[vee-kay]

Starting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose. Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads. The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers. Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.

[shiroiuma]

They are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do.

A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits.

And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?

[vee-kay]

Oracle did the same cheap dirty trick for profits, when it is bundled adware/spyware (Ask toolbar) by default on its JRE (Java Runtime Installer) used on millions of corporate and student/home PCs, because it knew Java/JRE would already be whitelisted on those machines (Java gets updates, so IT admins tend to whitelist its EXEcutable and its installer (JRE installer), since it is necessary for corporate work (many legacy software depend on Java)).

Suddenly, many IT admins were in a tough spot explaining to many internal customers (including senior management; even CxO's have Java on their office laptops) why their PCs were suddenly flooded with popup ads and even ads on intranet sites (because Ask toolbar integrated into the browser)).

Google used to have a motto/policy of "Do Not Evil", but it silently dropped that approach. It had to do so, because its biggest rivals had already adopted and profited from the evil attitudes, so it too simply followed the evil tide.

The world has always been ruled by the oligarchs (the richest and most powerful people), but in modern era, it is the biggest corporates (especially trillion dollar valuation companies) that call the shots. And they continue do as they please, bending even powerful nations to their will.