It is effectively "free".
People buy a new PC, it comes preinstalled. You don't see an individual line item on your receipt for "Windows OS".
And the vast majority of windows users do it with a prebuilt.
The small number of DIY builders...can upgrade their current Win 10 license, for free.
Single Win 10 or 11 licenses make up a tiny tiny portion of MS profits.
Let's not go into how M$ has at times forced vendors not to sell PCs without Windows pre-installed: it's about as free as sales tax, which comes included on every purchase and is listed, while your brain might omit registering it.
Here in Europe quite a few laptops are still sold without Windows: actually they are sold with a "DOS" or a "Linpus", which for some reason always fails to boot, when you switch them on...
Costing typically €50-100 less, these are often targeted at students, who then get their "free" Windows and Office from the University subsidized by M$, just to make sure that by the time they are ready to enter the workforce, they are addicted to M$ ware and by then it's the employer who has to pay the M$ tax.
M$ learned decades ago that going full throttle after "software piracy", killed their market share, so they changed tracks.
With Trumputin tariffs, drastic erosion of alliances and separation of powers becoming public, the sovereignty issue on who decides what's going on on personal computers will return much harder and unhitching the Google and M$ data siphoning hose from personal, corporate and institutional computing devices will become essential to maintain the essential degree of sovereignty required to survive.
I just spent another few hours testing Bazzite against the family Steam library with the vast majority of titles working rather well, certainly a lot better than I remembered from my last round a year or two ago. These days the Atomic derived read-only nature is actually the bigger issue for me than game compatibility, because 45 years of Unix habits are hard to change: much less of a problem for the rest of the family. KDE is the better Windows GUI than Windows without the Classic Shell, GNOME's fruity cult antics might have cost me a decade in Linux desktop adoption, just as Ubuntu color schemes pushed me to CentOS until IBM turned on the RedLight.
I left dark mode with the arrival of GEM on the PC pretty exactly 40 years ago, with the Ventura publisher as a killer app a year later. I just cannot fathom why people would want to go back to glaring letters on black, ...except that probably the principal intellectual input for those generations was no longer books printed on paper. To me 1000 nits letters on true black OLED are like heavy metal pumped into a science lecture, pure torture at all levels of perception.
(PERHAPS DARK MODE IS THE REAL REASON WHY SOME ELDERLY TURN TO CAPITAL LETTERS TO EXCRETE THEIR MIND?)
I finally ditched all M$-Office last fall and everything money-making has long been M$ free with me and my company for decades.
M$ has always played the long game, trying to turn up the heat so slow that people were cooked before their escape mechanism triggered: they copied that lesson from the Fruity Cult, too.
But Muskovich and Medvedevance together with that inane Co-Plot push have stirred the waves and upped the speedometer probably a bit too much, so whoever still can, may now move.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram