Microsoft considers their customer base to be corporate IT, PC/laptop companies like Dell, governments, consumer subscriptions, and the gamers who buy their AAA games. And gamers status is a bit tenuous... gaming doesn't really fit in their current revenue generating model, but they spent billions, and they seem unsure what to do. Rumor has it they might stop making/selling the Xbox, and they lost probably millions of Gamepass customers when they raised the price this week. Microsoft did view you & I as customers when they released Win7, but since then many, including their CEO, Nadella, probably wish we'd stick with Apple or Android and leave Microsoft alone. Their revenue comes mostly from the cloud. Their stock prices, which have risen with the AI bubble, are how Nadella & other top execs make most of their money, so to them, laying off thousands to fund more AI makes obvious good sense.
Maybe the biggest bit of evidence that Microsoft doesn't care about individual consumers is Win11's [fake] hardware requirements. Win11 was designed to run on legacy hardware, same as Win10, but they knew ARM powered laptops were coming, that their current Windows revenue stream comes from OEM licenses [e.g., Dell], and so if they could somehow boost new PC/laptop sales, they'd make more money. Originally Win11 wasn't even a new version of Windows. That's not to say they really care what corporate thinks of Windows. It takes a fairly large revolt on the part of corporate IT for Microsoft to actually listen to what anyone has to say.
And Microsoft obviously doesn't want to spend any more resources on Windows than absolutely necessary. Mail worked fine, but they were spending money working on Outlook, which corporate used more than Mail. So they dropped Mail, so they'd no longer have to update it, dropped Outlook for the same reason, and forced the New Outlook, a web app that cost them a fraction of what they were spending. The OneDrive app will soon be following in the same path. Notepad and Paint got AI with preferences for Copilot+ laptops, so they're likely safe. Loads of other legacy features however were dropped rather than spend any money adapting them to Win11's design, with more likely on the chopping block. Burning discs was added at some point to Windows, and like Win7's backup app, was migrated to Win11 as part of the legacy code base. It would probably cost more to strip them out of that code base than it would to update them, so they more or less persist in a somewhat usable state. Microsoft has built up their security software biz quite extensively, pushing corporate to use their AI-based end to end solutions. Windows Defender is somewhere between a minimal subset of that and an afterthought IMHO, with Microsoft hoping that it may be useful to point out that Windows includes Defender as people in power &/or with very large audiences complain about Windows lack of security.
That said, the industry has taken notice of Microsoft's attitudes towards users, with Apple rumored to be working on a laptop in the $600 range, which is the most popular price bracket for Windows laptops, and we might see Google's PC OS next year. They've had some success with Chromebooks, but maybe more importantly, that's led to relationships with PC/laptop makers. They've been working on both combining their Chrome OS with Android, and working on a PC OS, so something new to compete with Windows may well be on the way.
