So... they're a software company? Specifically an OS vendor?
Seriously, how does your description imply anything unethical?
You can't even buy a device today that forces you to use MS. You can always install something else or hack your Windows installation however you want.
> You can't even buy a device today that forces you to use MS
That’s only because they lost that battle.
This is nonsense. Microsoft doesn't ship most hardware running Windows, and there was never a time any of it was locked to Windows.
I installed Linux on dozens of Windows machines starting in the 90s.
By your logic, all software is unethical if it's closed-source. Apple, Samsung, and every phone manufacturer actually do put effort into locking down their hardware, so you must think they're all far more evil than MS.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesnt the free outlook.com (formerly hotmail) still have ads for everybody who doesnt pay? When I log in, I have a banner on the right.
But to your point, maybe the ad is there to annoy people into paying, and less as a source of revenue.
No doubt Microsoft is trying to monetize user data at this point as well, but their empire isn’t built on top of it. The parent comment said they use ProtonMail for personal, So I suspect they only reason they don’t choose that for business also is the weight the Microsoft name still holds.
Many of us got sucked into the Google vortex a while back on the basis they gave us many of the best software options, in many categories. But at this point, there is nothing Google does that you can’t find an alternative of equal or better quality. So if one day a person realizes Google values don’t align with their own, slowly phasing out all Google services can only have a net positive.