There are several parties at this party. One is the person who bought a computer with an operating system on it; possibly they even paid for the operating system itself, though more likely they are using the operating system that came on the computer they're using. Another party is the one who bought a license from microsoft; occasionally they're the same party but more typically it is some sort of vendor who did this. And there's also the party that's giving microsoft money to put advertising in front of the "consumer."
So -- it isn't clear to me who in this context is "always right"
Consider this relationship:
Toyota makes a car to the specifications of general motors, who brands the car as a "Pontiac Vibe" and sells the car to a Pontiac dealership. The Pontiac dealership then sells you the car at mostly a wash because you're also financing the purchase and they want to sell "your" loan to a loan bundler and reseller.
So -- everyone gets a cut, and almost nobody's actually got a direct interest in how the schlub who buys a car feels about the car.
Tesla is a rather famous example of a car manufacturer that doesn't have a dealership model. Do you imagine that GM or Toyota is somehow less interested in how their cars are either liked or disliked by their target audiences than Tesla is? That seems pretty hard to imagine.
Microsoft is selling your eyeballs to advertisers: You are the product not the customer.
Vendors are buying windows from Microsoft and installing it onto a computer and selling that computer to you. You are buying a computer not windows. If you need support you talk to the vendor, not microsoft. The vendor is the customer to Microsoft, not you.
And regarding cars -- car companies make lots of crappy cars and sell them to dealerships who have to buy them regardless of if they want them or not. The dealerships are the customers of the car companies. You are a customer of the dealership. 99% of the time if you've got a problem with the car, the manufacturer is going to be of limited use to you.
> Vendors are buying windows from Microsoft and installing it onto a computer and selling that computer to you. You are buying a computer not windows.
Sometimes people are buying Windows[1].
It is possible to be the customer for the OS and the product for the ads at the same time.
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1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-home/dg7gmgf0kr...
Except - like with the car examples above - eventually customers get pissed off or frustrated enough to switch to a different OS (or car manufacturer).
Thus Apple and Linux distro's picking up a lot of ex-windows users. KDE plays well to this audience. :)
Also, likely microsoft has realized there's zero long term revenue in operating systems -- you'll have been forced to move all your data to their Office 365 environment and will be paying them rent regardless of if you use a windows or a mac or a linux or an oracle desktop.
I think if steam decks gets a good linux desktop, similar to windows in look and feel, that can be run on a desktop, parallel to windows. Its over, very suddenly, very brutal.
And here it is: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos/download?ver=steamdec...
A challenger appears. He is unburdened by the need to advertise. Its super effective.
The individual who buys and reads the newspapaper is referred to as the 'Consumer'.
... or, keep improving the product to the point where most people actually find it useful, which is obviously an option for Microsoft, with cash reserves to fund centuries of development. Find out what the downsides are, and fix them, or offer actually compelling benefits.
Heck, I'm very hard-set against it, but I just heard about Apple starting to offer savings accts with 4.5% interest. If MS started paying that much, with trustworthy security and no upper limit, I might sign up (i.e., if you pay me enough, I might also accept your other parts of the offer).
It must be damn valuable for MS to have us have accounts, and if so, they could actually afford to provide better returns than banks, because the return to MS would be [banking profit] + [network profit].
Not all product ideas can be made desirable and useful no matter how much improvement they get.
You'll also always have some who see through it.
You, a windows 11 licensee, are a captive market for microsoft to sell your eyeballs to advertisers.
"I am going to sell clicks to advertisers and the cost of customer acquisition is negative $10 per customer -- they pay us to get advertised to!"
[0]: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Farfetch%27d_(Pok%C3...
Well, that's what it originally meant. Nowadays it's been twisted to mean reacting to every minor complaint and demand in order to retain existing customers, no matter how unreasonable or costly the effort. Rather than helping increase productivity it's become a weapon to punish subordinate sales staffs.