[majormajor]

What if it doesn't survive and 70% of the people who were in the Kingdom end up in worse, arbitrarily-ruled, small despotic fiefdoms instead? And only 10% end up being better off by being lucky enough to have landed in the high-trust+high-competence small group?

Or, switching to consumer products vs company revenue/profit or kingdoms, and grounding in a specific example: people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux? And "well they could just learn how to [code or configure text files or whatever]" for these purposes counts as worse off, IMO - more time spent on something that used to kinda-sorta-at-least-work-predictably for them.

[gf000]

> people love to hate Windows, but how many of them would actually be better off if the options were just Mac (still expensive, still niche) or Linux?

I don't know, but Windows has becoming increasingly worse at everyday usage. I swear Linux has better suspend/sleep functionality now, doesn't sneaky restart randomly (yeah, just because you reopen an explorer window but none of my other, actually important programs will definitely make people notice), doesn't take a minute to react to an unlock attempt several times a day for no reason on even very performant hardware..

So yeah, I think many would be better off with Linux.

[sidewndr46]

Your comparison isn't very good as Microsoft Windows undergoes perpetual change and churn for the sake of doing it. This breaks existing workflows along the way. As a product it was effectively complete by the time Windows 2000 was released, having successfully integrated what was then considered state of the art technology to develop a practical operating system based on the principals known at the time. All it ever needed from there forward was maintenance updates and kernel updates to enable new hardware level technology to be harnessed by software.