I found it jaw-dropping how badly Microsoft handled that release. In some cases, the best way to improve multithreaded performance under Windows was to disable three quarters of the cores. Meanwhile any decent Linux distro scaled to the full core count out of the box.

I wonder to what extent this is holding back computer architecture. Certainly the Wintel cartel has historically back competition from other architectures, but even within x86-land we can see the monopoly power and technical inadequacy of Windows holding back innovation.

Linux supports every architecture known to man. Microsoft pretty much only supports x86. They have no excuse.