In other words, if you really don't want to pay, Microsoft still seems desperate to get you to "upgrade" to Win10... precisely so they can monetise you with ads (and might make more from you eventually even if you never paid for their OS). As a mass-exodus to Linux and macOS curretly seems unlikely, their strategy appears to be winning so far.
... or people just install windows 7 / avoid upgrading to 10. Hard to call that a "win"
Take everything with a grain of salt, but metrics still point to Windows 7 dominance:
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/windows/de...
https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share...
It took me a few hours of research (having never had to add drivers to get a machine to boot into a Windows installer before). I imagine that a lot of other people wouldn't have had any idea where to start.
And even after getting everything working smoothly, the touchscreen doesn't work (no drivers available, and the hardware isn't detected at all; good riddance), and there are some bits of power-management hardware that still show up as question-marks in the device manager.
New hardware will be increasingly difficult to run a reasonable Windows OS on. At least in my case, there were drivers for everything that matters to me.
That claim doesn't stack up. Windows 10, for example, works fine on older hardware. As Microsoft said, they're blocking updates to Windows 7 and 8 if you try to run those OSes on newer hardware.
Wait, what if you were to redirect the download links for the automatic updates to a Linux installer? Assuming Microsoft's security is still as lax as it was during the XP era, you could get this to work without much difficulty.
[1] Secure Boot comes into play only when 1) you use distribution in SecureBoot enforcing mode (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) and 2) want to build your own kernel modules. Then, you have to enroll your Machine Owner Key into UEFI and sign your modules with it. However, building kernel modules is not something that grandma is going to do. For normal use, all the mainstream distributions come with a signed bootloader (shim.efi).
I'm liking lots of things microsoft is doing as of late, but I still don't like a lot of their business practices and they are ruining their operating systems infesting it with ads.