Microsoft is losing Builders fast. They’re switching to MacOS and Linux. The biggest pull keeping people on Windows, outside of shear inertia, is content creation and gaming. However, even these are falling to Linux.
Without Builders, you don’t have software, and without software, you don’t have users. This is why Microsoft needs Windows Lite.
You’re forgetting the huge and much more lucrative market that is businesses. We literally can’t switch away from windows because every single piece of engineering software we use only exists for windows. We can’t program anything, configure anything, deploy anything or service anything if we’re not running windows. Oh, a VM solution you suggest? wrong!, because the drivers needed to interface with the hardware are wonky as hell as is but inside VMs it gets the job borked half the time making my job unnecessary frustrating.
Ouch!
The good news is you’ll get invited to Cobol/AS400/Mainframe conventions if eventually you’re the only ones left on Windows.
Those folks have similar challenges, but are great to party with after a day of conference talks.