They are greedy, but not stupid

The difference between greedy and stupid grows smaller every time the shareholders demand a profit. The only proof you need of that is tracking the OS development from win7 to win11.

The logic "We know you guys pay $120 for a license but here's ads on your lockscreen" was called stupid 10 years ago.

Then, "We know you guys pay $120 for a license and deal with forced updates and lockscreen ads, but here's a framework for ads in your file explorer" was called stupid a few years ago.

Now here we are listening to them say, "We know you guys pay for a license and deal with ads all over everything you're doing with mandatory updates and setting reversion when we don't like what you're doing, but we're also gonna charge you $10/month indefinitely" and saying to ourselves that they can't be that stupid.

The reality is that there's no reason to push a new version of windows that doesn't make them more money. This is that.