> Over time, Windows Lite becomes the main, and only, version of Windows. Development and maintenance costs fall, and somehow Microsoft makes more money than they ever did on an OS.

Looking from the outside, it doesn't seem that Microsoft treats Windows as an isolated product anymore with a balance sheet of sales versus development costs. Rather, it's an advertising billboard for their other money-making products like Edge, Copilot, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, and at some point Candy Crush of all things(?). In fact this isn't isolated to just Windows or Microsoft either. SwiftKey pushes you to use OneDrive, Google (search engine) famously pushed Google products and there were antitrust discussions about that. Advertising was just some annoying thing that was necessary to power free web services but now it's infiltrated the very core of our day-to-day technology. Until we can get proper antitrust enforcement, we'll only see technological stagnation get worse as more products become boring billboard monopolies with little incentives to get better.