No, AFAICS that part is some combination of trying to mitigate the total cost of {free OS, no-upgrade cost}, and wanting some of the fun information companies like Google get from their more invasive telemetry.

I understand but that makes Windows 10 pretty toxic. I think people would be less bothered (or less people would be bothered) if they were upgrading their users to an awesome OS. In my opinion they are upgrading their users to a piece of shit OS designed to monetize their users. That to me is an "evil" behavior.

Well, technically Win10 looks better and is more awesome than Win8 (which I'd call a half-assed UI that got stuck in the middle of thinking "I'm on a PC" and "I'm on a phone". But otherwise, your point stands. Especially compared to Win7, the gains for users are not obvious.

I agree that it makes Windows 10 highly toxic and unlikely to be touched, and that it's a horrific behavior.

I just think it came about as a result of a number of rational and ethically ~neutral decisions, rather than the level of deliberate malice and anticompetitive practice the Microsoft of the 90s had.

Who cares for the motivation (outside of MS)? End result is identical.

Understanding the motivation and decisions that led to an end result allows you to better gauge whether they're likely to, say, change their stance on a topic, or other decisions they're likely to make going forward.

For example, I submit that it is extraordinarily unlikely that Microsoft will actually end the Win10 upgrade program on July 29th, because their primary goal is to migrate as many people away from their aging older platforms as possible, onto a platform they can find ways to monetize into infinite incremental upgrades.

In other words, whether they're doing it to be Eeeeevil (unlikely), or for profit (probable), the result is still the same: "YOU WILL SUBMIT TO WIN10, YOUR LORD AND MASTER"

Free, yeah right. I'm pretty sure that I have paid the Windows Tax on every (non-server) computer that I ever bought.

And wait for the next shoe to drop. MS is going to want to get paid for this "service"(ads & metrics aren't enough, MORE is always the goal). Despite the cheers of the marketeers, this SaaS is not perpetually "free". Thw more people trapped, the more that will subscribe when the extortion...er...subscription comes due.