Here's an extraordinary - and extraordinarily depressing - story from Stefano Maffulli about the Comune di Milano (roughly the Milan city council) pushing to its citizens some free services from Microsoft for, er, free...
When will governments finally learn their lessons about 'free' (gratis) Microsoft offers? They merely acts as agents of monopolisation. ⬆
“They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
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