The alternative explanation is that your view is simply an opinion, one that is not shared by others. Why must it be some kind of conspiracy theory of Microsoft trying to "buy" goodwill? They certainly have goodwill from our company. We're in biotech and the backwards-compat of Windows has saved us from re-buying new versions of very expensive LOB software. No other OS has the level of binary compatibility of Windows, and commercial software is not guaranteed to work across OS versions.

Windows as a dev box is a tiny niche use-case that is over-represented on HN.

>Meanwhile I can simply avoid Google products.

That maybe true for you, but for most people, its far easier to avoid Windows than Google.