Internal metrics can be cooked to show anything. I read somewhere that "if you torture the data enough, it will confess". Whatever oxygen wasters are pushing for this crap will cook the data in such a way to push for their idea (as their salary depends on it) while "conveniently" not putting forwards data that shows otherwise.
I think you can track pretty well with just the device ID alone, but you combine it with other identities like location information, IP address, cookies, login information and so on. Is that why Windows 11 recently made it impossible to bypass creating an MS account?
You estimate how many people use computers and how many people use computers you make. When you subtract the two, you get how many people use computers that your competitors make.
Not every “internal metric” is something you can measure directly.
I think you raise a very important point. What if it's economically better for you to let men have sex with your wife for money? If you _don't_ do this, you're just sitting on untapped value.
Not a fan of the analogy, I like to think that would be her own decision, not her partner's.
Anyway, companies are capitalist entities, so all that ultimately matters for them is to make more money. The majority of decisions happen along the axis of short term revenue vs long term revenue (e.g. not ruining your brand, not getting fined etc).
In an environment of insecurity and fear, I've seen companies focus more on the short term, since it's less speculative. But it sure doesn't look very good from the outside.
Of course they are. It's just not practicle to track long-term consumer sentiment around Microsoft, and life-time customer spending. So they track something else and convince themselves it's close enough.