You surely jest!

Individual users are not customers of Microsoft in any meaningful sense. Microsoft sells the OS mostly to companies who install it on machines so that the end user buys a computer with Windows already installed.

If MS wanted to keep me as a customer they would have provided a proper upgrade path for all the millions of lines of VB6 code that are out there and they would create an IDE that has a usable editor.

I seriously question that presumption. I think Microsoft is generally trying to satisfy enough of my needs to keep me in their ecosystem while extracting as much value as they possibly can (within legal, technical and business constraints) from collecting data on me, pushing ads, etc.

I'm certainly not saying Microsoft are "more malign" (by whatever moral standard) than hackers out to steal people's money, however, by virtue of using Windows, I automatically have a degree of exposure to Microsoft that can only be mitigated rather than eliminated altogether. My exposure to ransomware and other non-targeted attacks by non-state actors is vastly smaller, and much easier to mitigate.

I am under no illusions about my ability to withstand targeted attacks by more competent parties, but that isn't a particularly significant concern to me.

Yes. And there is no /s on this comment.

We don't use much recent Microsoft software because we no longer trust it. They are going down a path we don't want to follow.

With the older OSes that we do still use, principally Windows 7, we are similarly sceptical about updates, and typically we only apply necessary security patches now.

[Edit: For whoever is downvoting a lot of the comments with this sort of sentiment, you might consider that objectively we have had far more downtime as a result of bad updates from Microsoft than as a result of malicious actions by hackers over recent years, and I doubt we're alone in that.]

I haven't seen it put that way before. You're not alone.

One of the recent update cycles had some kind of interaction the video drivers on several of my machines, resulting in monitors connected via DisplayPort intermittently failing to wake up following a screen blank. The current workaround is for users to reach around the back of their monitor, unplug and replug the power. I burned an entire day on that one, plus the continued frustration.

Knock on wood, but I can't remember the last time I had to scramble for a security incident or malware outbreak.

So in reality we do have more concern about Microsoft's update channel, which has a trusted, straight-shot channel directly into the core of our system than we do random Joe hacker who had to bypass our NAT, find a zero-day, etc.

From a secure point of view, Windows update operates within the secure zone with root privileges. Of course that's more concerning if you don't trust it that an external hacker.

And while I'm sure there are many definitions by which I could be called "incompetent" (as could you or anyone else), I'm especially intrigued to know how the rather isolated setup I described would present a danger to anyone.