Technology

Microsoft

Concerning Defining pattern Dependency Stack Most serious finding The layer underneath the product is Microsoft’s to change Methodology CHI/CVI v2.0 Assessed as of 19 August 2026

Microsoft’s product engineering is frequently generous. Its distribution engineering is consistently self-serving.

Microsoft 365 Family costs roughly 6% less in real terms today than the plan it replaced in 2013, and covers six people instead of five. Most enterprise list prices are still below their inflation-adjusted launch prices. Windows 10 received a full ten-year lifecycle and then the first consumer security-update extension Microsoft has ever offered — free by two routes, now running to October 2027. Value case leads this page That is why the CVI is 84 and why this page does not argue that Microsoft is gouging anyone. The finding is structural and it sits one layer down: Microsoft rarely raises the price of the thing you already bought. It changes what is default, what is required, what is bundled and what is difficult to avoid — and then monetizes the dependency that architecture creates. Microsoft’s own 10-K states the strategy as a growth opportunity: “Leveraging Windows to fuel our cloud business, grow our share of the PC market, and drive increased engagement with our services like Microsoft Edge, Bing, Copilot, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Consumer, XBOX Game Pass, and more.” Microsoft FY2026 Form 10-K

CHI64/100Concerning

CVI84/100Exceptional

CFS+20Fair

CFS = CVI − CHI (84 − 64 = +20). “Fair” does not mean customer-friendly. It means an exceptional value score and a high hostility score very nearly cancel. Microsoft is not characterised here as a customer-friendly company, and not characterised as a bad product — both halves are the assessment, and a reader who takes only the 84 or only the 64 will misread the relationship in opposite directions. Methodology →

Pattern AnalysisAll patterns →

DEFINING

☰

Dependency Stack

STRONGLY SUPPORTED

▣

Advertising Creep

STRONGLY SUPPORTED

◫

Intellectual Disrespect

SUPPORTED

⇆

Default Flip Monetization

Pattern Heatmapⓘ

Dependency Stack*

Advertising Creep

Intellectual Disrespect

Default Flip Monetization

Reference-Price Erasure

Subscription Creep

Rentalization

Dependency Principle

Price Creep (segments)**

Algorithmic Replacement**

Artificial Scarcity†

Preference Amnesia†

Loyalty Pricing†

Comm. Overrideable Scarcity†

Justify the Exchange†

Compensation Ratio†

Not established

Strongly supported

Cells encode this assessment’s own classification tiers — defining, strongly supported, supported, narrow, not assigned — and are not a per-pattern severity ranking. * Dependency Stack is the defining pattern and Microsoft is the index’s type specimen for it. ** Narrow or segment-dependent: recorded at reduced weight and kept out of the pattern strip. † Tested and not assigned to Microsoft — see What we did not conclude.

The verdict

Microsoft’s most valuable distribution channel is not an ad network. It is Windows.

The products are, by a wide margin, worth what they cost. Win32 software written thirty years ago still runs. The family productivity plan is cheaper in real terms than it was in 2013. The developer tooling is free and open-sourced. None of that is a preamble to the criticism — it is the reason the criticism is narrow enough to be worth making.

Because what Microsoft changes is rarely the price of what you own. It is the setup screen that no longer offers a local account, the folder that quietly became a cloud folder, the AI feature that arrives at renewal with the bill, the cheaper plan that lives inside the cancellation flow, and the licence that costs more on someone else’s cloud than on Microsoft’s. CMA final decision, 31 Jul 2025

Fair. Not friendly.

CHI v2.0 dimension breakdown

Customer Restriction15/20

Behavioral Manipulation17/25

Trust & Transparency10/15

Information & Privacy9/15

Revenue Extraction13/25

13 + 17 + 15 + 9 + 10 = 64/100. Shown in order of proportional severity rather than methodology order, because the ordering is the argument: Microsoft’s hostility concentrates in Customer Restriction and Behavioral Manipulation — what is required of you and what is chosen for you — and not in what you pay. Revenue Extraction at 13/25 is the lightest proportional score on this page and the lowest of any Technology-sector company on the index, because Microsoft’s twelve-year consumer price freeze and eleven-year commercial freeze are real, documented, and inconvenient for a simple extraction thesis.

Read this first · Evidence against hostility

What Microsoft actually gives people.

A CVI of 84 is one of the highest value scores in this index and it is not a courtesy. Microsoft’s falsification record is unusually strong: several of the claims this investigation set out to test were tested and failed. A page that leads with grievance forfeits the right to be believed later, so this section leads — and a reader who skips it will misread everything that follows.

The consumer price did not move for twelve years, and the family plan is still cheaper in real terms than in 2013. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family held their US prices from January 2013 to January 2025 — Microsoft’s own words, “for the first time since its release.” Family at $129.99 covers six people and six terabytes, roughly 6% below the inflation-adjusted price of the five-device, 20 GB plan it replaced. Microsoft 365 blog · pricing pages This is the single largest reason Revenue Extraction is held to 13/25.

Commercial list prices were frozen for eleven years and most remain below inflation. No Microsoft 365 commercial increase between 2011 and March 2022. Office 365 E3 is up about 30% nominally over 2011–2026 against roughly 47% cumulative CPI; Business Standard about 12% against roughly 39%. Business Premium and E1 were held flat again in the July 2026 round, and eurozone cloud prices were cut 7.4% in February 2026. Microsoft licensing news · partner pricing tables

Windows 10 got its full ten years, and then the first consumer security extension Microsoft has ever offered. End of support on 14 October 2025 was published on the lifecycle page years in advance. Consumer Extended Security Updates then arrived free by two routes (Windows Backup settings sync, or 1,000 Rewards points) or $30 for up to ten devices — and in June 2026 Microsoft extended it another year, unilaterally, to 12 October 2027. Microsoft ESU documentation Microsoft 365 Apps and Edge/WebView2 security updates on Windows 10 run to October 2028 without ESU. That is twelve years of security coverage for a consumer operating system.

Backward compatibility measured in decades. Win32 applications written for Windows 95 still largely run on Windows 11. No company on this index carries a comparable compatibility burden voluntarily, and it is the principal reason Microsoft’s installed base is sticky for reasons that are not hostile. Compatibility earned is not the same as exit blocked, and this page keeps the two apart.

The Store takes nothing if you bring your own payments. Since June 2021 developers may use their own commerce engine in the Microsoft Store and “keep 100% of their revenue”, with any framework accepted — “Win32, .NET, UWP, Xamarin, Electron, React Native, Java and even Progressive Web Apps.” Windows Experience Blog, 24 Jun 2021 This was done pre-emptively, before any court or regulator required it, and it is the most generous first-party app-store term in the corpus.

Windows is an open hardware and software platform. Any OEM or self-built PC can run it; any Win32 application can be installed from anywhere without store approval, developer verification or a signing gate. Microsoft’s risk factors even concede the competitive consequence: “Competing with operating systems licensed at low or no cost may decrease our PC operating system margins.” FY2026 Form 10-K This is the strongest single reason Customer Restriction is 15/20 rather than 17 or 18.

Perpetual licensing still exists across the portfolio. Office Home 2024, Visual Studio Professional at $499, Windows Server, SQL Server and Windows itself remain one-time purchases. Rentalization is supported on this page, and it is deliberately not scored as complete, because the ownership route was subordinated rather than closed.

Developer tooling is free and much of it is open source. VS Code, .NET, TypeScript, PowerShell and WSL — the last released under the MIT licence in 2025 — plus free private GitHub repositories since 2019 and a free GitHub Copilot tier since December 2024. Microsoft joined the Open Invention Network with roughly 60,000 patents in 2018. Microsoft · GitHub announcements Developer tooling is also the area where Microsoft’s customers can leave most easily, which is the point of Section the dependency principle.

Security investment is real, expensive and independently acknowledged. Defender built in and free since Windows 8; Patch Tuesday since 2003; the Secure Future Initiative with “34,000 full-time engineers” and senior-leadership compensation tied to security milestones; the Customer Copyright Commitment indemnifying Copilot users. Microsoft security blog The initiative followed a damning federal review, which is stated on this page and does not cancel the investment.

Telemetry documentation among the most transparent in the industry. Field-level diagnostic-data documentation on Learn, the Diagnostic Data Viewer shipped in 2018, Required/Optional levels, the completed EU Data Boundary (February 2025), a stated policy of no ad targeting from the content of your email, documents or photos, and no training of foundation models on Microsoft 365 commercial customer data. Microsoft privacy statement · Learn This is why Information & Privacy is 9/15 and not higher.

Recall was rebuilt, not repackaged. After the May 2024 criticism Microsoft made it opt-in, required Windows Hello, moved the index into a VBS enclave with TPM-bound keys, made it removable through Windows Features, defaulted it off and un-enablable on managed devices, and delayed shipping by eleven months. Windows Experience Blog, 27 Sep 2024 Under this project’s Fixed Under Pressure principle the current design earns full credit, and it does.

Xbox reverses itself, publicly and fast, four times over thirteen years. The Xbox One always-online and used-game restrictions removed eight days after E3 2013; the Xbox Live Gold price doubling reversed the same day with “We messed up today and you were right to let us know”; The Outer Worlds 2 cut from $79.99 to $69.99 with refunds; Game Pass Ultimate cut from $29.99 back to $22.99 in April 2026 after the company’s own executives said the price was too high. Xbox Wire · management statements Credited in full — and analytically important for a different reason, developed later on this page.

Two further credits change the balance of this page without moving a score. Microsoft publishes its full SKU tables, licensing FAQs, lifecycle dates and release-note off-switches — a substantial part of the evidence used against it here comes from Microsoft’s own documentation rather than from criticism of it, and that transparency is credited inside Trust & Transparency. And on the specific question this investigation was commissioned to answer, three of the more dramatic available claims were tested and failed: Microsoft is not broadly price-gouging its customers, it has not engineered present-day file-format incompatibility, and Windows 10’s retirement does not meet this project’s evidentiary bar for forced obsolescence. All three are set out in What we did not conclude.

The mechanism

The price of what you own rarely moves. Everything around it does.

Across Windows setup, OneDrive, Microsoft 365, Edge, Windows Search, Teams, security tiers and cloud licensing, the recurring behaviour is the same, and it is not a price rise. Microsoft alters what is default, what is required, what is bundled and what is integrated — then monetizes the dependency that architecture produces. The alternative is almost never removed. It is made progressively less convenient: a registry key instead of a toggle, an administrator policy instead of a user setting, a plan reachable only by starting a cancellation, a licence that costs more on a competitor’s cloud than on Microsoft’s. That distinction matters, because it is what separates this finding from the antitrust record it sometimes rests on. Microsoft did not make its products worse. It made the layer underneath its products its own to change — and then changed it.

The same shape, three unrelated products

Windows setup2021 → October 2025

BeforeA link that said “Offline account.”Windows 10 offered a local account during setup. Windows 8 offered “Sign in without a Microsoft account.” Windows 7 had nothing else.

After“Require internet connectivity and a Microsoft account.”Home from 2021, Pro personal-use from 2022. In March and October 2025 Microsoft removed the remaining setup bypasses, stating it wanted “all users” to exit setup signed in.

The way back: switch to a local account after setup, which Microsoft still supports — having first created the account.

OneDrive folder backupJune 2024

BeforeYour Desktop was on your desktop.Folder backup was an opt-in feature; Known Folder Move was an enterprise deployment tool with explicit prompt-or-silent policy settings.

AfterTurned on during setup, on Home, without a question.Signing in during Windows 11 Home setup enables Desktop, Documents and Pictures backup. Pro still asks. The EEA is exempt from the non-dismissable follow-up prompts.

The way back: reversible — but the files do not move back on their own, and the 5 GB free quota is shared with Outlook.com mail.

Microsoft 365 Personal & Family16 January 2025

Before$69.99 and $99.99, unchanged since 2013.Twelve years of flat US pricing — one of the strongest pro-Microsoft facts in this file, and the reason the increase registered as it did.

After$99.99 and $129.99, with Copilot included.+43% and +30% in the US; +45% and +29% in Australia. The AI arrives automatically at renewal. The no-AI “Classic” plans were not purchasable new.

The way back: a Classic plan reachable, on the regulator’s account, by beginning to cancel.

Three unrelated products, three different teams, one mechanism: a settled condition changed in Microsoft’s favour, with the alternative left technically available and made materially harder to reach. None of the three is a price increase on a product the customer already owned. Two of them are not price changes at all. That is the shape of Microsoft’s hostility, and it is why a page built around sticker prices would score this company wrongly in both directions.

The defining pattern

Every layer makes the next one harder to refuse.

CHI’s Dependency Stack concept holds that dependency can accumulate across products rather than within one. Microsoft is the index’s clearest empirical case, because one customer can depend simultaneously on an operating system, an identity provider, a mail service, a file store, a collaboration tool, a security suite, a directory and a cloud. This is not a claim that leaving is impossible. Every rung below has an exit, most of them documented by Microsoft itself. The finding is about accumulating friction, not literal lock-in — and about the fact that each rung is engineered to make the next one the path of least resistance.

Consumer stackValidated. The load-bearing rung is the account — and it became load-bearing only in 2024–25.

Windows 11Pre-installed on most new PCs; free upgrade from Windows 10. Setup requires internet and, on Home and Pro personal-use, a Microsoft account.
Microsoft accountNow gates the BitLocker recovery key on 24H2 clean installs, Windows Backup, the Store, Xbox, Rewards, Copilot sign-in — and Windows 10 ESU enrolment, including on the $30 paid route.
OneDriveDesktop, Documents and Pictures backup enabled during Home setup. 5 GB free. Outlook.com attachments have counted against the same quota since February 2023.
Microsoft 365 Basic → Personal → FamilyThe “storage almost full” prompt resolves into a $19.99/yr Basic plan, or Personal, or Family — which is also where Office, 1 TB and Defender live.
Copilot / Microsoft 365 PremiumBundled into Personal and Family at renewal from January 2025 with the price rise. AI credits are metered and, on Family, usable only by the subscription owner.

Where it sticks: identity, because the account now holds the disk-encryption key; and data, because files are physically relocated into a OneDrive\Desktop path. Where it does not: the money. A consumer’s switching cost here is low in cash and high in knowledge — seventeen settings toggles across at least seven locations, by one catalogue.

Enterprise stackValidated, re-ordered. The stickiest rung is identity, not the file formats.

Windows / OfficeInstalled base, Win32 compatibility, and .docx/.xlsx/.pptx as the de facto exchange formats — which are, notably, open standards.
Microsoft 365 E3 / E5Teams auto-installed with Microsoft 365 Apps since around 2019; Copilot Chat pinned by default in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook for eligible users since August–September 2025.
Exchange / SharePoint / TeamsTeams stores its files in SharePoint, its calendar in Exchange and its identity in Entra. The EU commitments oblige Microsoft to open equivalent APIs to rivals precisely because of this.
Entra IDThe stickiest rung. Mandatory for Microsoft 365, Intune, Teams and Azure role-based access. The CISPE settlement left the Entra activation requirement unresolved; a CISPE representative’s summary was blunt: “There’s no ability to have a competing identity management and swap it out.”
Intune / Defender / PurviewSecurity and compliance capability gated to E5 or add-ons. Advanced audit logging was premium until July 2023. Unified Support is priced as a percentage of spend, so every list rise raises the support bill too.
AzureAzure Hybrid Benefit makes Windows Server and SQL Server materially cheaper on Azure than on a “Listed Provider” rival. Windows 10/11 multi-session is licensed for Azure Virtual Desktop only.
Copilot / E7 / consumption metersE7 at $99 per user per month layers per-seat licensing on top of consumption units — Security Copilot SCUs, Copilot Studio credits, Work IQ API calls.

Where it sticks: licensing and identity. The measurement: the UK Competition and Markets Authority found in its final cloud decision that “less than 1% of customers switch provider each year.” What is not claimed: that the file formats are the lock. They are open, and this page says so.

What this diagram is and is not. It is a map of where friction accumulates, drawn from Microsoft’s own setup flows, licensing terms and support documentation. It is not a claim that any rung is inescapable: local accounts remain reachable after setup, OneDrive backup is reversible, Teams-less suites are contractually guaranteed for seven years, perpetual Office still exists, and rival clouds remain licensable. The CHI finding is narrower and harder to argue with — each additional Microsoft layer measurably raises the cost of not adopting the next one, and Microsoft has repeatedly chosen the configuration that makes its own next layer the default. The proof that these are choices rather than technical necessities is on the page below, in Microsoft’s own scoping language.

Supported patterns

What the evidence actually supports.

Microsoft is large enough to support twenty pattern assignments and fifty exhibits. This page caps them at ten patterns and fourteen exhibits, because pattern count must represent distinct defensible behaviours rather than corporate scale. Six further patterns were tested and are not assigned.

Defining pattern

Dependency Stack No Lexicon page yet Dependency accumulates across products and infrastructure layers rather than within one, so that each additional layer raises the friction of avoiding the next. Microsoft is this index’s type specimen: Windows → Microsoft account → OneDrive → Microsoft 365 → Copilot for consumers; Windows/Office → Microsoft 365 → Exchange/SharePoint/Teams → Entra ID → Intune/Defender/Purview → Azure → Copilot for enterprises. The consumer stack is engineered into the setup experience; the enterprise stack is engineered into the licensing terms. CMA final decision · EC Teams commitments Stated limit: every rung has an exit and none is technically impossible to leave.

Strongly supported — page-strip patterns

Advertising Creep → Monotonic expansion of first-party promotional surfaces inside an operating system, 2015–2025: Start “suggested apps,” lock-screen game promotions, Search highlights and Rewards cards, File Explorer banners, Settings recommendation cards, full-screen OneDrive and Microsoft 365 interstitials, and a setup flow documented in March 2026 as running to roughly sixteen pages including three OneDrive screens, a Microsoft 365 offer, a fallback Basic offer, a pre-checked trial toggle and a Game Pass promotion. Microsoft’s own Settings page is now titled “Recommendations & offers.” Microsoft KB and policy documentation Precision: these are first-party promotions, not a third-party ad network in the shell — the accurate charge is acquisition channel, not ad platform. Intellectual Disrespect → The label does work the mechanism cannot. Back up your files describes an operation that relocates your Desktop into a cloud path — ten years after Microsoft removed cloud placeholders from Windows because they were, in its own account, “too confusing.” Removing the local-account setup path was explained as preventing devices that are “not fully configured.” Promotional interruptions are called “tips” and “suggestions” on screen while Microsoft’s own settings page says “offers” and a Microsoft vice-president says “upsells.” Browser prompts are framed as protection from “phishing and malware.” Microsoft support pages · Windows release notes

Supported

Default Flip Monetization Lexicon entry pending A settled condition is reversed by default and the reversal is monetized downstream. OneDrive folder backup switched on during Home setup; Copilot added to consumer Microsoft 365 at renewal with the price rise; Copilot Chat pinned into Office apps for users without a licence; new Outlook installed by a Windows update with, in Microsoft’s own Message Center wording, no way to block the installation at the time. Feature Imposition — where the imposed feature is itself the justification for the higher recurring charge — is treated here as a mechanism within this pattern, not as a separate pattern.

Reference-Price Erasure No Lexicon page yet The comparison a customer needs is made hard to construct. The business pricing page now leads with “Business Standard with Copilot” and “Business Premium with Copilot” rather than the Copilot-free equivalents; Teams-inclusive and Teams-less variants create parallel ladders; the no-AI Classic plans were not listed alongside the plans that replaced them; Xbox Live Gold became Game Pass Core became Essential while the Console tier became Standard became Premium with shifting day-one rights. Offsetting: Microsoft publishes complete SKU tables and licensing FAQs, which is more than most.

Dependency Principle CHI principle As exit becomes harder, the commercial penalty for hostile treatment falls. Microsoft supplies an unusually clean internal control: where customers can defect — gaming, developer tooling — corrections are fast, voluntary and public. Where dependence is structural — Windows setup, identity, enterprise licensing, cloud — comparable changes have generally required a regulator, a statute or a very large public reaction. Stated limit: this is a supported structural correlation. No causal claim is made, and the 2026 Windows de-escalation is a genuine voluntary counter-example.

Rentalization → The perpetual Office support lifecycle was compressed from ten years to seven to five; Office 2024 ships “only a subset of the features included in Microsoft 365 Apps”; connectivity to Microsoft 365 services was withdrawn from Office 2016/2019 two years before their security end-of-support; Exchange Server Subscription Edition ended perpetual-without-Software-Assurance use; Games with Gold titles now require an active subscription; and, for the first time on consumer Windows, continued security updates became a conditioned layer. Deliberately not scored as complete: perpetual Office, Visual Studio, Windows Server, SQL Server and Windows itself are all still sold.

Subscription Creep No Lexicon page yet The ladder lengthens in both segments. Consumer: Basic → Personal → Family → Premium, with Copilot Pro folded upward into Premium. Commercial: E3 → E5 → E7 at $99, with consumption meters stacked on top of per-seat pricing. Unlicensed OneDrive accounts that could previously be retained free became a metered charge from January 2025. Offsetting and stated: Microsoft 365 Premium at $199.99 is cheaper than the Family-plus-Copilot-Pro combination it replaced, and Copilot Chat is free.

Price Creep → Segment-dependent Real, and only in specific places: consumer Personal +43% and Family +30% (2025); Game Pass Ultimate +53% since 2019 even after the 2026 cut; Xbox Series X from $499 to $799.99 across three rises in fifteen months; Teams Phone +25% and Power BI Pro +40% (2025); a 5% surcharge for monthly billing; the removal of Enterprise Agreement volume-discount levels B, C and D in November 2025; a second list rise on 1 July 2026. Contradicted for consumer Microsoft 365 across 2013–2025, for most commercial SKUs against inflation, for Business Premium and E1 in 2026, and for eurozone cloud prices, which fell. Wrong unless presented as segment-specific.

Supported but narrow — recorded, not counted in the strip

Algorithmic Replacement NarrowAssigned only to the support relationship. All Microsoft Store retail locations and their in-person Answer Desk closed permanently in June 2020, and account recovery is form-only by policy — our support agents are not allowed to send password reset links, or access and change account details. Not assigned to Copilot, which adds capability rather than replacing a function customers relied on. Live chat and phone remain for billing and product issues.

Choice Illusion OverlappingThe alternative is nearly always present and progressively less reachable: a registry policy rather than a Settings toggle for web results in Windows Search outside the EEA; an administrator or AppLocker path rather than a user setting for Copilot; a plan surfaced in a cancellation flow. Substantively covered by Default Flip Monetization and Intellectual Disrespect, and not separately scored.

Feature Imposition Mechanism, not a patternA capability is inserted into a product the customer already pays for, default-on or pinned, with opt-out requiring administrator tooling or a hidden plan — and the price of the existing subscription rises with the insertion as its justification. Specimens: consumer Copilot (Jan 2025), the pinned Copilot Chat pane (Sep 2025), the Microsoft 365 Copilot app auto-install (2025–26). Recorded as a mechanism inside Default Flip Monetization, pending cross-company recurrence.

Jurisdictional Default Asymmetry Evidentiary tool · zero score effectNot a pattern and not scored. It is the observation that where a company ships a less restrictive version of a default in one jurisdiction, that version is evidence the restrictive version elsewhere is a policy choice rather than a technical constraint. Microsoft is the type specimen, and the evidence is Microsoft’s own scoping language: in the EEA. See Two Windows.

Six of the ten assigned patterns have no CHI Lexicon page yet and are shown unlinked, following the site’s existing convention for patterns validated in an assessment ahead of their Lexicon entry. Default Flip Monetization was admitted to the Lexicon by the Google assessment; its entry remains a separate build task and is not linked from here. Dependency Stack is carried as this page’s defining pattern on the strength of the evidence below, and Microsoft is proposed as its type specimen.

Exhibits · the consumer side

What the architecture looks like from inside a PC you already paid for.

Eight of the fourteen exhibits. They are numbered as they sit in the assessment’s locked exhibit set, which is split across this section, the enterprise section below and the correction ledger. Ten of the fourteen are proven out of Microsoft’s own published words — support pages, release notes, licensing terms, Message Center posts and SEC filings — rather than out of criticism of Microsoft.

Exhibit 1Windows setup2021 → October 2025

The setup screen that stopped offering a local account

Before: Windows 7 had local accounts only. Windows 8 offered Sign in without a Microsoft account. Windows 10 offered an “Offline account” link, which disappeared on Home with an internet connection from version 1903.
Change: Windows 11 Home required an account and internet at first setup from its June 2021 specification; Pro for personal use followed in 2022. In March 2025 Microsoft removed the bypassnro script: This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account. In October 2025 it went further — We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE)… they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.
After: Microsoft’s current specification page: Windows 11 Pro for personal use and Windows 11 Home require internet connectivity and a Microsoft account during initial device setup. The account is now the custodian of the BitLocker recovery key on 24H2 clean installs where device encryption is on by default, and the licence holder for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates — including for customers who pay the $30.
Consequence: A purchased PC can no longer be set up as sold without creating an account with the operating-system vendor, and that account becomes the recovery path for the customer’s own encrypted disk.
Microsoft says: Security and user experience; devices that are otherwise “not fully configured.” The benefits it cites — settings sync, Find My Device, key backup, passkeys — are real. In March 2026 a Microsoft vice-president replied publicly to a complaint about the mandate: “Ya I hate that. Working on it.”
Evidence: Microsoft Windows 11 specification page; Windows Insider Blog, March and October 2025; Microsoft ESU enrolment documentation; contemporaneous testing by specialist outlets.

What this exhibit does not claim. The alternative was not eliminated. Windows 11 Pro → “Set up for work or school” → “Domain join instead” still produces a local account, unattended-install tooling still works, and switching to a local account after setup remains officially supported by Microsoft. Whether the registry bypass still functions on current retail 25H2 media is disputed between specialist outlets and is not resolved here. The finding is the direction of travel over thirteen years and what the account now gates — not an impossibility claim.

Dependency StackIntellectual DisrespectConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 2OneDrive · Windows 11 HomeJune 2024 → present

“Back up your files” is a move, not a copy

Before: Files lived on the PC. Microsoft had removed cloud placeholders from Windows in 2014 because, on its own account, they were “too confusing” — a documented finding, by Microsoft, that blurring the local/cloud boundary confuses users.
Change: From June 2024, signing in during Windows 11 Home setup turns on Desktop, Documents and Pictures backup without asking. Contemporaneous reporting: Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it. Pro setup still presents the choice.
After: The contents of C:\Users\<name>\Desktop are relocated into OneDrive\Desktop and the original folder removed; the files do not move back automatically when backup is switched off; multiple PCs’ desktops merge. Files On-Demand is default-on, so many files are online-only placeholders. The free quota is 5 GB — and since 1 February 2023 Outlook.com attachments count against the same 5 GB: If you reach your cloud storage quota, your ability to send and receive emails in Outlook.com will be disrupted.
Consequence: The sequence completes itself: cloud integration is enabled by default → the default consumes a small free quota → the quota being full stops your email → the remedy offered is Microsoft 365 Basic at $19.99 a year, or Personal.
Microsoft says: Backup protects files against device loss and ransomware, which is true and valuable. No formal Microsoft statement on the June 2024 setup change could be located.
Evidence: Microsoft OneDrive and Windows Backup support documentation (current, primary-verified); Microsoft’s Outlook.com storage policy; Known Folder Move policy documentation; contemporaneous specialist reporting for the setup change.

Counter-evidence, in the same breath. The protection is genuine: version history, a 30/93-day recycle bin, Personal Vault and ransomware recovery are real customer value. Microsoft’s current “Back up your folders” page is a materially improved disclosure — it now offers to keep files only in OneDrive or only on the PC and warns that cloud-only files must be downloaded first. In 2024 Microsoft also removed the pulsating File Explorer backup badge and Word’s nag on local saves. Not established: that the default drives Basic conversions. Microsoft discloses no such figure and none is asserted here.

Default Flip MonetizationIntellectual DisrespectDependency StackConfidence: High

Exhibit 3Microsoft 365 Personal & Family16 January 2025 → present

The cheaper plan you had to start cancelling to find

Before: $69.99 and $99.99 in the US, unchanged since January 2013. Microsoft’s own framing of the increase concedes the record: for the first time since its release.
Change: Copilot was included in both consumer plans and prices rose to $99.99 (+43%) and $129.99 (+30%) in the US, and A$159 (+45%) and A$179 (+29%) in Australia. The feature arrives automatically at renewal. Lower-cost no-AI “Classic” plans existed but were described as available “for a limited time” and were not purchasable new.
After: On 27 October 2025 the ACCC instituted Federal Court proceedings, alleging Microsoft deliberately omitted reference to the Classic plans in its communications and concealed their existence from roughly 2.7 million Australian subscribers. Microsoft Australia responded: “We fell short of our standards here, and we apologise”, surfaced the Classic plans and offered refunds for switchers. The UK CMA opened a consumer-protection investigation in July 2026 — Upon renewal, customers were automatically enrolled in higher-priced plans with these features unless they actively switched to a ‘Classic’ plan or cancelled — and Italy’s AGCM opened its own investigation in June 2026.
Consequence: The customer’s real choice — pay 30–43% more, or keep what you had — was available, and not presented at the moment the decision was actually being made. On Family, AI credits are usable only by the subscription owner: five of six members pay for a feature they cannot use.
Microsoft says: The increase reflects the extensive subscription benefits that we’ve added over the past 12 years, and later, “1,100 new features.” Both statements are true. Neither addresses the salience of the alternative.
Evidence: Microsoft 365 Blog, 16 January 2025; ACCC media release and originating process, 27 October 2025; Microsoft Australia statement, 6 November 2025; UK CMA announcement, July 2026; AGCM announcement, June 2026.

Procedural status, stated precisely. The ACCC matter is a proceeding, not a judgment: the quoted words are the regulator’s allegation, penalties have not been determined, and no court has made findings. The CMA and AGCM matters are open investigations with no findings. What is not allegation: Microsoft’s apology, the refunds, and the surfacing of the Classic plans in Australia and New Zealand — all of which are on the record and are credited under Fixed Under Pressure.

Default Flip MonetizationReference-Price ErasurePrice CreepIntellectual DisrespectConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 4Windows Search · Edge · Bing2015 → present

One search box, one browser, one search engine

Before: Windows 7’s Start search was local. Browsers could set themselves default programmatically, and upgrades preserved the choice.
Change: Windows 10 (2015) reset defaults to Edge under Express settings — Mozilla’s then-chief executive wrote that the upgrade appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made. Bing web results were added to Start search with a toggle; in Windows 10 version 2004 Microsoft began ignoring the BingSearchEnabled value, leaving a policy key as the only method, and gave no explanation when asked. Chromium Edge was force-installed by Windows Update in 2020 — the update does not support the removal of this update. In November 2021 Microsoft blocked tools that redirected microsoft-edge: links: the search experience from the taskbar is one such example of an end-to-end experience that is not designed to be redirected.
After: Outside the EEA, as of December 2025, Windows 11 provides no Settings toggle to disable web results in Search; Home users must edit a registry policy, and a Microsoft Q&A thread asking for one has been open since March 2022 without a Microsoft answer. Web results from Search and Widgets open in Edge regardless of the declared default. Edge’s DefaultBrowserSettingsCampaignEnabled policy is on by default; Chrome download pages carry Microsoft interstitials.
Consequence: An operating-system utility the customer paid for transmits typed queries to Bing and opens results in Microsoft’s browser, and the off-switch outside one jurisdiction is a registry edit.
Microsoft says: End-to-end experiences; “Following the upgrade, they can easily choose the default browser of their choice.” Microsoft also reports that “Bing and Edge have both taken share for 5 straight years”, alongside search advertising revenue growth of 10–16% a quarter.
Evidence: Microsoft Edge policy documentation; Microsoft statements on link redirection; Windows Update KB language; Microsoft earnings commentary; Mozilla open letter (2015).

Held in view. Any browser can be installed on Windows without approval — a freedom the mobile platforms on this index do not offer. The eleven-handler default-browser regression of 2021 was reversed within two months in preview and about twelve at retail. Outlook and Teams link-opening gained user opt-outs by 2025. And in 2026 Insider builds added a worldwide Settings toggle for web results and stripped MSN tiles, trivia and sponsored cards from Search — a substantive reversal in progress, credited in direction, and not yet shipped to retail worldwide as of this assessment.

Dependency StackAdvertising CreepIntellectual DisrespectConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 5Windows shellNovember 2015 → 2026

The desktop that became an acquisition channel

Before: Windows 7 had no first-party promotional surfaces in the shell.
Change: A ten-year ledger. Start “suggested apps” with auto-installed games (2015); lock-screen Spotlight promotions (2016); removal of the “Turn off Microsoft consumer experiences” policy from Pro (2016); File Explorer OneDrive and Office banners (2017); full-screen “Get even more out of Windows” prompts (2019); Widgets with an MSN feed, Search highlights and Rewards cards (2021–23); Start-menu Store-app promotions shipped to retail default-on (2024) — The Recommended section of the Start menu will show some Microsoft Store apps. These apps come from a small set of curated developers; a Settings Game Pass recommendation card; full-screen “Let’s back up your files” interstitials (2024).
After: The Settings page is now titled “Recommendations & offers” and “Tailored experiences” was renamed “Personalized offers.” Game Pass toasts were described by Microsoft as notifications giving people the option to purchase. Start-menu “Action advised – back up your PC” alerts were found not to be permanently dismissible because required notifications are still shown — with EU users exempt. One catalogue counted seventeen distinct toggles across at least seven Settings locations needed to quiet a Windows 11 PC. The AllowWindowsConsumerFeatures, AllowWindowsTips and AllowWindowsSpotlight policies are Enterprise and Education only; Pro is explicitly unsupported.
Consequence: The operating system a customer paid for through their hardware became a promotional surface for the vendor’s own subscriptions — and the ability to switch that off cleanly became an edition-gated privilege.
Microsoft says: “Tips,” “suggestions” and “recommendations.” In March 2026 a Microsoft vice-president used a different word: “a calmer and more chill OS with fewer upsells is a goal.”
Evidence: Microsoft KB release notes (KB5036980 and others, primary-verified); Microsoft Learn policy documentation on edition support; Microsoft statements on Game Pass notifications; specialist ledgers for the dated sequence.

Two credits that belong here, not in a defence section. First, Microsoft publishes the off-switch in the same release note as the promotion — nearly every surface above is disableable and documented. Second, the 2026 “Windows quality” programme is a real, apparently voluntary de-escalation: the Widgets MSN feed off by default, MSN tiles and sponsored cards removed from Search, Start “aggressive recommendations” removed, Copilot entry points stripped from Notepad, Snipping Tool, Photos and Widgets, and Microsoft intervening against OEM bloatware advertising. Stated limit: most of this remains Insider or controlled-rollout as of 19 August 2026, and retail users still see the 2024–25 surfaces.

Advertising CreepIntellectual DisrespectConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 6Windows 10 · Extended Security UpdatesJune 2025 → October 2027

Security with a sign-in condition

Before: Security updates came with the operating system for its published lifetime. Windows 10’s end-of-support date — 14 October 2025 — was on Microsoft’s lifecycle page for years, and the ten-year commitment was honoured in full.
Change: Microsoft offered consumers Extended Security Updates for the first time: free with Windows Backup settings sync to a Microsoft account, free for 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or $30 once for up to ten devices. In August 2025 Microsoft confirmed that every route requires a Microsoft account, including the paid one — The ESU license will be associated with the Microsoft account used to enroll.
After: Euroconsumers challenged the conditions under the Digital Markets Act. Microsoft made EEA enrolment free without the backup or Rewards condition, requiring only a sign-in at least every 60 days: In the European Economic Area, we’re making updates to the enrollment process to ensure it meets local expectations. On 25 June 2026 Microsoft extended consumer ESU a further year to 12 October 2027 — unilaterally, by documentation edit, with enrollees auto-extended.
Consequence: For one year the price of continued security on a paid-for operating system included an account, and outside the EEA a cloud sync or engagement with a rewards programme. That is the narrow finding. It is not that Microsoft abandoned Windows 10.
Microsoft says: An ongoing commitment to helping customers stay secure during the transition; on the extension, We understand that moving to a new PC can take time.
Evidence: Microsoft Extended Security Updates page and lifecycle documentation (primary-verified); Euroconsumers DMA challenge; contemporaneous reporting on the June 2026 extension.

This exhibit is mostly a credit, and it is placed here deliberately. Consumer ESU is unprecedented — no prior consumer Windows received one. Two of the three routes are free. Ten devices per account. It was then extended by a year with roughly 30% of Windows desktops still on Windows 10 and Windows OEM revenue falling, which is the opposite of what an obsolescence-forcing strategy would do. Microsoft 365 Apps and Edge security updates on Windows 10 run to October 2028 without ESU at all. Twelve years of security coverage for a consumer OS is the most generous lifecycle on this index, and it is why forced obsolescence is not concluded on this page.

RentalizationDependency PrincipleConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 7Windows Recall20 May 2024 → 25 April 2025

The feature Microsoft rebuilt rather than defended

Before: The operating system did not maintain a searchable index of everything shown on screen.
Change: Announced 20 May 2024 for Copilot+ PCs: periodic screenshots, local optical character recognition and a vector database, enabled by default. Within two days the UK Information Commissioner’s Office was making enquiries. Within eleven days a security researcher demonstrated the store was just files in AppData, readable in plaintext by any user-level process, and that credential-stealing malware could trivially be adapted to it.
After: On 7 June 2024 Microsoft made Recall opt-in, required Windows Hello enrolment and just-in-time decryption; on 13 June it was pulled from the launch. On 27 September 2024 Microsoft published a full architecture update: a virtualisation-based security enclave, TPM-bound keys, Recall is an opt-in experience… Users can also remove Recall entirely, sensitive-content filtering on by default, and Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties. It shipped on 25 April 2025 — eleven months late — off and un-enablable on managed devices: Administrators can’t enable saving snapshots on behalf of their users.
Consequence: Customers today get a local, opt-in, biometric-gated, removable feature that does not transmit their screen history. Customers in mid-2024 were shown a default-on version whose risk model Microsoft had framed as requiring physical access, and that framing was contradicted by a regulator within two days and a researcher within eleven.
Microsoft says: The full architecture, published in unusual technical detail — itself a transparency credit.
Evidence: Windows Experience Blog, 7 June and 27 September 2024; Microsoft Recall support and management documentation; ICO statement, 22 May 2024; published security research; Tom’s Hardware filter testing, December 2024.

Microsoft gets full credit here, and it is the clearest Fixed Under Pressure case on the page. An eighteen-day redesign and an eleven-month delay are architectural, not cosmetic, and shipping opt-in when default-on would have driven Copilot+ adoption was a commercially costly choice. What is still recorded: in September 2024 Microsoft called the ability to remove Recall an issue… This will be fixed in an upcoming update, and reversed that position twenty-five days later — which suggests removability was conceded rather than planned. And in December 2024 the sensitive-information filter was shown to miss card and identifier data in several contexts; Microsoft’s answer was We’ll continue to improve this functionality. Those two items are the whole of the Trust & Transparency debit. The current design earns its credit in full.

Fixed Under PressureIntellectual DisrespectConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 8New Outlook for WindowsDecember 2024 → 2029

The mail client that arrived with an update, and with ads

Before: Windows Mail, Calendar and People were free, local, ad-free applications built into Windows.
Change: Support ended 31 December 2024 and the ability to send or receive mail will be revoked. New Outlook was auto-installed on Windows 10 by the January–February 2025 updates; Microsoft’s own Message Center said Currently, there isn’t a way to block the new Outlook from being installed… you can remove it after it’s installed. Microsoft’s framing: The new Outlook for Windows is for everyone.
After: Adding a Gmail or IMAP account syncs the credentials and a copy of mail, calendar and contacts to “Microsoft data centers” — Synchronizing users’ IMAP accounts helps deliver a consistent user experience. The free client displays inline advertisements designed to sit within the message list; Windows Mail never did. Removing them costs $1.99 a month. Features absent at the time of the consumer migration included offline mode, PST support and COM add-ins.
Consequence: A previously local, ad-free mail client became an advertising surface and created a new data relationship — third-party mail routed through Microsoft’s cloud — as a condition of continuing to have desktop mail on Windows.
Microsoft says: Consistency of experience; and that classic Outlook is supported until at least 2029, with a revert toggle for users moved across.
Evidence: Microsoft support and Learn documentation; Microsoft 365 Message Center posts; Microsoft’s own new-Outlook availability guidance.

Credited. Classic Outlook to at least 2029; a working revert toggle; an administrator opt-out; an enterprise cutover timeline extended twice, most recently to March 2027 with no forced migration before March 2028; and ads removable for a small fee rather than not at all. Germany’s federal data-protection authority raised the IMAP sync with the Irish supervisory authority; no outcome has been published and none is asserted here.

Advertising CreepDefault Flip MonetizationIntellectual DisrespectConfidence: High

Exhibits · the enterprise side

The leverage most customers never see.

Public criticism of Microsoft is overwhelmingly about Windows advertising. The strongest evidence in this file is not. It is about licensing terms, identity and the price of running Microsoft software on somebody else’s cloud — and it carries the highest evidentiary weight on the page, because a competition authority has made findings about it. These four exhibits are the reason Customer Restriction is 15/20. They are translated into plain language deliberately; the underlying documents are not.

Exhibit 9Azure · cloud licensing1 October 2019 → present

The same licence costs more on somebody else’s cloud

Before: A business that had bought perpetual Windows Server or SQL Server licences could deploy them on dedicated hardware at any outsourcer it chose.
Change: From 1 October 2019 Microsoft designated four “Listed Providers” — itself, Amazon, Google and Alibaba. Licences without Software Assurance could no longer be deployed on their dedicated hosts, while Azure Hybrid Benefit allowed Software Assurance licences to run on Azure. In 2022 the Flexible Virtualization Benefit opened deployment to any outsourcer except the Listed Providers. Windows 10/11 multi-session remains licensed for Azure Virtual Desktop only: It’s against the licensing agreement to run Windows multi-session outside of the Azure Virtual Desktop service for production purposes.
After: On 31 July 2025 the UK Competition and Markets Authority published its final decision in the cloud services market investigation: “Microsoft’s licensing practices are adversely impacting the competitiveness of AWS and Google in the supply of cloud services.” It found that the input price paid to Microsoft by AWS and Google for some of these products can be higher than Microsoft’s customer-facing price for some cloud customers, that egress fees are a key commercial barrier, and that “less than 1% of customers switch provider each year.” On 25 June 2026 the European Commission preliminarily designated Azure and AWS as DMA gatekeepers, citing vast and entrenched user bases that appear to benefit from lock-in effects and high switching costs.
Consequence: In plain terms: a business that standardised on Microsoft software finds that moving its infrastructure to a rival cloud costs more than staying — not because the rival is worse or dearer, but because of what Microsoft charges for the licences it already sold. This is invisible to consumers and it is the most structural mechanism on this page.
Microsoft says: The 2019 change closed a licensing loophole; the 2022 benefit comprehensively resolved the concerns of all but the largest hyperscale cloud providers. Azure Hybrid Benefit is a genuine discount for customers who choose Azure.
Evidence: CMA cloud services market investigation, final decision and licensing working paper (31 July 2025); European Commission DMA preliminary designation (25 June 2026); Microsoft licensing terms and Azure Virtual Desktop FAQ (primary-verified).

Two claims deliberately not made. Google’s 2024 European Commission complaint alleged a markup of roughly 400% and more than €1bn a year in additional EU cost. That is an allegation by a directly interested competitor, it was withdrawn in November 2025, and no figure from it is used anywhere on this page. The CMA’s own differentials are redacted. Separately, the CMA cleared committed-spend agreements as not harming competition, and in March 2026 declined to designate the cloud market for Strategic Market Status after Microsoft’s UK commitments — extending the free-egress window from 60 to 180 days, including its global network, and allowing per-service switching. A separate SMS investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem opened in May 2026 and runs to February 2027. Nothing here is final.

Dependency StackDependency PrincipleConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 10Microsoft TeamsMarch 2017 → 1 November 2025

What happens when a new product ships inside one customers already have

Before: Buying a workplace chat and meetings tool meant choosing one and persuading an organisation to adopt it. Slack had done exactly that.
Change: Teams launched in March 2017 free in every commercial Microsoft 365 suite, and from around April 2019 was auto-installed with Microsoft 365 Apps. Skype for Business Online was retired in July 2021. Slack’s July 2020 complaint alleged Microsoft had illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal.
After: The European Commission opened a formal Article 102 investigation in July 2023 and issued a Statement of Objections in June 2024 finding, preliminarily, that Microsoft is dominant worldwide in the market for SaaS productivity applications for professional use and that its 2023 changes were insufficient. Microsoft’s first unbundling attempt was priced so that buying suite and Teams separately cost more than the old bundle — one analyst firm called it just a sneaky price hike. On 12 September 2025 the Commission accepted binding commitments: a price gap of up to EUR 8 per user per month for E3 and E5 for seven years, interoperability and data-portability obligations for ten, and a monitoring trustee. No fine and no infringement decision. Microsoft widened the gap by 50% after the market test and applied it worldwide from 1 November 2025.
Consequence: Teams reached 320 million monthly active users largely through suite distribution. The customer-welfare picture is genuinely mixed: six years of a free, capable product, followed by a real discount — a Teams-less Office 365 E3 fell to roughly $14.45 in November 2025 from about $20.75 in April 2024 — that arrived only after a regulator required it.
Microsoft says: In 2020: We created Teams to combine the ability to collaborate with the ability to connect via video, because that’s what people want. In 2025, on the commitments, that it appreciated the dialogue that led to the agreement.
Evidence: European Commission Statement of Objections (25 June 2024) and commitments decision AT.40721 (12 September 2025); Microsoft EU Policy Blog; Microsoft 365 blog on the November 2025 implementation; Slack complaint (22 July 2020).

Status, stated precisely. The Commission’s abuse finding was preliminary. The case ended in accepted commitments under Article 9 — not an infringement decision, and not a fine. The remedies exceed what the Statement of Objections demanded. The commitment also protects the gap, not the level: the July 2026 list increases raised the no-Teams variants in step. And the same distribution mechanism is now visible with Copilot — Business SKUs sold “with Copilot” and Copilot Chat pinned into Office apps — which is a structural observation, not a legal claim.

Dependency StackReference-Price ErasureDefault Flip MonetizationConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 11Cloud security loggingMid-2023 → September 2023

The logs that were premium until the right customer got breached

Before: Detailed mailbox-access audit logging in Microsoft 365 was a premium capability, available with E5 or as a paid Purview add-on.
Change: In mid-2023 a China-linked actor accessed Exchange Online mailboxes at 22 organisations. The US State Department detected the intrusion only because it had purchased the premium logging; as the subsequent federal review recorded, few if any other victims had. CISA and a US senator pressed Microsoft publicly.
After: On 19 July 2023 Microsoft made more than 30 log types previously exclusive to the premium tier free, and raised standard retention from 90 to 180 days. CISA’s director called it truly a step in the right direction toward the adoption of Secure by Design. In April 2024 the US Cyber Safety Review Board found a cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors, concluded that Microsoft’s “security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul”, and stated that logging should be a core element of cloud offerings.
Consequence: For the period before July 2023, the ability of a customer to discover that they had been breached inside Microsoft’s own cloud was a function of which licence they had bought. That is the clearest documented instance in this file of a baseline safety capability sitting behind a tier — and it was released by policy, at no technical cost, within about a week of sustained public pressure.
Microsoft says: It launched the Secure Future Initiative, put security above all else—over all other features, assigned 34,000 full-time engineers, and tied senior-leadership compensation to security milestones.
Evidence: Microsoft Security Blog, 19 July 2023; US Cyber Safety Review Board report on the Summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange Online intrusion (April 2024); CISA statements; Microsoft Secure Future Initiative progress updates.

The direction since 2023 is de-gating, and it is credited. Standard audit logging is now free. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint P1 moved into E3 in 2021, Defender for Office P1 into E3 in 2026, and Intune Suite and a capped Security Copilot allocation into E5 in the same year. The Secure Future Initiative is a real, expensive programme with executive pay attached. What the exhibit still records: the de-gating arrived alongside base-price increases, and E5 Security, Entra Suite and the E7 tier keep meaningful protections behind higher SKUs. Competitors tier security too; that is stated, and it does not answer the specific 2023 logging finding.

Dependency PrincipleFixed Under PressureConfidence: Very High

Exhibit 12Enterprise Agreement pricingMarch 2022 → July 2026

Four new price axes in four years, after eleven years of none

Before: Microsoft 365 commercial list prices did not increase between 2011 and 2022. Enterprise Agreements carried programmatic, published volume-discount levels A to D of roughly 6%, 9% and 12%, a three-year price lock and an annual true-up.
Change: March 2022: the first rise (E3 $32→$36; Office 365 E3 $20→$23). April 2025: a 5% surcharge for monthly billing of annual subscriptions, Teams Phone $8→$10 and Power BI Pro $10→$14. November 2025: volume-discount levels B, C and D removed for online services — in one licensing specialist’s summary, Everyone will start… from the same Level A pricing, regardless of the organisation’s size — and customers below 2,400 seats steered from EAs to agreements that lack the EA price lock.
After: 1 July 2026: a second list rise (E3 $39, E5 $60, Office 365 E3 $26, Business Basic $7, Business Standard $14, F1 +33%, F3 +25%), coupled with genuine packaging additions. E7 arrived at $99 per user per month, stacking per-seat licensing on consumption meters — Security Copilot units with $6 overage, Copilot Studio credits, Work IQ API calls. Unified Support is priced as a percentage of spend, so each list rise raises the support bill as well. Independent licensing analysts model compounded effective increases of roughly 15–25% for large enterprises across the period.
Consequence: Not one large price rise, but several simultaneous changes to the basis of pricing — discount structure, billing cadence, agreement vehicle, tier composition and consumption metering — each defensible alone, and collectively very difficult for a customer to compare against what they paid three years earlier.
Microsoft says: The packaging additions are real value: Defender for Office P1 folded into E3, Intune Suite and capped Security Copilot into E5. One specialist’s caution is worth quoting alongside it: Added Intune entitlements are worth only what they save you.
Evidence: Microsoft licensing news pages and pricing tables (primary-verified); Microsoft partner and licensing analyst documentation of the discount-level removal and billing surcharge.

Held in view, because it materially caps this finding. Eleven years of frozen list prices. Existing customers keep their prices until renewal. Most SKUs remain below their inflation-adjusted launch prices. Business Premium and E1 were not increased in 2026. Eurozone cloud prices were cut 7.4% in February 2026. Microsoft publishes complete rate cards and FAQs for all of it. The 15–25% figure is an analyst model, not a Microsoft disclosure, and is presented as such. This is why Revenue Extraction is 13/25 and not 17.

Price CreepReference-Price ErasureSubscription CreepConfidence: High

The proof that these are choices

There are two versions of Windows, and Microsoft wrote down which is which.

This is the single most useful evidentiary fact on the page, and it comes from Microsoft’s own compliance documentation rather than from any critic. Under the Digital Markets Act, Microsoft shipped a materially less restrictive Windows in the European Economic Area — and scoped each concession with the words “in the EEA.” If a default can be relaxed in one place at no technical cost, its retention elsewhere is a commercial choice, not a technical necessity. That is the whole of the argument; it does not require anyone to impute a motive.

Behaviour by jurisdiction, as documented by Microsoft. Sources are Microsoft’s EU Policy Blog and Windows Insider DMA posts (March 2024, June–July 2025), Microsoft’s ESU enrolment guidance and its Copilot deployment FAQ. Rest-of-world behaviour is Microsoft’s default configuration except where noted.
Surface	European Economic Area	Rest of world
Microsoft Edge	Uninstallable.	Not uninstallable.
Default-browser prompts	Microsoft Edge will not prompt you to set it as the default browser unless you open it directly.	Campaign prompts on by default; full-screen “recommended settings” screens after updates.
Defaults across updates	An existing default browser setting will be maintained during Windows updates.	No equivalent published commitment.
Bing in Windows Search	Removable; rival providers can plug in; results open in the default browser.	No Settings toggle as of Dec 2025; registry policy only; results open in Edge.
Microsoft 365 Copilot app	Automatic installation does not apply in the EEA.	Auto-installed on devices with Microsoft 365 desktop apps; administrator opt-out.
OneDrive backup nags	Exempt from the non-dismissable full-screen and Start-menu backup prompts.	Prompts recur; required notifications are still shown.
Windows 10 consumer ESU	Free with no backup or Rewards condition; sign-in at least every 60 days.	Free only via Windows Backup sync or 1,000 Rewards points; otherwise $30. Account required on every route.
Bing result pages	Edge promotions on Bing results eliminated — which Microsoft says goes beyond the DMA requirements.	Edge promotions present.

European Economic Area : what Microsoft ships when a regulator requires it.Rest of world : what Microsoft ships when it does not.

Microsoft deserves the credit it has earned here twice over: several EEA concessions exceed what the DMA demanded, and Microsoft says so openly. But the table is why this page can describe the rest-of-world defaults as chosen rather than required — and it is why Artificial Scarcity, which would otherwise be tempting for the local-account and search-toggle findings, is not assigned: nothing is scarce here. The capability exists, ships elsewhere, and is withheld by policy. This assessment records that as an evidentiary observation with no score effect of its own, and declines to make it a pattern.

Chronology

Seventeen years, compressed.

This is a compression, not a history. It is the assessment’s locked event set: nothing has been added to it during the build. Rows in red are load-bearing for the finding; rows in yellow are customer-favourable and are here for the same reason the counterweight section is.

2009Windows 7 ships: local accounts only, no promotional surfaces in the shell, no cloud identity layer

28 Jun 2011Office 365 launches for business; commercial list prices then hold unchanged until 2022

29 Jan 2013Office 365 Home Premium at $99.99/yr — and consumer prices then hold unchanged until 2025

2014Microsoft removes OneDrive placeholders from Windows 10 because they were “too confusing”

Jul 2015Windows 10 Express settings reset the default browser to Edge; Mozilla’s CEO publishes an open letter

Nov 2015Start-menu “suggested apps” arrive — the first first-party promotional surface in the Windows shell

Nov 2015“Unlimited” OneDrive cut to 1 TB and free tier from 15 GB to 5 GB; Microsoft apologises and offers opt-outs and refunds

Jun 2016The GWX upgrade prompt where closing the window counted as consent is replaced with a clear decline dialog after a $10,000 judgment

Aug 2016“Turn off Microsoft consumer experiences” policy removed from Windows Pro — a control regression that has not been reversed

Apr 2017 · 2018Creators Update privacy controls after CNIL; Diagnostic Data Viewer ships

Mar 2017Teams launches free in every commercial suite; auto-installed with Microsoft 365 Apps from around April 2019

Feb 2018Perpetual Office support cut from ten years to seven: “it has become imperative to move our software to a more modern cadence”

1 Oct 2019“Listed Providers” rule: perpetual licences can no longer be deployed on AWS, Google or Alibaba dedicated hosts without Software Assurance

May 2020Windows 10 2004 begins ignoring the BingSearchEnabled setting; no explanation given

Jun 2020All Microsoft Store retail locations and the in-person Answer Desk close permanently

2020Chromium Edge force-installed via Windows Update — the update “does not support the removal of this update”

22 Jul 2020Slack complains to the European Commission that Teams is illegally tied to Office

Jun 2021Windows 11 Home specification: “requires internet connectivity and a Microsoft account to complete device setup”; Pro personal-use follows in 2022

24 Jun 2021New Microsoft Store policy: developers may use their own commerce engine and “keep 100% of their revenue”

22 Jan 2021Xbox Live Gold price doubling reversed the same day: “We messed up today and you were right to let us know”

Nov 2021Microsoft blocks tools redirecting microsoft-edge: links: taskbar search is “not designed to be redirected”

1 Mar 2022First Microsoft 365 commercial price rise since 2011

1 Feb 2023Outlook.com attachments begin counting against the shared 5 GB OneDrive quota — over-quota accounts stop sending and receiving mail

19 Jul 2023After the Exchange Online intrusion, Microsoft makes 30+ premium audit log types free and raises retention from 90 to 180 days

27 Jul 2023European Commission opens a formal Article 102 investigation into Teams tying

Mar 2024DMA compliance ships in the EEA: Edge uninstallable, Bing removable from Search, no default-browser prompts, defaults preserved across updates

Apr 2024US Cyber Safety Review Board: “a cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors”; security culture “inadequate and requires an overhaul”

20 May 2024Recall announced default-on; regulator enquiries in two days, plaintext-store research in eleven, opt-in redesign in eighteen

Apr 2024KB5036980 ships Start-menu Store-app promotions to retail, default on

Jun 2024Windows 11 Home setup begins turning on Desktop, Documents and Pictures backup to OneDrive without asking

Dec 2024Microsoft deletes its own registry-bypass instructions for unsupported Windows 11 installs; TPM 2.0 called “non-negotiable”

16 Jan 2025Copilot bundled into consumer Microsoft 365 with the first price rise in twelve years; Classic plans not offered for new purchase

Jan–Feb 2025New Outlook auto-installed by Windows update: “there isn’t a way to block the new Outlook from being installed”

25 Apr 2025Recall ships opt-in, enclave-encrypted, biometric-gated and removable, off and un-enablable on managed devices

31 Jul 2025CMA final decision: “Microsoft’s licensing practices are adversely impacting the competitiveness of AWS and Google”; “less than 1% of customers switch provider each year”

Aug–Oct 2025Windows 10 ESU confirmed to require an account on every route, including the paid one; remaining local-account setup paths removed from OOBE

12 Sep 2025European Commission accepts binding Teams commitments — €8 price gap for seven years, interoperability for ten, no fine; Microsoft widens the gap 50% and applies it worldwide

27 Oct 2025ACCC institutes Federal Court proceedings alleging Microsoft “concealed” the Classic plans; Microsoft Australia apologises and refunds

1 Nov 2025Enterprise Agreement volume-discount levels B, C and D removed for online services

Mar 2026Microsoft commits to “a calmer and more chill OS with fewer upsells” and begins removing Copilot entry points and Start promotions

21 Apr 2026Game Pass Ultimate cut from $29.99 to $22.99 after Microsoft’s own executives concede it “has become too expensive for players”

14 May 2026CMA opens a Strategic Market Status investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem, reporting by February 2027

25 Jun 2026Consumer Windows 10 ESU extended a further year to 12 October 2027 — twelve years of security coverage

25 Jun 2026European Commission preliminarily designates Azure a DMA gatekeeper: “lock-in effects and high switching costs”

1 Jul 2026Second commercial list rise; E7 at $99 stacks per-seat pricing on consumption meters; Business Premium and E1 held flat

Jul 2026UK CMA opens a consumer-protection investigation into Microsoft 365 renewal and Classic-plan marketing

Aug 2026The Browser Choice Alliance publicly cites the 10-K’s “Leveraging Windows” language; Microsoft’s stated strategy becomes the criticism

Three matters above are live at publication and are stated as such: the ACCC proceeding (allegations, no findings, penalties undetermined), the UK CMA consumer-law investigation and Italy’s AGCM investigation (both open, no findings), and the CMA business-software SMS investigation and EC DMA cloud designation (both prospective). This assessment is stated as of 19 August 2026.

The internal control

Microsoft treats its customers better where they can leave.

CHI’s Dependency Principle holds that as customer exit becomes harder, the economic penalty for hostile treatment falls — which makes hostile treatment commercially easier to sustain. Most companies cannot test that proposition, because they sell into one market with one exit cost. Microsoft can. It sells operating systems, identity, cloud infrastructure, games and developer tools to overlapping customers with radically different abilities to walk away, and the correction record splits along exactly that line. Gaming and developer tooling produce fast, voluntary, public reversals. Windows, identity, Microsoft 365 and cloud licensing produce slower corrections that have generally followed a regulator, a statute or a very large public reaction — and are often bounded to the jurisdiction that applied the pressure.

Exhibit 13Xbox & Game Pass · the control group2013 → 2026

Four reversals in thirteen years, in the one place customers can simply buy a PlayStation

Before: Xbox competes with two rival consoles and an open PC platform. A customer who dislikes a price rise has an immediate, cheap and socially visible alternative — which is precisely what makes this segment useful evidence.
The reversals: Xbox One’s always-online and used-game restrictions removed eight days after E3 2013. The Xbox Live Gold twelve-month price doubling reversed the same day, with free-to-play games freed from the paywall in the bargain: We messed up today and you were right to let us know. The Outer Worlds 2 cut from $79.99 to $69.99 with refunds, in about six weeks. Game Pass Ultimate raised to $29.99 in October 2025 and cut to $22.99 in April 2026, roughly seven months later.
What made them happen: Not a regulator. Microsoft’s own executives said it plainly: the Xbox chief strategy officer, We shed millions of subscribers over the span of a few months; the incoming gaming chief executive, “Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players.” Xbox content and services revenue moved from +1% to −10% across the year of the increase. The customers left, and the price came back down.
The contrast: Set that against the same company’s Windows and Microsoft 365 record: the Microsoft account mandate, tightened across thirteen years, is unreversed. The Bing search toggle outside the EEA is unreversed at retail. OneDrive setup backup is unreversed. Edge’s removability changed only in the EEA, and only under the DMA. The consumer Copilot bundle was addressed in one country, after a regulator sued.
Microsoft says: On the Game Pass cut, the chief executive: The team is recommitting to our core fans and players… staying responsive to customer feedback. That is a true description of what happened. It is also a description of what has not happened elsewhere.
Evidence: Xbox Wire announcements (2013, 2021, 2026); Microsoft earnings commentary and segment reporting FY2025–FY2026; public statements by Xbox leadership.

What is claimed and what is not. This is presented as a supported structural correlation, not a causal finding. Microsoft has not said that exit difficulty determines its posture, and no internal document in this file suggests a deliberate policy of that kind. There is also a genuine counter-example, and it is recent: the 2026 “Windows quality” programme is the first broad voluntary de-escalation on Windows in the period — and it arrives with Windows desktop share around 71% and Linux at an unusually high 7.5%, which is what the principle’s own corollary would predict. Gaming is also not costless to leave: libraries, saves and friends lists are real switching costs, and Game Pass Ultimate is still up more than 50% since 2019 even after the cut.

Dependency PrinciplePrice CreepReference-Price ErasureConfidence: High

The reason this belongs on the page rather than in a footnote: it is the closest thing this index has to a controlled experiment inside a single company. The same management, the same culture, the same year — and two entirely different standards of customer treatment, separated by how easily the customer can leave.

Falsification discipline

The exhibit that mostly argues against this page.

Windows 11’s hardware requirements and Windows 10’s retirement are the most widely repeated criticisms of Microsoft, and they are the place where this investigation’s evidence came out weakest. It is included at full length, with its own counter-evidence, because a page that only publishes the findings that survived would be worth less than one that shows what did not.

Exhibit 14Windows 11 requirements · Windows 10 lifecycleJune 2021 → October 2027

Where the forced-obsolescence claim does and does not hold

Before: Windows upgrades tracked broad hardware capability. Windows 10 was offered as a free upgrade from Windows 7 and 8, with a key-based path that worked until September 2023.
Change: Windows 11 (June 2021) required TPM 2.0, UEFI Secure Boot capability, and a CPU floor of roughly Intel 8th-generation or AMD Zen 2. Independent scans put the ineligible installed base somewhere between 200 and 400 million PCs — estimates, not a Microsoft disclosure. In December 2024 Microsoft called TPM 2.0 a non-negotiable standard for Windows 11 now and in the future, and in the same month removed its own registry-bypass instructions from its support page while keeping the warning that unsupported PCs are not entitled to updates. Microsoft’s specification page tells ineligible users they might want to consider purchasing a new PC.
What the evidence supports: The security case for TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot is credible and is not disputed here; Microsoft cites a 99.8% crash-free rate on supported hardware against 52% more kernel-mode crashes on unsupported machines. The weakest link is the CPU-generation floor: 7th-generation Intel and Zen 1 parts support TPM 2.0, Secure Boot and virtualisation-based security, and Microsoft’s published justification for the floor is correlational crash data tied to driver support. Microsoft also added a small number of 7th-generation exceptions in August 2021, including a CPU used in its own Surface hardware, which is difficult to reconcile with a hard technical line.
What the evidence does not support: Forced obsolescence is not concluded on this page. Windows 10 received its full published ten-year lifecycle. Consumer Extended Security Updates were unprecedented, free by two routes, cover ten devices, and were extended to October 2027. Microsoft 365 Apps and Edge security updates run to October 2028 without ESU. Windows OEM revenue rose 3%, 6% and 5% across the end-of-support window and then fell 2% and 5% — a modest pull-forward, not a windfall. Apple retires Intel Macs on a faster cadence. Twelve years of security coverage is the most generous lifecycle on this index.
Microsoft says: Security by design from the chip to the cloud; and, on the extension, We understand that moving to a new PC can take time.
Evidence: Microsoft Windows 11 specification and security blogs; Microsoft lifecycle and ESU documentation; Microsoft segment revenue disclosures FY2025–FY2026; third-party installed-base estimates from enterprise scanning and consumer-advocacy research, presented as estimates.

What is retained, and it is narrow. The finding that survives is not about hardware at all. It is that the locus of harm moved — from the 2021 hardware floor, where Microsoft’s security argument is strong, to the 2025 conditions attached to continued security: an account on every route, and outside the EEA a cloud backup or engagement with a rewards programme. Those conditions were relaxed only where a consumer body invoked the DMA. That is Exhibit 6, and it is the whole of the finding. Artificial Scarcity is recorded as possible and is not assigned.

RentalizationDependency PrincipleConfidence: Moderate — deliberately downgraded

Counterweights · at full strength

The evidence for Microsoft.

This is not a defence paragraph appended to a critical page. It is a section with the same visual weight as the exhibits, because the score depends on it. Each credit below carries the scoring effect it actually had on CHI or CVI. Several of them are the direct reason a dimension is two or three points lower than the adverse evidence alone would produce.

01 · A twelve-year consumer price freezeMicrosoft 365 Personal and Family held their US prices from January 2013 to January 2025. Family at $129.99 for six people and six terabytes is roughly 6% below the inflation-adjusted price of the 2013 plan it replaced.CHI −−− · Revenue Extraction held to 13/25

02 · An eleven-year commercial price freeze, and most SKUs still below inflationNo Microsoft 365 commercial increase 2011–2022. Office 365 E3 up about 30% nominally against roughly 47% CPI over the same period. Business Premium and E1 held flat in 2026; eurozone cloud prices cut 7.4%.CHI −− · caps Price Creep at segment-specific

03 · The most generous consumer OS lifecycle on this indexTen years of Windows 10, then the first consumer ESU ever offered — free by two routes, ten devices, and extended unilaterally to October 2027. Apps and browser security updates run to October 2028 without ESU.CVI ++ · CHI −− · blocks forced obsolescence

04 · Win32 backward compatibility measured in decadesApplications written for Windows 95 largely still run. No company assessed here carries a comparable voluntary compatibility burden, and it is the largest single component of Microsoft’s Core Product Value.CVI +++ · Core Product Value 26/30

05 · An open hardware and software platformAny OEM or self-built PC; any Win32 application installable from anywhere with no store approval, developer verification or signing gate. Microsoft’s own 10-K concedes the margin consequence of competing with free operating systems.CHI −− · Customer Restriction held to 15/20

06 · A first-party store that takes nothing if you bring your own paymentsSince June 2021 developers may use their own commerce engine and “keep 100% of their revenue,” with any framework accepted. Done pre-emptively, before any court or regulator required it.CVI + · CHI − · most generous store terms in the corpus

07 · Perpetual licensing survivesOffice Home 2024, Visual Studio Professional, Windows Server, SQL Server and Windows itself are still one-time purchases. The ownership route was subordinated, not closed.CHI − · Rentalization scored as incomplete

08 · Open source and free developer toolingVS Code, .NET, TypeScript, PowerShell and WSL under MIT; free private GitHub repositories since 2019; a free GitHub Copilot tier since 2024; roughly 60,000 patents contributed to the Open Invention Network.CVI ++ · Feature & Capability 22/25

09 · Interoperability that is real rather than claimedOOXML standardised as ISO/IEC 29500; ODF 1.3 supported; the Open Specifications Promise; the Open XML SDK open-sourced; Office on iOS, Android and the web; Microsoft Graph for mail, files and Teams data.CHI −− · deliberate incompatibility not concluded

10 · Privacy documentation and controls among the industry’s most detailedField-level diagnostic-data documentation, the Diagnostic Data Viewer, the completed EU Data Boundary, a stated policy of no ad targeting from message or document content, and no training of foundation models on commercial customer data.CHI −− · Information & Privacy held to 9/15

11 · Recall rebuilt rather than defendedOpt-in, Windows Hello required, VBS enclave with TPM-bound keys, removable, off and un-enablable on managed devices, snapshots not shared with Microsoft — and an eleven-month delay to ship it.CVI ++ · CHI − · Fixed Under Pressure, credited in full

12 · Security investment with executive pay attachedDefender free since Windows 8; Patch Tuesday since 2003; the Secure Future Initiative with 34,000 engineers and senior-leadership compensation tied to security milestones; the Customer Copyright Commitment indemnifying Copilot users.CVI + · CHI − · against the 2024 federal review

13 · Reversals where reversals are possibleFour public Xbox climb-downs in thirteen years, two of them within eight days and one within the same day. The 2026 Game Pass cut followed Microsoft’s own executives publicly conceding the price was too high.CVI + · supplies the Dependency Principle control

14 · Independent satisfaction that is respectable, not stellarACSI scored Copilot 74 in its first AI-platform study — ahead of ChatGPT and Claude at 73, behind Gemini at 76. Bing scored 77 in 2024, a twelve-year high. Microsoft Surface scored 76 among PCs, behind HP, Apple and Dell.CVI + · presented with the unfavourable figures included

15 · Accessibility leadershipThe Xbox Adaptive Controller, Seeing AI, Immersive Reader, Accessibility Insights and the Inclusive Design toolkit — sustained investment in an area with no obvious commercial return.CVI + · Feature & Capability

16 · Transparency that supplies the evidence against itComplete SKU tables, licensing FAQs, published lifecycle dates, and release notes that document the off-switch in the same paragraph as the new promotion. A substantial share of this page’s primary sourcing is Microsoft’s own documentation.CHI −− · Trust & Transparency held to 10/15

Two further credits change the balance without moving a number. Microsoft made its European digital commitments contractually binding in 2025, including an undertaking to contest in court any order to suspend its European cloud operations. And on the three most dramatic claims this investigation set out to test — broad price gouging, engineered file-format incompatibility, and forced obsolescence — the evidence went against the thesis in all three cases. Those are not omissions. They are findings, and they are listed as such below.

Fixed under pressure

What Microsoft corrected — and what it took.

Roughly two compelled or backlash-driven corrections for every voluntary one, and the split is not random: it maps onto how easily the customer can leave. Both columns are credited in full. Under this project’s locked methodology a correction counts toward the customer’s current experience regardless of why it happened: no CHI penalty is applied anywhere for the fact that a fix was compelled, and no CVI credit is withheld anywhere for the same reason. This ledger is context, not score.

Corrected after outside pressureRegulator, statute, court, market defection or public backlash. The page states when, and after what, and lets the reader draw the inference.

Edge uninstallable; no default-browser prompts; defaults kept across updates; Bing removable from SearchMar 2024, EEA only · Statutory — Digital Markets Act
Teams unbundled; €8/$8.55 price gap; interoperability and portability commitmentsSep 2025, worldwide from Nov 2025 · Regulator — European Commission, binding commitments
30+ premium audit log types made free; retention 90→180 days19 Jul 2023, about a week after public pressure · Regulator — CISA and a US senator
Classic plans surfaced; refunds offered; public apologyNov 2025, Australia and New Zealand · Regulator — ACCC proceedings
Windows 10 consumer ESU made free without the backup or Rewards conditionSep 2025, EEA only · Consumer body — Euroconsumers, under the DMA
Windows 10 telemetry controls and a mandatory privacy choice screenApr 2017 · Regulator — CNIL formal notice
Office telemetry reduced; Required/Optional/Neither levels; processor-role contracts2019 · Regulator — Dutch government DPIAs
Flexible Virtualization Benefit; CISPE settlement; CSP-Hoster route2022–2025 · Regulator/complaint — CISPE and the European Commission
Azure free-exit egress credit; UK switching window 60→180 daysMar 2024; Mar 2026 · Regulator and market — CMA, EU Data Act, rivals
GWX upgrade prompt where closing the window counted as consent, replacedJun 2016, about three months · Backlash and litigation
Recall made opt-in, encrypted in an enclave, removable, delayed eleven monthsJun–Sep 2024 · Backlash — security research and ICO enquiries
Windows 11 per-file-type browser defaults replaced by one-click Set defaultDec 2021 preview, 2022 retail · Backlash — press and rival browser vendors
File Explorer advertising banner withdrawn as “experimental”Mar 2022, within days · Backlash
Microsoft 365 Copilot app auto-install pausedMar 2026, resumed Jun 2026 · Backlash — enterprise administrators
Game Pass Ultimate cut from $29.99 to $22.99Apr 2026, about seven months · Market — “millions” of subscribers lost

Done without being made toNot a small column. It contains the most generous first-party store terms in this corpus and the first broad de-escalation of Windows promotional surfaces in a decade.

Microsoft Store: own commerce engine, developers keep 100%Jun 2021 · Voluntary — pre-emptive, before any ruling
Xbox One always-online and used-game DRM removedJun 2013, eight days · Voluntary — customer reaction
Xbox Live Gold price doubling reversed; free-to-play freed from the paywallJan 2021, same day · Voluntary
The Outer Worlds 2 cut from $79.99 to $69.99 with refundsJul 2025, about six weeks · Voluntary
Windows 10 consumer ESU extended a year to October 2027Jun 2026 · Voluntary — no regulator asked
“A calmer and more chill OS with fewer upsells”: Widgets feed off by default, MSN tiles and sponsored cards removed from Search, Start promotions removed2026 · Voluntary — still Insider or controlled rollout
Copilot entry points removed from Notepad, Snipping Tool, Photos and WidgetsMar–Apr 2026 · Voluntary — “places where it doesn’t live up to its promise”
OneDrive File Explorer badge and Word local-save nag removedMid-2024 · Voluntary — unannounced
OneNote 2016 deprecation reversedNov 2019, about eighteen months · Voluntary — enterprise feedback
“Unlimited” OneDrive reduction apologised for, with opt-outs and refundsNov 2015 · Voluntary — “For this, we are truly sorry”
Copilot key made remappable; Right Ctrl/Menu option promised2024–2026 · Voluntary
Surface repairability improved; parts and repair guides published2021–2024 · Voluntary — after a shareholder resolution
Secure Future Initiative; executive compensation tied to security milestones2024 · Voluntary, after an adverse federal review
Intervention against OEM bloatware advertising on new PCsJul 2026 · Voluntary

Two things the ledger shows that a simple count would miss. First, several corrections are jurisdictionally bounded: the customer who benefits from Edge being uninstallable, from defaults surviving updates, from free ESU without conditions, or from an escapable OneDrive prompt is a customer in the European Economic Area. Second, the practice frequently returns in a different wrapper — the GWX upgrade prompt gave way to full-screen Windows 11 prompts; the Teams bundle gave way to Copilot bundled into new SKUs and pinned into Office apps; the reversed Xbox Gold rise was followed by Game Pass increases totalling more than 50%. Neither observation reduces the credit given above. Both are why the corrections do not, on their own, resolve the finding.

Product-level adjudication

Microsoft is not behaviourally uniform, and this page will not imply that it is.

Windows setup, cloud licensing and the consumer Microsoft 365 restructuring are the strongest findings. This table exists so that they do not colour Office, Azure as a product, GitHub, developer tooling or the security organisation, several of which are genuinely mixed or net beneficial. Every row is adjudicated on the conduct, not on how much criticism it attracted — and four rows come out net customer-beneficial.

Product or systemAdjudicationWhy

Windows setup & account requirementStrong customer-hostile evolutionThirteen years of monotonic tightening, ending with the removal of the remaining local-account setup paths in 2025 and an account that now custodies the disk-encryption key and holds the ESU licence. Offsetting and stated: the Pro work-or-school path, unattended installs and post-setup switching all still work.

Cloud & server licensingStrongA competition authority’s final decision found Microsoft’s licensing practices adversely affect rivals’ competitiveness, that rivals’ input prices can exceed Microsoft’s own customer-facing prices, and that fewer than 1% of customers switch cloud in a year. The least visible and most structural mechanism on the page. Offsetting: FVB, CSP-Hoster, egress credits and the UK commitments are real.

Windows promotional surfacesStrong for 2015–2025; improvingTen years of monotonic expansion across lock screen, Start, Search, Settings, File Explorer, notifications, setup and full-screen interstitials, with the policies to suppress them edition-gated away from Pro. The 2026 de-escalation is genuine in direction and mostly not yet at retail.

Consumer Microsoft 365 · Copilot restructuringStrong on process; Moderate on priceThree regulators are examining the same conduct and Microsoft has apologised and refunded in one market. But the price finding is weaker than it looks: this followed twelve flat years and Family remains below its inflation-adjusted 2013 equivalent. The hostility is in the salience of the alternative, not the number.

OneDrive · the local/cloud boundaryStrongDefault-on folder relocation during Home setup, a 5 GB free tier shared with email since 2023, and non-dismissable prompts outside the EEA — ten years after Microsoft itself concluded that cloud placeholders confuse users. Offsetting: genuine ransomware and device-loss protection, version history, Personal Vault, and materially improved current documentation.

Edge / Bing / Windows SearchModerate-to-Strong outside the EEA; resolved inside itOS surfaces bound to Microsoft’s browser and search engine regardless of the declared default, with a registry-only off switch. The EEA version of Windows is the counter-evidence and the remedy at once, and the 2026 worldwide search toggle is in preview.

Teams · distributionModerate-to-Strong historically; materially remediedA preliminary abuse finding, seven- and ten-year binding commitments, and a first unbundling priced so that buying both parts cost more than the bundle. Against that: six years of genuinely free value, no fine, no infringement decision, remedies beyond those demanded, and a real discount since November 2025.

Enterprise licensing & pricingModerateFour new pricing axes in four years after eleven with none: list rises, a billing surcharge, removal of programmatic volume discounts, and consumption meters layered onto per-seat tiers. Strongly offset: most SKUs remain below inflation-adjusted launch, existing customers are protected to renewal, Business Premium and E1 were held, and eurozone prices fell.

Security tieringModerate, improvingBaseline breach-detection logging sat behind a premium tier until a dependent customer base was compromised, and was released by policy within about a week. The direction since 2023 is de-gating — Defender for Office P1 into E3, Intune Suite into E5 — and the Secure Future Initiative is substantive.

Windows Update & forced migrationsModerateThe update channel doubles as a distribution channel for software the customer did not request — Edge, new Outlook, Copilot — and end-of-servicing overrides deferral preferences. Credited: pause and active-hours controls, machine-learning safeguard holds, the 2018 update halt, and the 2026 consolidation to one restart a month.

Product retirement practiceModerateSkype retired nine weeks after announcement with credit sales halted immediately; Windows Mixed Reality headsets rendered unusable by a feature update; OneNote 2016 deprecated, reversed, then the replacement retired. Counter-cases are strong: Xbox 360 purchases still downloadable, IE mode to 2029, classic Outlook to at least 2029, and repeated enterprise extensions.

Privacy & telemetryMixed, trending favourableSetup toggles default to maximal sharing and Required diagnostic data cannot be disabled on Home or Pro eleven years on. Against that, field-level documentation, the Diagnostic Data Viewer, the EU Data Boundary, no ad targeting from content, no model training on commercial data, and repeated remediation after independent assessments.

Xbox & Game PassMixed / finely balancedUltimate is up more than 50% since 2019 and the cheap legacy routes were specifically closed; hardware rose three times in fifteen months. But four public reversals, management conceding the price was too high, cross-generation compatibility and first-party titles on rival consoles are the strongest responsiveness record in the file.

Office file formats & interoperabilityWeak — not a findingThis page makes no claim of engineered incompatibility, and the evidence does not support one. OOXML is an ISO standard, ODF 1.3 is supported, the Open Specifications Promise stands, and Graph provides export. Switching cost here is feature depth and network effects, which this project does not score as hostility.

Support & account recoveryModerateThe in-person channel was eliminated in 2020 and account recovery is form-only by policy, with no human override — a real autonomy problem when the account now gates disk encryption. Live chat and phone remain across Microsoft 365, Windows, Xbox and Surface.

Windows as an open computing platformNet customer-beneficialStated explicitly so this page cannot be accused of scoring the product rather than the conduct. Any hardware, any application, no store gatekeeping, no signing requirement, decades of compatibility — materially more open than any mobile platform on this index.

Developer tooling · VS Code, GitHub, WSL, .NETNet customer-beneficialFree tiers that expanded rather than contracted, open-sourcing under permissive licences, and free private repositories. It is also the segment where customers can leave fastest, which is exactly the Dependency Principle’s prediction.

Windows 10 lifecycle & consumer ESUNet customer-beneficialA ten-year commitment honoured, then twelve years of security coverage via an unprecedented consumer programme, free by two routes and extended unilaterally. The account condition is the finding; the programme itself is a credit.

Recall, as shippedNet customer-beneficialOpt-in, local, enclave-encrypted, biometric-gated, removable, and not shared with Microsoft. Eleven months late because Microsoft rebuilt it. The initial design is documented as context and does not govern this row.

What we refused to count

What we did not conclude.

Microsoft is large enough to supply an unlimited number of examples. The discipline that makes the rest of this page believable is the list of things that were tested and rejected — and on this company that list is unusually long, because three of the most commonly made criticisms of Microsoft did not survive contact with the evidence.

Microsoft is broadly gouging its customers on priceFalsified Not asserted anywhere on this page. Consumer Microsoft 365 prices did not move for twelve years and Family remains roughly 6% below its inflation-adjusted 2013 equivalent while covering six users instead of five. Commercial list prices did not move for eleven years and most remain below inflation-adjusted launch. Business Premium and E1 were held flat in 2026 and eurozone cloud prices were cut. Price Creep survives only as a segment-specific finding, and Revenue Extraction is the lightest proportional dimension on this page as a direct result.

Windows 11’s requirements are forced obsolescenceNot established The TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot case is credible and is credited. Windows 10 received its full ten-year lifecycle, followed by an unprecedented consumer security programme — free by two routes, extended unilaterally to October 2027, with apps and browser updates running to 2028. Windows OEM revenue showed a modest pull-forward and then declined. The CPU-generation floor remains under-justified, which is why Artificial Scarcity is recorded as possible; it is not enough to assign the pattern.

Microsoft deliberately breaks file compatibility to trap customersNot established OOXML is ISO/IEC 29500, ODF 1.3 is supported, the Open Specifications Promise stands, the Open XML SDK is open source, and Graph provides programmatic export. Historic episodes exist and are contested. The real switching cost sits at the identity layer, not the format layer — which is exactly what the European Commission’s Teams remedy targets, and it is where this page puts the finding instead.

Artificial ScarcityTested and not assigned The candidates — the removed local-account path, the missing search toggle, the premium-only audit logs — all fail the pattern’s own test. Nothing is scarce. The capability exists, ships in the European Economic Area, and is withheld elsewhere by policy. That is a default choice, which this page names as such, and it is a different behaviour from manufacturing scarcity.

Preference AmnesiaNot assigned The strongest available evidence is indirect: Microsoft’s EEA commitment to maintain an existing default browser across updates implies defaults were not always maintained, and the BingSearchEnabled setting was quietly ignored from 2020. Both are real. Neither establishes the repeated resetting the pattern requires, and systematic evidence of settings reversion after recent feature updates could not be obtained. Facebook remains the type specimen; Microsoft is not a second one.

Loyalty PricingPossible, not assigned Enterprise Agreement renewals are where discounts are reduced, and Game Pass grandfathered pricing is conditional on auto-renew staying on. Both are documented. But existing customers are protected until renewal, and the evidence does not establish the systematic new-customer-favouring structure the pattern names.

Commercially Overrideable ScarcityPossible, not assigned The 2023 audit-log release fits the shape precisely — the logs existed and were withheld by SKU, then released by policy at no technical cost. One clean specimen is not a pattern assignment, and the behaviour is already scored inside the Dependency Principle finding.

Justify the Exchange · Compensation Ratio · Value RecoveryNot supported “More value” messaging accompanies every Microsoft increase — “24 apps, 1,400 features”; “1,100 new features” — but it does not meet the threshold these patterns set, and no systematic compensation mechanism was examined beyond the Australian refunds and the Outer Worlds 2 refunds, both of which are credited rather than scored.

Algorithmic Replacement applied to CopilotRejected as framed Copilot is added to products; it does not substitute for a human function customers previously relied on. The pattern is assigned narrowly, and only to the support relationship — the closure of the in-person Answer Desk and account recovery with no human override. Extending it to AI features would have been the easy move and it is not supportable.

Microsoft’s security rationales are pretextualNot asserted The hardware root-of-trust argument, the crash data, the case for forced security patching after WannaCry and the Secure Future Initiative are all real and are quoted on this page. The findings are narrower: no Microsoft document argues that a mandatory account is necessary for security, and the security case for forced patching does not extend to installing applications the customer did not ask for.

The OneDrive default causes Microsoft 365 Basic conversionsCausation not established The funnel is structurally complete and is described as a sequence. Microsoft discloses no conversion data, none was found, and no causal claim is made anywhere on this page.

Whether the registry bypass still works on current retail Windows 11 mediaUnresolved — deliberately left open Specialist outlets conflict, no Microsoft knowledge-base article naming the change was identified, and no hands-on verification was possible. The exhibit therefore rests on Microsoft’s own specification page and its own Insider announcements, which are sufficient without it. An open question is not evidence.

Whether Start-menu “Recommended” developers pay for placementUnknown Microsoft describes them as a small set of curated developers. No paid-placement marketplace was found, and no claim of one is made. This matters, because it is the difference between Windows as a first-party acquisition channel — which is what this page says — and Windows as a third-party advertising network, which it does not.

Pending consumer-protection outcomesLive, not decided The ACCC matter is a proceeding with allegations and undetermined penalties. The UK CMA consumer-law investigation and Italy’s AGCM investigation are open with no findings. A US class action over Windows 10 end-of-support was filed in 2025 and its status could not be established. No score on this page anticipates any of these outcomes.

Google’s cloud-licensing markup figuresRemoved — interested-party allegation The roughly 400% markup and the €1bn-a-year EU cost figure come from a complaint by a direct competitor, which was withdrawn in November 2025. The CMA’s own differentials are redacted. No third-party competitor figure is used anywhere on this page. The CMA’s published findings are sufficient and stronger.

“Microsoft was found guilty” of anything in this periodWrong on the record Across 2015–2026 there is no infringement decision and no fine in the matters covered here. The Teams case ended in accepted commitments. The CMA cloud investigation produced findings on competitive effects, not a penalty. The CSRB produced a report, not an enforcement action. The ACCC matter is live. Every regulatory statement on this page carries its authority, its date and its procedural status, and collapsing them would be the single easiest way to discredit the assessment.

Intellectual Asymmetry as a new CHI patternHeld as a concept, not launched Microsoft is the strongest specimen the corpus has produced for it: information is technically disclosed — on Learn, in FAQs, in Message Center posts — while the surface the customer actually touches carries a label that minimises recognition of the commercial consequence. Disclosure present, salience engineered away. That may be the definition the Lexicon eventually needs. It is not added to the taxonomy by this assessment, and it carries no score.

Microsoft’s revenue, profit and scale as evidence of hostilityScale is not hostility This page permits itself a small number of financial figures, and uses them only to explain why per-seat pricing levers exist — slowing seat growth in the highest-margin segment against very large AI capital expenditure. A score driven by corporate size would have been 75 or higher. That would have been wrong, and it was rejected here as it was for Google.

Microsoft is uniquely hostileFalsified Apple and Google show structurally similar account, cloud-default, AI-insertion and EEA-only-compliance behaviour, and both score higher on CHI. Microsoft’s distinct contributions are two: control of the identity layer, and software-licensing leverage over rival clouds. That is a narrower and better-evidenced claim than uniqueness, and it is the one this page makes.

Two further disciplines are worth stating plainly. No employee statement on this page is treated as corporate intent — where a Microsoft executive is quoted saying “upsells” or “Working on it,” the quotation is attributed to the person and the moment, and nothing further is inferred from it. And every regulatory statement carries its authority, its date and its status: the ACCC words are pleaded allegations; the European Commission’s abuse finding was preliminary and the case closed on binding commitments without a fine; the CMA’s cloud finding is a final decision on competitive effects; the DMA designation of Azure is preliminary; and the Cyber Safety Review Board produced a report rather than an enforcement action.

Score composition

Show the arithmetic.

Assessed under CHI/CVI Methodology v2.0: dimensions score the underlying customer harm, patterns describe the behaviour that produced it. CHI 64, CVI 84 and CFS +20 are settled analytical values and are not presented as a range. Methodology →

CHI v2.0 · 64 / 100 · Concerning

Revenue Extraction13/25

Behavioral Manipulation17/25

Customer Restriction15/20

Information & Privacy9/15

Trust & Transparency10/15

13 + 17 + 15 + 9 + 10 = 64. Behavioral Manipulation at 17/25 is Microsoft’s heaviest adverse category and the highest on this dimension of any Technology-sector company on the index: recommended defaults, a setup flow that promotes before it configures, OneDrive backup switched on without a question, security-framed browser prompts, an alternative plan placed inside a cancellation flow, and commercial surfaces embedded in the operating system itself. Customer Restriction at 15/20 reflects the account mandate, edition-gated policies, non-disableable Required telemetry on Home and Pro, the Listed Providers rule and multi-session licensing — and is held to 15 rather than 17 by one fact that deserves its weight: Windows remains an open hardware and application platform with no store gatekeeping. Revenue Extraction at 13/25 is the lightest and is deliberately so: twelve years of flat consumer pricing, eleven of flat commercial pricing, most SKUs still below inflation, and a family plan cheaper in real terms than in 2013. Information & Privacy at 9 is below Google, Facebook and Instagram, because the documentation, controls and remediation record are genuinely stronger. Trust & Transparency at 10 is the lowest of the tech cohort on this index — not for absence of disclosure, which is unusually good, but because the commercially important consequence is repeatedly made less salient at the moment of decision.

CVI v2.0 · 84 / 100 · Exceptional

Core Product Value26/30

Feature & Capability Improvements22/25

Technology & Performance17/20

Trust, Safety & Reliability10/15

Innovation9/10

26 + 22 + 17 + 10 + 9 = 84. Core Product Value at 26/30 rests on things that are difficult to argue with: decades of Win32 compatibility, a family productivity plan cheaper in real terms than in 2013, free web Office, Outlook.com and Teams, Azure at global scale, GitHub and VS Code, and support lifecycles that run to a decade and beyond. Feature & Capability at 22/25 reflects the breadth of the stack and sustained accessibility work — the Xbox Adaptive Controller, Seeing AI, Immersive Reader — alongside an AI assistant that scored 74 in the first independent AI-platform satisfaction study, ahead of two of its three named rivals. Technology & Performance at 17/20 is docked for Windows 11 quality complaints Microsoft itself acknowledged in 2026 and for a January 2026 update that broke opening files stored in OneDrive — where Microsoft’s own defaults had put them. Trust, Safety & Reliability at 10/15 is Microsoft’s weakest ground. The security investment is real and expensive, but a US federal review found the security culture “inadequate,” the 2023 Exchange Online intrusion was detectable only by customers who had paid for premium logging, Recall’s first design was withdrawn, and account recovery has no human override by policy — on an account that now holds the disk-encryption key. Innovation at 9/10 covers on-device AI silicon support, Azure at frontier scale, WSL, GitHub Copilot and the enclave architecture Microsoft built for Recall’s second attempt.

CHI64

BandConcerning

CVI84

BandExceptional

CFS+20

ReadingFair

CFS = 84 − 64 = +20. Microsoft delivers an exceptional and unusually durable body of customer value, and it exercises unusual structural control over the terms on which that value is delivered. The two very nearly cancel, and that is the finding. Reading +20 as a compliment would be the single worst misreading available: it does not mean Microsoft is customer-friendly, it means an exceptional value score is being almost entirely consumed by a high hostility score.

Where +20 sits

CompanyCHICVICFS

Zoom2889+61

Canva3889+51

Emirates4885+37

Adobe5083+33

Spotify4976+27

Amazon6788+21

Google / Alphabet6787+20

Microsoft6484+20

Uber6482+18

Apple6884+16

Facebook6477+13

TikTok7481+7

Instagram7076+6

Luxy7060−10

Published CHI, CVI and CFS values for other companies are taken from their own assessment pages as currently published on this site; no other company’s score was reviewed or altered while building this one. Microsoft lands in the same finely balanced band as Apple, Google and Amazon — four companies whose products are excellent and whose control over the terms of those products is the reason they are here at all.

The shape of the score, not the size of it

Revenue Extractionout of 25

Microsoft13/25

Google14/25

Amazon17/25

Behavioral Manipulationout of 25

Microsoft17/25

Google16/25

Amazon15/25

Customer Restrictionout of 20

Microsoft15/20

Google15/20

Amazon14/20

Information & Privacyout of 15

Microsoft9/15

Google11/15

Amazon10/15

Trust & Transparencyout of 15

Microsoft10/15

Google11/15

Amazon11/15

Three Technology-sector companies with close totals — Microsoft 64, Google 67, Amazon 67 — and three different distributions. Microsoft’s profile is the numerical statement of this page’s thesis: lightest of the three on Revenue Extraction, heaviest on Behavioral Manipulation. Customers pay in defaults and requirements, not in price increases. Apple is the natural fourth comparison and is omitted from these bars because its page publishes its CHI split on a five-point scale rather than the v2.0 dimension maxima used here; its headline values appear in the table above.

Evidence & methodology

Research statusComplete

Research streams11

Methodologyv2.0

Patterns10

Exhibits14

Assessed as of19 Aug 2026

This assessment draws on an eleven-stream research programme completed on 19 August 2026, covering Microsoft 365 pricing and rentalization, Windows account dependency and promotional surfaces, Edge, Bing and Windows Update, OneDrive, Outlook and product retirements, Copilot, Recall and telemetry, Windows 11 requirements and the Windows 10 lifecycle, Teams, file formats and the regulatory record, enterprise licensing, Azure, administration and security, Xbox, cancellation and support, and financials, counter-evidence and reversals. Primary sources dominate: regulator decisions and filings, SEC filings and earnings disclosures, and Microsoft’s own blog, support, Learn, licensing and Message Center documentation. Ten of the fourteen exhibits are documented in Microsoft’s own published words. Where a claim rests on secondary reporting, on an analyst model, or on an allegation rather than a finding, the page says so in the text rather than in a footnote. Microsoft is large enough to supply an unlimited number of examples; this page is deliberately capped at ten patterns and fourteen exhibits, and the items in What we did not conclude are as deliberate as the items in the exhibits.

SEC filingMicrosoft Corporation — Annual Report on Form 10-K (FY2026, year ended 30 June 2026)The controlling source for the page’s central strategic quotation, listed under “Our Future Opportunity”: “Leveraging Windows to fuel our cloud business, grow our share of the PC market, and drive increased engagement with our services like Microsoft Edge, Bing, Copilot, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 Consumer, XBOX Game Pass, and more.” Substantively identical wording appears in the FY2023 filing, so this is a durable stated strategy rather than a new one. Also the source for the risk-factor admission that competing with low- or no-cost operating systems may decrease PC operating-system margins.
Regulator · final decisionUK Competition and Markets Authority — Cloud services market investigation, final decision and licensing working paper (31 July 2025)Source for Microsoft’s licensing practices are adversely impacting the competitiveness of AWS and Google in the supply of cloud services, for the finding that rivals’ input price can be higher than Microsoft’s customer-facing price for some cloud customers, for egress fees as a key commercial barrier, and for less than 1% of customers switch provider each year. A final decision on competitive effects, not a fine. Committed-spend agreements were expressly cleared. Cloud SMS designation was declined in March 2026 after UK commitments.
Regulator · commitments decisionEuropean Commission — Case AT.40721, Microsoft (Teams) (Statement of Objections 25 June 2024; commitments accepted 12 September 2025)Source for the preliminary finding that Microsoft is dominant worldwide in the market for SaaS productivity applications for professional use, for the assessment that the 2023 changes were insufficient, and for the binding remedies — a price gap of up to EUR 8 for E3 and E5 for seven years, interoperability and portability for ten, and a monitoring trustee. Closed under Article 9: no infringement decision and no fine. Microsoft widened the gap 50% after the market test and applied it worldwide from 1 November 2025.
Regulator · live proceedingAustralian Competition and Consumer Commission v. Microsoft — Federal Court proceedings (instituted 27 October 2025)Source for the allegation that Microsoft deliberately omitted reference to the Classic plans in its communications and concealed their existence from roughly 2.7 million Australian subscribers. Pleaded allegations, not findings; penalties undetermined. Microsoft Australia’s response — We fell short of our standards here, and we apologise — the surfacing of the Classic plans and the refunds are matters of record and are credited under Fixed Under Pressure.
Regulator · open investigationsUK CMA — Microsoft 365 subscription marketing (July 2026); Italy AGCM — Microsoft 365 price rise (June 2026)Source for the CMA’s description that Upon renewal, customers were automatically enrolled in higher-priced plans with these features unless they actively switched to a ‘Classic’ plan or cancelled. Both are open consumer-protection investigations with no findings, and no score on this page anticipates either outcome.
Government reviewUS Cyber Safety Review Board — Review of the Summer 2023 Microsoft Exchange Online Intrusion (April 2024)Source for a cascade of Microsoft’s avoidable errors, for the conclusion that Microsoft’s “security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul”, and for the finding that logging should be a core element of cloud offerings. A report, not an enforcement action. The State Department’s detection of the intrusion through paid premium logging comes from the same document.
Regulator · preliminary designationEuropean Commission — DMA gatekeeper designation, cloud services (preliminary, 25 June 2026)Azure and AWS preliminarily designated on the basis of vast and entrenched user bases that appear to benefit from lock-in effects and high switching costs. Preliminary and prospective. A separate CMA Strategic Market Status investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem opened 14 May 2026 and reports by February 2027.
Company documentationMicrosoft — Windows 11 specifications page (current, verified 19 August 2026)Windows 11 Pro for personal use and Windows 11 Home require internet connectivity and a Microsoft account during initial device setup. The load-bearing sentence for Exhibit 1, taken from Microsoft’s own live specification rather than from criticism of it. Paired with the Windows Insider Blog announcements of March and October 2025 removing the remaining setup bypasses.
Company documentationMicrosoft Support — Back up your folders with OneDrivePrimary source for the mechanics of folder backup, for the options to keep files only in OneDrive or only on the PC, and for the warning that cloud-only files must be downloaded before unlinking. Read alongside Microsoft’s Files On-Demand documentation and its Known Folder Move policy reference, which documents the silently move and reminder-notification options. Microsoft’s current disclosure here is materially better than it was and is credited as such.
Company documentationMicrosoft — Windows 10 Extended Security UpdatesSource for the three consumer enrolment routes, the ten-device limit, the extension to 12 October 2027, the EEA variation, and the statement that The ESU license will be associated with the Microsoft account used to enroll — which applies to the $30 paid route as well as the free ones. Also the source for the commercial ESU ladder and for the October 2028 dates covering Microsoft 365 Apps and Edge on Windows 10.
Company blogMicrosoft 365 Blog — Copilot included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family (16 January 2025)Source for the price change — framed by Microsoft as an increase for the first time since its release — and for the justification that it reflects the extensive subscription benefits that we’ve added over the past 12 years. Read against Microsoft’s Microsoft 365 Premium announcement of October 2025 and its current consumer and business pricing pages.
Company blogWindows Experience Blog — Update on Recall security and privacy architecture (27 September 2024)Source for Recall is an opt-in experience… Users can also remove Recall entirely, for the VBS enclave and TPM-bound key design, for Sensitive content filtering is on by default, and for Recall does not share snapshots or associated data with Microsoft or third parties. Paired with Microsoft’s Recall management documentation for the enterprise default-off position and with the ICO’s statement of 22 May 2024 — enquiries, with no published enforcement.
Company documentationMicrosoft — EU Policy Blog and Windows Insider DMA compliance posts (November 2023; March 2024; June–July 2025)The source for the entire Two Windows table, and the most important evidentiary material on the page. Microsoft’s own scoping language — in the EEA — establishes that Edge uninstallability, the absence of default-browser prompts, defaults preserved across updates, Bing removal from Search, exemption from the Copilot app auto-install and free unconditional ESU are policy choices available at no technical cost. Microsoft states that eliminating Edge promotions on Bing results goes beyond the DMA requirements, and it is credited for that.
Company documentationMicrosoft — licensing news, pricing tables and Message Center posts (2022–2026)Source for the March 2022 and July 2026 list increases, the April 2025 monthly-billing surcharge, the November 2025 removal of Enterprise Agreement volume-discount levels, the July 2026 packaging changes, the E7 tier and its consumption meters, and the new-Outlook deployment guidance including Currently, there isn’t a way to block the new Outlook from being installed… you can remove it after it’s installed. Compounded-increase figures of 15–25% are independent analyst models, not Microsoft disclosures, and are labelled as such wherever they appear.
Company documentationMicrosoft Learn — Windows diagnostic data, policy CSP and edition support references (current)Source for the Required/Optional diagnostic levels and the statement that setting telemetry to zero is only applicable to Windows 10 Enterprise, Education, Mobile Enterprise, IoT Core, Server 2016. Using this setting on other devices is equivalent to setting the value of 1 — the basis for the finding that Home and Pro cannot disable Required data. Also the source for AllowWindowsConsumerFeatures, AllowWindowsTips and AllowWindowsSpotlight being Enterprise and Education only.
Company blogWindows Experience Blog — Building a new, open Microsoft Store on Windows 11Source for developers being permitted to use their own commerce engine and keep 100% of their revenue, and for the acceptance of any kind of app … Win32, .NET, UWP, Xamarin, Electron, React Native, Java and even Progressive Web Apps. Cited in the counterweight section as a pre-emptive, voluntary and unusually generous term.
Company blogs · securityMicrosoft Security Blog — expanded cloud logging (19 July 2023) and Secure Future Initiative updates (2024–2025)Source for the release of more than 30 previously premium log types and the extension of standard retention from 90 to 180 days, and for the Secure Future Initiative including security above all else—over all other features, the 34,000 full-time engineers figure, and the linkage of senior-leadership compensation to security milestones.
Company statements · gamingXbox Wire and Microsoft gaming leadership statements (2013; 22 January 2021; 2025–2026)Source for the Xbox One reversal, for We messed up today and you were right to let us know, for the April 2026 Game Pass Ultimate price reduction, and for management’s own assessments — We shed millions of subscribers over the span of a few months and Short term, Game Pass has become too expensive for players. The evidentiary backbone of the Dependency Principle exhibit.
Earnings disclosuresMicrosoft — quarterly results and earnings-call commentary (FY2025 Q4 – FY2026 Q4)Source for the limited financial figures this page permits itself: segment operating margins, Microsoft 365 consumer revenue growth against subscriber growth, commercial ARPU growth attributed to E5 and Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows OEM revenue across the Windows 10 end-of-support window, Xbox content and services after the Game Pass increase, and Bing and Edge have both taken share for 5 straight years. Used to explain why per-seat levers exist — never as evidence of hostility in itself.
Independent measurementAmerican Customer Satisfaction Index — AI platforms (April 2026), search (2024) and personal computers (2025)Copilot scored 74, ahead of ChatGPT and Claude at 73 and behind Gemini at 76; Bing scored 77 in 2024, a twelve-year high; Microsoft Surface scored 76 among PCs, behind HP, Apple and Dell. Reported with the unfavourable figure included, because a counterweight section that publishes only the flattering measurement is not a counterweight.

Entries without a hyperlink are cited to a specific dated document rather than to a URL, following this site’s existing convention where no stable public canonical link was verified at build time; every one is sourced in full in the underlying CHI research dossier. That dossier runs to roughly 55,000 words across eleven research streams and is deliberately not reproduced here. Several well-supported items were dropped from this page rather than published on weaker sourcing — among them the exact current status of Windows setup bypasses on retail media, whether Store “Recommended” developers pay for placement, and the outcomes of four live regulatory matters. Community and forum reports were used only as investigative leads and never as standalone proof of any claim on this page. Where this assessment could have used a more dramatic claim and the evidence did not support it, the claim was dropped; the section headed What we did not conclude is a list of exactly those, and on Microsoft it is unusually long.

Reserved

Microsoft vs. Google / Alphabet

This comparison is intentionally empty. Microsoft and Google both have independent CHI assessments, but no normalized head-to-head comparison is represented here.

Reserved comparison dimensions: operating-system and browser default architecture · identity layer and account requirements · free storage entitlements and quota design · the free-versus-paid consumer relationship · AI insertion into products customers already pay for · enterprise productivity bundling and the price of unbundling · cloud licensing and switching economics · developer terms and store economics · data portability · privacy defaults and what triggered their improvement · product retirement practice · regulatory posture across the EU, UK, US and Australia.

The two companies are unusually comparable and fail in adjacent rather than identical directions — Google resets the default on products it gives away; Microsoft changes what is required around products customers have bought. A mechanical dimension-by-dimension comparison would flatten that before it explained it, and the AI-bundling comparison in particular cuts in Microsoft’s favour in one respect — Microsoft shipped no-AI “Classic” plans the day after Google bundled Gemini into Workspace with no AI-free tier — and against it in another, since a regulator now alleges those plans were concealed. A matched-surface panel is required before any comparative superiority claim is published.

Final verdict

EXCEPTIONAL PRODUCTS · SELF-SERVING DISTRIBUTION

CHI64/100Concerning

CVI84/100Exceptional

CFS+20Fair

Microsoft is the hardest company this index has assessed, because two true things sit on top of each other. Its product engineering is frequently generous: prices that did not move for a decade, compatibility measured in decades, a store that takes nothing, tooling given away, and a consumer operating system supported for twelve years. Its distribution engineering is consistently self-serving: a setup screen that no longer offers a local account, a folder that quietly became a cloud folder, a search box wired to one browser, a cheaper plan reachable by starting to cancel, and a licence that costs more on a competitor’s cloud than on its own.

Neither half cancels the other, and the page has refused to let either one win. Microsoft is right that its family plan is cheaper in real terms than in 2013. Microsoft is right that Windows 10 got its full ten years and then two more. Microsoft is right that Windows runs any application from anywhere, that its formats are open standards, that it rebuilt Recall rather than defending it, and that it cut the Game Pass price when its customers walked. The assessment survives all of it, because it was never an argument about price or about quality. It is an argument about who controls the layer underneath.

And that argument has an unusually clean piece of proof, supplied by Microsoft itself. There are two versions of Windows in the world. One of them lets you uninstall the browser, keeps your default after an update, removes the search engine you did not choose, and gives you free security updates without conditions. The other does not. The difference between them is not technical. It is jurisdictional — and Microsoft wrote the scope in its own compliance documentation.

The more of Microsoft a customer uses, the harder each individual Microsoft product becomes to evaluate as an independent choice.
That is not a claim that anyone is trapped. It is the observation that every layer makes the next one cheaper to accept than to refuse — which is why +20 is a measurement, not a compliment.

No matter how good, or bad, Microsoft ever is or becomes, XP will always be THE FUCKING BEST OS.