There are a lot of heavy manufacturing tools that are controlled and have their interface handled by Windows under the hood.

They're not all networked, and some are super old, but a more modernized facility could easily be using a more modern version of Windows and be networked to have flow of materials, etc more tightly integrated into their systems.

The higher precision your operation, the more useful having much more advanced logs, networked to a central system, becomes in tracking quality control.

Imagine if after the fact, you could track a set of .1% of batches that are failing more often and look at the per second logs of temperature they were at during the process, and see that there's 1° temperature variance between the 30th to 40th minute that wasn't experienced by the rest of your batches. (Obviously that's nonsense because I don't know anything about the actual process of steel manufacturing. But I do know that there's a lot of industrial manufacturing tooling that's an application on top of windows, and the higher precision your output needs to be, the more useful it is to have high quality data every step of the way.)