Re: Exactly the opposite of what happened 15, 20 years ago:
Actually, that wasn't what happened 25 years ago when PCs started moving into offices.
Before the IBM PC with MS DOS there was a largely hetero environment of hardware and software. Granted in the home tinkerer market CPM was the big player, but you could find damn near anything. And what those home tinkerers found was that they could hack together stuff they couldn't get out of the mainframe boys so they tried to bring their home systems into the office. But when they did so, the Office Guardians of the Corporate Culture said no (for reasons that are well outlined in a recent El Reg article and which have been biting us on the ass in the non-mainframe world for quite a while now). And IBM looked out and saw they were not getting a piece of that pie. So they said 'Let us enter this market and reap while the reaping is good, but note that it cannot be sustained, so don't waste a lot of R&D money on it.' And the minions went forth and spent no R&D money on it and built the first IBM PC. And when the home tinkerers saw it, it was too expensive to buy for home use. But it was an IBM, and they knew that the Office Guardians would say 'It is an IBM, it is good.' And thus they wer able to get their home program brought into the office and accomplish certain things more quickly, but without the coordination truly large organizations require. And as the IBM PC was adopted in some offices other offices saw that they were at a certain type of disadvantage so they adopted them too. And thus the IBM PC came to dominate the Business World. But then Compaq had a vision. In this vision they saw that because there was no R&D money spent on the IBM PC and there was no sales support money either, there were no patents protecting the hardware and the specs had openly been publishes. So they set about making compatible hardware based on the specs, but at a cheaper price. And they needed the same OS, so they went to Microsoft who granted unto them the same license that had been sold to IBM. From that line eventually came the affordable, and then the cheap home computer. And it spread like wildfire across the civilized world until MS was the monoculture of personal computing.
The only reason to buy Microsoft is because everyone else has been buying Microsoft. This isn't new and has been true for the last 15 years. It is the same reason MS has had problems moving away from their DOS base. (Hell, we have a critical app here that still depends on an 8-bit DOS app that the programmers can't find a replacement for.) The advent of pure consumer consumption devices doesn't change that. Goldman Sachs hasn't discovered anything, and they are likely wrong about their assertions.