I honestly suspect that most of Microsoft have absolutely no idea what the regular, retail Windows experience is like because neither they nor their customers use it.

If you work at Microsoft you are on an ad free, LTSC variant of Windows that behaves more or less reliably. The IT team handle all the OneDrive stuff for you and make sure that it remains unobtrusive.

Re the second part of my statement, Microsoft only really care about the S500 accounts, the big corporations like, say, Toyota or John Deere. Those guys do not get the ad infested version of Windows. They get something much more elegant and Microsoft outsource any drama by getting favored partners like Accenture and Avanade to deliver it.

You can be a billion dollar corp and not register on Microsoft's radar, being relegated to the "small medium biz" segment. As far as retail users or mom and pop businesses, Microsoft has zero interest in them. These are the people griping on techcrunch and Reddit. They get the ad filled, inscrutably weird versions of Windows.

Nothing is likely to change until Linux gets its act together and delivers a credible threat to Microsoft on the desktop. However it's just as likely that Ubuntu see $$$ and start selling ad space on Ubuntu to "preferred OEM" partners like Dell, whereupon we'll be back to the days of PCs filled with bloatware.

> However it's just as likely that Ubuntu see $$$

This is the bigger problem. There is a financial incentive to make OS suck for everyone but the biggest enterprise clients. If some linux provider started to fill take significant market share from, windows, it would eventually become as bad and for the same reasons. We need a wide field of competition to keep this from happening. The problem is that with all these competing OS variants, none have the resources and user-base to maintain easy compatibility with all the software and hardware being produced. So they all suck a little bit and in different ways. If one did get big enough to manage this, then they will exploit that market dominance through enshittification. It's a never ending battle.