I'm not sure that in computing history there's ever been the situation we have now of a software vendor owning so much of the market(s) that they can realistically afford to make this kind of move.
Microsoft in the 90s might have been the only company positioned appropriately to try but compared with Amazon, Google, and Apple, they did not have as much of an "in" into people's daily lives the way all three of those companies do today.
Unregulated capitalism leads to the company store, which is I think effectively where GP was suggesting things were headed.
This is the way most of the computing market has worked most of the time. Mainframes and minis were this way, then almost all the workstation vendors had their own CPU architecture and OS (often a flavour of Unix). The only real exception, and I admit it is a huge one, in Wintel but outside that in house hardware/software development in tandem has been the norm.
Furthermore this model is fundamental to the ARM architecture. The whole point is for licensees to develop SOCs with their own custom components on the same die. That's literally what a SOC is.
Windows is a massive “in”, your work and home device, your gateway to the *internet*.
As an aside that is monopolistic behaviour which at least California and EU are in top of. Companies have to be careful exploiting their dominance in an area.
maybe an “in” and dominance are different, if they are it doesn’t matter
Microsoft in the 90s might have been the only company positioned appropriately to try but compared with Amazon, Google, and Apple, they did not have as much of an "in" into people's daily lives the way all three of those companies do today.
Unregulated capitalism leads to the company store, which is I think effectively where GP was suggesting things were headed.