> I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private

Why would they do this? It makes zero sense. There would be zero (or really negative) ROI for doing as you suggest here. They already have a near-monopoly on desktop OSes, and these improvements you want aren't going to change that or improve the profits they get from the Windows business. It would have been colossally stupid for them to spend a ton of money making Windows "better" instead of what they did, which was to spend money on other projects, and to inserts ads and other annoyances into Windows while doing the bare minimum and also gutting their QA team. MS isn't losing any money on Windows from security problems, ads, or any other things you might think are problems.

>just to prove that "the big boys" make money on selling actual products, not their users.

Except that wouldn't have worked, because that's not what makes money now. The users have proven they don't care about high-quality products, especially for OSes.

I just rediscovered the difference between the two this morning.

I was trying to find some half-remembered meme images to share with a friend, and I couldn't find it in ddg. appending "!g" and... first 10 results are correct. It's remarkable how good google is when searching for things that are popular, and how far it's fallen for non-popular specific technical queries.

> but I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private and then thrown Bing in Googles face without the ads and tracking

I too wish more companies existed that didn’t sell out their users but what you’re asking for was never Ballmer’s Microsoft’s MO, and it doesn’t seem to be the case for Satya Nadella’s Microsoft either based off the reporting I’ve been reading on the increased enshittification of Windows 11 over time.