John - The MS Empire no longer has much interest in 'technical stuff' - their only interest is in making money. You do this by 'meeting a market', and more increasingly, by 'making a market'.

Thus waffleware becomes the single most important product, helping to keep the share price high - this being even more important for The Empire than any actual physical product.

If you have a captive market, this works even better. Getting your junk bundled with new computers is essential, even if you give the damn stuff away at 'less than cost', to keep market share high, thus keeping the previous illusions going, and propping up the exectuvies salary packages.

Sadly this is starting to infiltrate Linux too - the next version of Ubuntu defaults to a new super duper GUI that won't run on the lower end hw bulk of installs!