I don’t disagree, I think you’re right. I can just identify with folks trying to slowly de-google their lives, I’ve been on a similar mission around a year. The Microsoft name does still carry a lot of weight in the business world, so I suspect that’s the only reason the parent is still partially using them. If it were me I’d go ahead and go full protonmail (or others), but I get the reluctance.

> trying to insert themselves as a middleman between you and device in as many ways as possible and collect toll fees

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.

Unethical part is having oems ship all their devices with proprietary apis and software that is black box.

> You can't even buy a device today that forces you to use MS

That’s only because they lost that battle.

> Unethical part is having oems ship all their devices with proprietary apis and software that is black box.

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.