Then they will have the users by their balls. Charge money for every click. Insert ads where they see fit. Dynamically adjust prices to squeeze the max amount of money.
Time for quarterly reports? “Sorry our Excel servers are under ‘heavy load’, Excel now costs 4x the usual hourly rate…”
[1] https://www.techradar.com/news/could-windows-12-become-micro...
"The prize-winning Excel service is in high demand right now. We apologize for any delay this might cause. Do you want to become an 'Excel Prime Plus User' with preferential treatment? Just upgrade your subscription now and increase your productivity!"
Sooo don't waste money if you decide to pirate LTSC :)
Wine on linux is really nice these days BTW.
Their primary competitor, Apple, chose the route of programmed obsolescence for the hardware bundled to their OS software and also extreme price hikes for a given hardware performance level.
So, I don't know, pick your poison, I guess. I think it's easy to shit on Microsoft, but still most people prefer their shenanigans to Apple ones from what I see, because at least it's a lot easier on the wallet at the end of the day.
As an historical Apple user, I somewhat prefer this behavior because at least I can work around it. You don't have to use Outlook and all of the Windows "ads" can be turned off, especially if you are willing to pay a bit for a "pro" version. On the other hand, good luck working around Apple extortionate pricing on soldered SSD and RAM. Privacy may be valuable, but that's only true if you are rich enough in the end...
Microsoft always ends up looking like the bad guy, but considering how many people depend on them for easy cheap access to computing (including a lot of government/institutions) it could be much worse.
In fact, my point is that if it was Apple, we would be in big trouble we even less money in the bank while they would try to impose even more restrictions on their products to extract even more cash. At this point you realize that some shenanigans with ads are really not that big of a deal...