I preferred them served on floppy disks. 5 inches too!

Maybe if they made a better operating system that wouldn't be the case.

At this point Apple has a structural advantage over Microsoft in that Apple doesn't need to monetize their operating system to be profitable, as they're funded by hardware sales. That frees them up to provide a better user experience because they don't have to find way to make money off of their users. Not many companies are in a similar position, where they can recover software development expenses solely through hardware sales. There are a handful that could in theory, but they seem to lack the willingness.

It seems like Apple has largely forgotten that; a hardware company seeking to maximize value for their hardware would, for example, tolerate (if not outright encourage) alternative operating systems on said hardware instead of using "security" as an excuse to maintain a tighter and tighter grip on a walled garden of software. The App Store is lucrative enough that it's sucked in the rest of Apple; instead of making hardware for hardware's sake, Apple's hardware is increasingly a funnel into that App Store ecosystem.

Likewise...

> The biggest reason they’re trashing up their OS with advertising and other crap these days is that they now make a lot less money from Windows licenses than they used to.

You'd think a company whose bread and butter is software and services would understand that pissing off customers ain't exactly a winning strategy for making money off those software and services.

I'd also question the idea that they're making significantly less money on Windows licenses than before. Yeah, not very many people are buying retail copies of Windows like they were back in the day, but there's still plenty of volume from desktop/laptop OEMs (in spite of the perennial claims that mobile devices have killed the desktop) and plenty of volume from enterprise customers (which is arguably Microsoft's money tree, far more so than anything consumer-facing). Microsoft's probably perfectly fine with Windows Home Edition (and even, to an extent, Professional Edition) being a loss leader of sorts if it means maintaining mindshare such that enterprises instinctively pick Windows Enterprise Edition and Windows Server for their business needs, and especially if they instinctively pick those running on Azure. Shoving a bunch of ads and bloatware into their flagship OS is entirely unnecessary from that perspective.

The ads and bloatware are more likely from the other side of Microsoft's strategy: competing with Google on the ad delivery and search engine front. There's growing pressure from the Bing side of things to use the consumer versions of Windows as a funnel into Bing - as manifested in everything from the Start Menu to the incessant demands to use Edge as the default browser (which just so happens to use Bing as its default search engine).

There are countless other examples of this tendency of accidental goldmines sucking in the rest of a company's products and turning them into funnels. Valve is a notable case, with Steam evolving from a tool to support Valve's bread-and-butter of PC games to Valve's bread-and-butter in and of itself - and with Valve's software and (more recently) hardware projects serving primarily as funnels into the Steam ecosystem.

It’s a terminal phase you see in a lot of companies. Phase 1 is mega growth in user base. Phase 2 is innovation to try to sell as much as possible to the base, but mostly steady state. Phase 3 is shady monetizing and dark patterns to try to squeeze the last drops of revenue out of the base before dying.

It resembles the lifecycle of a star actually.