Notes: the picture was created by weaving together two separate images from the public domain (via Wikimedia, as usual) and Windows Vista's promotional images. We are still very careful with copyrights.
They don't care about the users and issuing a few bytes with random characters costs them next to nothing. It gives them control over billions of human beings.
If even one media outlet told you in 2010 that Microsoft would fall from 100% (of Web requests) to about 1 in 8 Web requests, you'd probably struggle to believe it