[shiroiushi]

Why should they listen? Will doing these things improve their profitability? I don't think so. Having this annoying stuff (telemetry, forcing Edge, etc.) is good for Microsoft's profitability, and that's all that's important. If users don't like it, they can pound sand. It's not like they're going to switch to Linux; if they were really going to do that, they would have done it already in the last 20 years. Microsoft has gotten smart, and realized that all those people swearing "if they do this, I'm finally switching to Linux!" weren't really serious, because they've been saying exactly that for a couple of decades now, and still haven't, so almost nothing they do at this point will actually get them to leave Windows as long as it actually lets them do their work, however poorly and annoyingly.

[timetopay]

The problem with this logic is that users _are_ pounding sand: to macos and ipados, which has been steadily ticking up.

[shiroiushi]

Those defections don't matter. The only thing that matters is MS's profits and stock price, and those are doing great. They can stand to lose a few malcontents and increase profits by squeezing the rest of the users.