Microsoft branched out over a decade ago and as such became a very useful arm of the US national security apparatus. Reason countries like China, Russia, and Iran have begun efforts to ban Windows on government computers while putting resources into state-maintained Linux distributions.

It used to be the case that Microsoft was just a software company until Microsoft realized third party malware protection and firewall software was half the reason most Windows installs were an unstable mess. To remedy this Microsoft branched out into threat analysis and protection. Ironically this has resulted in Microsoft, via the telemetry they collect through Windows Defender, having one of the most complete pictures of activity involving computing devices. Third party companies only really have data from what’s collected by whatever protection software they have managed to bamboozle customers into installing on their devices while Microsoft is able to have data from almost all Windows devices. Microsoft also has a sizeable footprint in the server and edge computing space, which they also cover with Windows Defender for server or Linux.