> They talk about improving memory footprint and performance, but simply removing (or making optional) the massive amount of cruft and telemetry in a default Windows 11 install would go miles.

Executive management at MS must be seeing interesting (migration) numbers on their dashboards, so they've gotten involved in white-washing their reputation without changing business strategy, hence the executive-level manifestos and platitudes coming out as of late.

I'm sure they see the EU/Worldwide decoupling from US companies as definitely-going-to-happen and they have no control over that, so retaining US consumers becomes even more important, but the first attempt will be at improving reputation without changing business strategy (ads, data monetization, ai are the future revenue drivers). And only if that fails will the business strategy change.