"It's easy. Just add a cog icon for settings!"

Then, there's the whole free/ad supported model wherein you need an MS account, etc. I don't want to be integrated into your cloud metaverse. I don't want OneNote. I don't want Teams. I don't want to go through a whole phony tablet-like experience to get to the stuff I need.

I just want to use my machine as the productivity/dev tool I purchased.

I think they fundamentally no longer understand what the product is or should be.

On the contrary, I think they know what the product is quite well: it's you. All the ads they're shoving into everything are evidence that even if you're paying for it, you are still the product being sold.

But, in terms of delivery, form-factor, packaging, etc., they have no idea how to pull it off with any coherence.

I've always assumed the "let's profile and sell the data" was a either a bubble waiting to pop in the face of something GDPR-alike, or a tail-wag-the-dog scenario where they're gradually killing $100-per-sale products for 30-cents-per-user-per-month of new revenue. Would be fascinating for both consumers and investors to see what dollar figures they're using.