago' to mean, roughly, within 30-40 years or so. Second half of the 20th century at the very least. (I'm not being pedantic for the fun of it, let alone because I want to downplay the atrocities that have been committed. I want to know if I'm ignorant of some important recent history; if not, I guess I want to point out that our recent history isn't quite as bad as the parent comment seemed to indicate.)
I'll give you mobile, but how did it lose any of the others in your list? Edge + IE maintain about 25% of browser market share compared to under 10% for Firefox on desktop. Bing is somewhere around 30% of the US search market depending on whose stats you believe and generated $1.8B last year, and growing. And .NET + visual studio are still very popular in the large enterprise space. Azure (not in your list) is also doing quite well in the cloud space, taking market share away from AWS to get to about 20% last quarter.
If your measure of "losing" is "not #1" then everyone is a loser in at least one of your categories, especially Apple.
Windows is still the de-facto standard x86 and x64 OS, powering everything PC-like from home desktops and office desktops to industrial control PCs, kiosks, ATMs, cashier systems and so on. I don't see this changing in the next 20 years, unless Microsoft make a concentrated effort to completely break Windows.
They are a fairly close 2nd in cloud computing, and growing faster than AWS.
And remember that Oracle is an enormous company just by focusing on enterprise, but MS is way larger just in enterprise. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc.
And even though they are a very distant second in search, that product alone produces more revenue than most companies can ever dream of. It is actually a huge financial success.
Yep. Microsoft has a huge dominance in personal computers and office suits, two of the most profitable product lines of the past 25 years, and this does not look like changing anytime soon.
Hopefully they'll get to alternative tech such as DAGs like the block lattice of Nano or Tangle of Iota.
Nano in particular could use a fiat ramp as the first and only crypto to be instant and feeless. Nano could be the one that takes cryptos mainstream - which is Coinbase's mission statement as well
DAG-only chains are very experimental and have unresolved game theoretic vulnerabilities.
IOTA resolves it for now with a centralized coordinator while Nano seems to just be counting on no one attempting to exploit its vulnerabilities until its developers come up with a solution.
They are not ready for major commercial use and there's no guarantee they ever will be.
If a DAG-only protocol can be shown to be secure, it could be a major breakthrough for distributed ledger scalability.
the scale at China can do things is different from japanese as a function of its population. 10% of japanese population investing abroad in an under connected world in the 80s is vastly different to 10% of Chinese buying up real estate in an connected world with access to lots of resources and information Japanese in the 80s simply didn't have.
Chinese also immigrate into other countries in vastly higher numbers than Japanese.
The japan, china comparison is close to false equivalence
There hasn't been much of discussion or writing about the extinction of cultures, syncretism, open border civs at the hands of Islam.
Greek / Roman / Indian influence in Eurasia to Indonesia is probably another tragedy that the world forgot.
Only pockets like Bali remain from that era now.