It is about making specific high value users happy. If the rest of us are unhappy - we don't matter. They know for most people ubuntu or whatever isn't a realistic option and so they can take whatever money they can get from those people. Sure a few people like me will run *BSD or linux, but we are a footnote not worth their time.

The only danger is every once in a while one of those little footnotes becomes large enough to be a problem and you lose the market of those who do matter as well. While there are many obvious examples of where that happened, there are also a lot of cases where it didn't.

It used to be empowering everyone to achieve more.