Windows world is not at a good place right now. Windows devotees do not like the new Qualcomm chips at all, while the latest high-end i9 Intel chip seems to be a massive disaster with up to a 100% failure rate acording to some sources and a blame game as to why.
Both Intel and Microsoft have "always" spent A LOT of resources preventing competiton such as the Intel compilator scandal where the code limited AMD performance, the document format war to prevent "office competition", killing of competitor contracts, Mono, buying GitHub and so on. They did the same stuff with gaming back in the day. Did I mention BIOS?
What it did was slowing down the competition which gave them time to do their own stuff without changing much. For instance making it very difficult to use Linux clients with Microsoft servers, which owns e.g. public sector. The only reason I have had to use Windows the last 25 years is document formats and public sector Microsoft servers.
One consequence is the vast numbers of professionals working with Microsoft software, and they would of course not want to reeducate themselves on open source, Linux, Apple stuff and so on, which pretty much serves as barrier against competition.
As for Intel, the number of lies they have used to sell their ovens (performance, heat, power consumption and what not) are nothing less than fantastic.
Both Microsoft and Intel have been too full of themselves, confident they could keep on playing their game to stifle competition. Intel and Microsoft remains irrelevant for pads/phones, the rumors about Apple developing their own hardware was going on for years, but still Intel was to full of themselves to realise what was going on.
Now, they are still in panic, everyone knows that it is early days for M, and it seems like Intel still are looking for the shortcuts to performance, whilst the Arm competition have "nicked" an Apple team to catch up.
And that`s what they all do, playing catch up. Anything on the client side is driven by either Apples present hardware or the fear of what it will progress towards. They still aren`t there with gaming/workstations, but they will be.
As for Microsoft, they have tried to clean up their client platforms for a loooong time, but until they realise it`s rotten core up they still won`t become technically and structurally superior to *nix iterations. They have messed up so many Windows versions that I have lost count. One can start anywhere, but Windows 3.1 was heavily critisised by their users (including yours truly). Then came Vista, which was so bad that the critics of Windows 3.1 started glorifying it. Windows still isn`t good.
