While it may be more journalistically appealing to promote the "Microsoft uses pirated software" angle, keep in mind that cracked does not necessarily mean pirated. They could have paid for it, then cracked it to avoid things like lost hardware dongles or unavailable Internet licensing/activation servers; I've seen this a lot in things like industrial control software, where even brief outages can mean very high lost profits.
Eh, that sort of thing happens all the time. We have customers that are national banks of foreign countries that are running on unactivated or cracked Windows servers.
I would bet that case was a contractor who was using their own equipment. Similar things have bit us in the ass with freelancers that have ripped off stock images and presented them as their own.
Yeah, but you'd expect the golden master .iso of a major Windows release to be examined in greater detail and not sloppily add bloat like that. It's in great contrast to earlier releases like Windows 95 where blinking dots were removed from the task bar to save a few kilobytes of demand paged memory. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031010-00/?p=...
Moore's law has allowed us to be lazy, and things have gotten too complicated for anybody to fully understand everything. I feel like I spend half my time trying to delete old dead code, and I can't keep up.