Why don't they finish actually implementing W11, give it a consistent UI standard and stop investing all their energy in trying to monitor and monetize their already paying users? Maybe then, people will upgrade.
I’d personally rather pay for extremely high quality OS updates, but I know from personal experience that most people don’t care enough to pay. They’d stick with the old OS until they have to buy a new computer, which could be 5+ years.
So for Microsoft, they either have to support large amounts of users on old OS versions or make the upgrades free. Unless Microsoft can start making large profits on the hardware like Apple does, this is really the only business model that makes sense.