Flashback: I remember standing in the pick-up department of a hardware vendor I used to frequent back when my business did a lot of system integration (helping Windows-dependent businesses take advantage of the capabilities Linux servers offered them). As I waited for someone to get my order together, I could hear a Microsoft rep in a nearby conference room pontificating to vendor staff about their latest version of Windows.
They were talking up its ability to 'hobble performance gradually and inoffensively' to ensure that people who hadn't activated their copies of Windows to make them 'legal' by Microsoft's arbitrary standard, would become annoyed enough to active their copy without being so annoyed that they switched to Apple, or, heaven forbid, Linux.
I've often thought about that. There're people at Microsoft whose job it is to work out how to piss you off enough to kowtow to their demands to formalise your exploitation rather than get brassed off enough to reject that exploitation.
And I wonder what proportion of Windows code exists entirely to do you, their user, a creative disservice. Also known as 'Anti-Features' (of which Windows is full-to-overflowing): https://wiki.mako.cc/Antifeatures I suspect it's a not insignificant amount, although we'll probably never know for sure (due to its proprietary nature). And we wonder why Windows has such a lot of security issues.