I was thinking about making a topic for it but this should do.
I'm a bit in two minds about the whole software thing. I don't ever believe in monopolies and I think Steam branching out might in the end make things worse for consumers.
I don't really know what to think, myself. On the one hand, I don't like monopolies unless they're tightly regulated, and I don't like organizations that are as 'silent' as Valve is.
On the other hand, I very much favor Valve holding the digital gaming monopoly over EA, or MS, or any publicly-held corporation. Corporations have to, by law, focus all efforts on maximizing shareholder value. It's literally illegal for them to prioritize consumers over shareholder profits.
Valve, being privately held, can do what it wants. That worries me in itself, but I take comfort that, over the ten(?) years that Steam has existed, Valve has shown that it does care about their customers. They don't always do the right thing, but I think the record shows that they try to.
My biggest technical issue with them is in their internal culture of 'work on what you want to.' I think it leads to boring but necessary stuff getting shortchanged. Case in point: the Steam Client. It should be far ahead of where it currently is.
Oh my, they've finally added freely customizable install locations for steam games.
Woot! We only started asking for this flexibility ten years ago. Now that's service!