[notyourNMI]

It's almost cute that people still think Windows as a product team cares what individual users want/need/buy. Individual opinions/license purchases don't seem to move Microsoft a millimeter in any direction. As others pointed out, examples abound with the horrible UI intrusions/dumb things that users have to work around just to get work done. My personal pet peeve is this persistent Windows 10 screen dimming/darkening that happens whenever I pull up a terminal no matter the settings changed via UI or registry. Also, having volunteers doing the (not always helpful or even right) troubleshooting for frustrated users isolates the devs from the stupid decisions they or their managers make. (speaking as a software developer myself: devs should be required to work support briefly in the section they'll be developing on so they understand user frustrations).

I believe the reason users still pay is so the price can justifiably be multiplied in bulk corporate purchases, otherwise they'd give it away for free to get more of that sweet, sweet data. So they can copy Google, poorly.