Oh yes, they were able to deploy a predatory component completely under the radar as soon as they could, because there was already the established habit of buying a home computer for the first time if you were fortunate enough during the early days of MS-DOS, then using or building on it from there, as it is right out of the box. As soon as possible. Without ever thinking about the possibility of changing the OS or its settings very much if at all. Just like the less-business-oriented home computers that came before. If there were even user settings for the OS, people hadn't usually become familiar with that kind of thing anyway.

And everything decent built up from there as much as it can, while declining from there to the maximum degree provided by that structure simultaneously.

Not the ideal foundation to allow an enterprise to rely on, but they were in a hurry, bless their hearts, for fear of other competitive enterprises getting computerized first. It was easily recognizable, since way before Gates was old enough to start Microsoft, I was already just as familiar with the concept of GIGO when I saw it. Except from a business standpoint it was more like watching so many unsuspecting enterprises putting up skyscrapers on the most unsuitably garbaceous landfill for a foundation, which could even be more insidious than more easily recognized garbage input data.

More so than home users, enterprises have always had to settle for a much smaller fraction of the PC hardware capabilities relative to their more extensive needs compared to consumers. The vast majority of the sometimes-rapidly improving performance of hardware over the decades has been completely wasted, and it really adds up. Microsoft has had such a huge hand in this it can not be denied. There is no other way to do the math.

Too many big enterprises act like they can afford to throw away the lion's share of their computing budget (just because a few actually can bear the cost) or they would have started reversing dependency risk as far as necessary a long time ago when it would have been less difficult. It's like there's so much money going out the windows for so long nobody can afford to make a move after that. And consumers still have less of a clue by far.

To quote Microsoft for the umpteenth time, "this is by design."

Except this time it's gotten so ugly the enterprise cost is rising everywhere but Microsoft isn't even getting more money out of it.

Like it's self-reinforcing in some way or another :\

As long as negative value is getting further out-of-control[0] for Windows users across-the-board in spite of their "best" efforts, the pooch remains screwed for all concerned.

[0] Also statistically speaking from a professional quality control perspective.