My point is that Windows/Office are a essential part in their sales funnel.
Google also makes most of their money in "ads" but if they were to axe Search and Youtube (which in an reduced view are only sales funnels for ads), they wouldn't have much of a business left.
I expect you’re right about the sales funnel angle, though neither Windows nor Office seems to be the same kind of product that those brands have traditionally described any more, presumably for that same reason.
Windows appears to be positioned more as a platform to reach all the online services now, rather than its traditional role as a desktop OS. Can you even activate it without being online and having a Microsoft account any more? I’m out of the loop, so genuinely don’t know the answer to this one.
Office — or whatever it’s being called after the recent changes — also appears to have morphed into something quite different. I tried searching just now to see if you could still buy a permanent licence and install the classic applications like Word and Excel locally, and some sources implied you could, but I didn’t actually find any way to buy it in five minutes of looking around office.microsoft.com. As far as I saw, that site is now 100% about the online SaaS version and trying to get users to save their documents in the cloud. For businesses, the strategy seems to include promoting other online services like SharePoint and Teams as well.
So I think I stand by my original argument, though I don’t think it necessarily disagrees with yours. Windows and The Software Product/Service Formerly Known As Office might still be a significant part of Microsoft’s sales funnel, but they aren’t the products that Windows and Office used to be any more. The products they used to be have been repurposed to support an online-first corporate strategy, along with almost everything else in the Nadella era. Would Microsoft care if 100% of their customers stopped using Windows tomorrow and jumped to Apple or Linux systems, as long as they still used the other services that generate most of Microsoft’s revenues these days? I’m not entirely sure they would.
Not much? Google would still have cloud services (which unlike Azure adoption depending on Windows/Office, only basically depend on the Internet), Gemini and Google Drive paid subscriptions, their flagship Pixel line...
Google also makes most of their money in "ads" but if they were to axe Search and Youtube (which in an reduced view are only sales funnels for ads), they wouldn't have much of a business left.