Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using their products, you can so easily taste how Microsoft is trying to become an "ecosystem", a "lifestyle brand", a "platform", and so on, and to use their OS as the relentless foot in the door for getting there. To me it's another nail in the coffin of general purpose computing. We've accepted that mobile devices/OSs are not for general purpose computing and expect that they come with a "lifestyle" to hawk, now o…
Microsoft is not, contrary to popular opinion, stupid. MS knew nobody was going to pay $€200+ for an OS anymore. So they had to find another way to monetize Windows.
Since Microsoft made money from new computer sales and those are less frequent they have to move to a subscription type system.