Summary: Bill Gates never really changed; he merely created a reputation-laundering scam to distract from his appalling behaviour (which later extended to reputation-laundering work on behalf of the biggest child traffickers)
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