I expect, want in fact, none of these things on my Windows PC. I do not trust Microsoft with my data, and this was before the last year of them being owned. It may not be right or even logical, but I imagine a ton of other users fit this same archetype. To me windows is the spyware ridden OS I use to pay a handful of games, and it basically always will be.
How do you know you aren't regularly running one (or more) of those? Or at least some stuff last updated sometime between W2K and W7?
Just a consideration: Aren't nearly all users who love the Apple/Mac experience already in the Apple ecosystem? In other words: Should Microsoft not rather assume that making Windows more Mac-like might be a bad idea considering their core customers?
Not sure. Macs are not that available and, in some places, are prohibitively expensive. Others would love the everything-integrated experience while using software that runs only on Windows.
I'm not sure Microsoft even has that "core customer" as neatly defined as Apple (or Linux). Getting a Mac or a Linux box is a deliberate action, whilst, for the end user, getting a Windows box is the default when you get a "generic" computer.
One group I can think of is the corporate administrators, who want to deliver a locked down set of functions to corporate workstations - VPN settings, firewalls, blocked websites, custom update schedules, and so on. That same crowd also orders Macs and Chromebooks with the same goals.
What Microsoft can do is to offer tailored experiences for specific groups - people who want everything to just work (who'll be happy with Skype logging them on on boot, with OneDrive backing stuff up...), gamers who'll definitely not want Skype to interrupt them and who have nothing to back up to OneDrive, but, sometimes, want to record and stream their games, Windows developers who'll spend most of their time within Visual Studio and the MSDN KB (am I dating myself here?), and so on. I'm very sure they have a list of personas already built for that.
At least considering the product policy that Microsoft currently applies to Windows, I tend to doubt that. ;-)
The article mentions the backwards compatibility. Honestly, it never occurred to me to run a binary compiled for Windows 95 on Windows 11 (or 10, which is where I am now). It also mentions dual booting, which is something completely alien to me - this is what VMs are for. When I needed to run Windows on either my Mac or my Linux box, I'd just spin up a small VM with enough brains to run what I needed.
And, since we are talking VMs, WSL 2 is a horrible user experienced compared to a real Linux environment - file sharing with the Windows side is clunkier than it was with WSL 1 (as things don't exist on a single filesystem, and that silly CRLF convention is what Windows expects) or even the venerable Cygwin (which saved me many times when I needed to use a Windows machine). With Macs and Linux you have full Unix environments without any border separating you from the rest of the machine.