Eric S. Raymond and I have a hypothesis that Microsoft wishes to deprecate the original Microsoft Windows Internals, and gradually replace them with an open source reimplementation based on Linux, GNU, and Wine. That is because optimising, refactoring, or otherwise enhancing them, have been made more and more discouraged due to the (possibly justified) policy to not break legacy 3rd-party applications (including many old ones or ones with no source available). Programmers and other software developers who wish to work on them, whether young, old, experienced, or inexperienced, are thus frustrated at the process' lack of flexibility and agility that they become unhappy, aggravated and complain. Other obstacles are the iffy legal status of the codebase, which prevents opensourcing it like .NET Core, and its reported lack of elegance.

Given these developers can easily find many other openings as software developers or other high paying jobs (including on different teams within Microsoft) and increasingly wish to enjoy their work (being geeks or "amateurs"), the team is starved of competent, and enthusiastic workers. Even if Microsoft still sells Windows copies, they are being starved of employees.

Another note about Microsoft Windows is that I suspect, that in their “Professional”/“Server” sub-line of Windows (such as Windows Server 2003 , Windows Server 2008, or Windows Server 2019), Microsoft has disabled, either in runtime, or in compile-time ( #ifdef/etc. ) compatibility code. As a result, misbehaving legacy applications will not run there, while properly-coded-or-fixed ones will run faster and with fewer quirks.

Note: Microsoft has many other products and services, many of them are Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and/or provide important services or infrastructure for open source, open/free content, or otherwise geeky, hackery or important projects. So I do not wish to completely demonise them. In fact, I make use of some of the Microsoft-owned GitHub infrastructure for many projects of mine, including my home-site, and it seems the user experience of GitHub improved since the acquisition by Microsoft, and I am also a fan of TypeScript.

Lawyers have been demonised, but I think most of the lawyers employed by the offenses in the Smartphone patent wars asked for a reassignment or quit in disgust, or they will. These "Smartphone wars" are a rerun of the "Jennens vs. Jennens" court case which gave many lawyers more work to do and made them a little richer, but made them more miserable:

William Jennens (possibly Jennings) (1701–1798)… was a reclusive financier who lived at Acton Place in the village of Acton, Suffolk, England. He was described as the "richest commoner in England" when he died unmarried and intestate with a fortune estimated at £2 million, which became the subject of legal wrangles (Jennens vs Jennens) in the Court of Chancery for well over a century until the entire estate had been swallowed by lawyers' fees.

There is a reason that most lawsuits are settled out of court: the reputation, angst, and happiness losses involved in them are too paramount.

A capable geek and hacker, will quickly enter clinical depression when working on destructive tasks, and this includes lawyers and politicians and clergymen and socialites - even accountants. Someone told me of a documentary showing almost empty Silicon Valley office spaces of patent trolls as most of their workers quit in frustration (also see karma / "what goes around comes around"). Even if a firm doing destructive tasks is not starved of customers, they will be starved of employees.

I suspect the recent RIAA (= "Recording Industry Association of America") takedown request against youtube-dl's GitHub repository was done by a techsavvy lawyer employee of the RIAA, who had the legal capability to file it on behalf of the RIAA as a whole, and hoped to save future work this way. This is given the RIAA foolishly sends takedown notices to many publicly accessible web sites that host media files downloaded using youtube-dl and similar tools ( Piracy, motherfucker! Do you speak it? Arrrrrr!! ), and they are kept being protested and challenged.

He or she may have been scolded by their executives, but do note Quark's approving reaction to Rom (= his brother and employee) having attempted to murder him in a Star Trek DS9 episode. I think the real solution is to completely stop sending these takedown notices and accept piracy as a necessary "evil" (and possibly sponsor better user interfaces for file sharing sites and practice less censorship).

There is an ongoing transition to the geeks and hackers' culture, which no one can stop ( see Summmerschool at the NSA ) and a trend towards openness, freedom, and sharing of cultural / code / scientific / tangible works. Thus, the film industry is starving itself, both of competent screenwriters and individual screenplays, and of attractive and competent actors, both male and female, and both those that haven't yet appeared in any major roles as well as experienced and highly acclaimed ones.