Big dumb corporation doing big dumb corporation stuff. It's so big it can't behave coherently anymore. But it's also so big that it acts like a black hole that sucks all the money towards itself regardless of how stupid, unproductive and wasteful it is being.
This is the norm of what shareholder-driven companies in a situation of monopoly will tend to do. They try to see how much they can abuse their position of dominance on the market to maximize their profits. Microsoft's primary goal isn't to make a good user experience, or even a good OS. Their main goal is to milk as much money as possible from its assets for its shareholders. They've been playing that game for decades, only backtracking when the consumer backlash is strong enough to threaten their sales or when the government threatens to break them up.
On top of that, Microsoft has a long history of letting arrogant elements of top management take control of projects who will then force their "vision" down the throats of their customers who don't want any of it. They will only backtrack once the sales numbers become disastrous enough. Then usually the control returns to more competent people and a decent product tends to result from it. Think how Windows Vista lead to Windows 7. And how Windows 8 lead to Windows 10. Or even how the XBox One was originally designed and marketed as some sort of stupid way to watch NFL games on your TV with Kinect controls until they realized they were losing the console war and then started treating it like a gaming console again.
Right now my computer isn't supported by Windows 11 so I have some time. But seeing this crap coming eventually in my future, I started dual booting Linux Mint to see if I could live with it. Turns out I like it better than windows. I haven't booted my window partition in weeks. When I finally upgrade my computer it will probably be running solely on Linux now and maybe have Windows 7 running in a virtual box for the very few programs I still need it for.
None of this would have happened had Microsoft not pushed their corporate enshitification past my threshold. Thanks Microsoft.
This is something that sneaks up on you as well. And all that started a few years ago when I finally decided to get myself my first smartphone and tried to optimize data usage and battery life. I then realized that not only some apps and "system processes" were using battery and data when not in use, but that there wasn't even given a way for me to stop it from happening. I also got creeped out when I moved to work in another building and Facebook started giving me friend suggestions of people who worked there. Location wasn't even enabled on my phone.
And now today I have no mainstream social media account, run GrapheneOS on my phone, Linux on my computer and have migrated to almost entirely FOSS software and apps. I have become the crazy privacy obsessed weirdo.
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