Windows historically came installed with Pinball, Minesweeper, Solitaire.

I would guess that a substantial base of Windows users plays games on their PC. It's rare to find a popular game that isn't enhanced by the internet.

I do tend to agree that maybe Professional versions should not come with these _links_, but even a large portion of professional users play games on their company issued laptop. I haven't installed Windows Server before but I would be surprised if that featured game links.

Minesweeper, Mahjongg, and Chess are a little different because they were developed by Microsoft, with no motive beside adding value to the operating system, at least for users who find value in them.

It is disgusting, but I fail to see how e.g. the team working on the C++ compiler should be ashamed for something another completely seperate team was forced to do by management (assuming something like that is responsible for this). In my opinion MS has gone too big for that, with a bunch of seperate departments almost acting as standalone entities (i.e. seperate companies) who can take a lot of decisions on their own without much interference between them, just all sharing the MS name. E.g. there's the research going on, there's VS/Office/Windows etc.

I mean, they take up some space but don't affect system behaviour, like some old windows OEM bloatware did.