Yep, you're absolutely correct. Services are where the money comes from these days, and Satya et al show with their actions that they consider the Windows value prop to be as a sales driver for those services.

It's simplicity itself to attribute the revenue growth, and very difficult to link ads to negative sentiment leading to abandonment.

No doubt they see Apple's relentless iCloud spamming as validation, but it's grating to get spam from an OS that you already paid for.