I have not forgotten, but Gates and Ballmer are gone and the market situation for MS is totally different. People don't have to take their Evil Empire monopolist crap of the past.

That doesn't stop them from trying though, and there are plenty of examples from recent times that prove that the difference between the old MS and the new MS are much smaller than their PR department would like you to believe.

The biggest difference is that the new MS is no longer selling you software but access to software.

> People don't have to take their Evil Empire monopolist crap of the past.

Advertising in the Start Menu enters the room

Often enough, it feels as if there are two brains inside Microsoft - shiny new MS with Azure, WSL, VSCode on the one side, and old, schoolyard bully MS with advertising, telemetry, forcing cloud everywhere on the other side.