> Are you implying that the natural tendency of a product is to get worse until it's no better than its competitors?
Yes! And I'll get a little philosophical here but if we really take an eagle's eye view on the source of this problem it's that capitalism insists on growth to keep the machine of prosperity running. On a microcosmic scale you can see this at work inside companies, which must pursue new growth streams as existing markets become saturated. With single digit growth in OS licenses, Microsoft pursues cloud/Office/SaaS to continue offering investors big returns. This leads to the inevitable downward spiral of the quality of former core products and desperate moves to monetize essentially a delivery vehicle to sell SaaS products.
Stepping outside Microsoft for a moment and looking at Apple we can already see this emergent behavior in Apple's pivot to services and the marketing of those services inside its SaaS/subscription delivery vehicles, such as iCloud+, Apple TV, Arcade etc.
Returning to Microsoft, this is why we see Windows licenses now being sold basically for free and Microsoft removing virtually all burdens to a user running an unlicensed OS. It no longer matters to their new core business.
Given this duopoly of OSes with a new service fetish it behooves a user of these OSes to either pay so much money to Microsoft for respectful OS editions they can't help but notice (volume licensing LTSC) or explore alternatives that aren't beholden to these vicious imperatives.