The goal of msft isn’t to be and efficient steward of your resources, or better enable the user, or to create a platform for game/app developers in hopes of creating a more attractive ecosystem for you.

It’s nothing like any of those things.

The goal of Microsoft is to maximize shareholder returns, and the best way to do that is to abuse their dominant market position while monetizing every aspect of their platform that most people will buy anyway.

I’m not sure how this fits in to the question to be honest.

I don’t doubt the greed, but I don’t see how that pertains to legacy code bloat.

The point is that they have no financial incentive to clean up or prevent bloat, so they don’t.

Linux doesn’t either, but the Linux community operates on principles and passion instead of financial incentives, and so thusly is not similarly bloated.

Ah right, yeah the bloat I’m asking about isn’t so much about all the shit applications they bundle in, but the stuff that remains to maintain compatibility with obscure or legacy hardware/applications.

The financial incentive would be long term user retention, combined with a simplified codebase and performance improvements.

The legacy compatibility is very important for microsoft’s enterprise customers, many of whom are still using some legacy software for aging machinery. A lot of big businesses are slow to move away from legacy software because it always incurs cost. Often they will tell microsoft and other companies they buy products from that compatibility is essential. They won’t invest thousands or millions of dollars to upgrade their aging infrastructure simply on microsoft’s insistence with their new product.

Wouldn’t the aging hardware running that legacy software not be upgradable to the latest Windows versions due to modern hardware requirements anyway?