"lock-in" is the word you're looking for.
People can't switch without considerable cost in money and/or convenience. That could be as simple as using two different systems at home and at work, which adds to the mental load.
Windows has been winning for 30+ years because it's familiar shit. Everyone knows it's shit, but at least you already know the taste. Consumers know that if they use Windos their skills trained at work transfer. Businesses know that if they use Windos then new hires don't need basic computer training. Software developers know that if they support Windos, there's a huge market that runs it.
Everyone is locking everyone else into the shit, and Microsofts sits in the middle and laughs.
I would bet that there's an internal competition among the various teams how much utter crap they can put into their respective parts of the OS before the public rebels against it.
Been a non-windows user for two decades now, and don't miss it one bit. Sometimes sad if a cool game is out only on Windos, but I anyway don't have as much time anymore as I used to.
It's not just Windos, though. DOS was equally horrible. I replaced MS-DOS with Novell DOS on one of my PCs for utterly different reasons (better to run a small BBS system on) and that was miles ahead of the Microsoft shit.
It keeps getting worse because we are not the customers anymore, we are the product. Your data is sold, your user habits are monitizied, and the main reason Windows still rules the games market is so kids grow up on Windows PCs and will demand them in their jobs (businesses are the main buyers of the OS).
And probably because Bill Gates is sad if market share falls. And who can stand old men crying?
he is.
The minimum that I can't think of a good argument against is that AI needs to disclose that it is AI.
The problem of access for minors is, of course, how to check someone's age online, where as the old saying goes, nobody knows that you're actually a dog. That's nearly impossible without serious privacy intrusions.
Unlike cars, escalators (or airplanes, as one commenter used as another example) are not driven by amateurs. They are either automated or operated by professionals.
The trade-off we had to make was between allowing only licensed chauffeurs to drive, or allowing everyone to drive after a short intro course that teaches you only the basics and very little about SAFE driving. Oh, and you get qualified for life. Not further tests, requirements for courses, experience, etc.
Are roads safe? Fuck no, not by a huge margin. But you'll understand why if you give the task of designing a road network as safe as commercial air travel to a PhD student or a couple of students as the master thesis topic. Surprise: The result will essentially be a rail network. Very little driver autonomy, changing lanes and turning after prior announcement at defined spots only, etc. etc.
To this day I can't understand how we let the general public - for which we know the statistics of how many are suicidal or mentally unstable - into a 1-2 ton vehicle and on a road with opposing traffic not seperated by a solid barrier. So yes, there's a big part of design, but that design is not an accident, it's what apparently people want. Or when is the last time you've seen demonstrations against it?
SAYING that security is your #1 priority and actually ACTING that way are two different things.
The fact that the stock price didn't immediately plummet makes it very clear that at least the investors understood the message correctly: It had an implicit "but only if it doesn't get in the way of profits" added to it.
I mean, if you bet so much on words people say, let me assure you that your upcoming birthday is the #1 priority on my mind and I can hardly think of anything else.
When businesses originally adopted Windows (3.x)
the Internet was still used mostly by universities and very few businesses had e-mail or a website. Heck, probably more business had Gopher pages than websites.
You are right, though "inertia" doesn't quite describe it. There were also all the anti-competitive actions MS took to lock its customers in. There literally was a lawsuit about it that found them guilty.
This has literally been a problem for every OS.
Is it though?
For fun and giggles, I've put
preview windows security vulnerability exploit
into Google. Every result on the first page is an actual security issue. I've also put
preview macos security vulnerability exploit
and nothing on the first page is an actual preview vulnerability. The first result, for example, is a vuln found by Microsoft (of all people) that triggers only if you load untrusted third party kernel extensions (what a surprise). All the other results appear tangential or theoretical at first glance. For Linux it's a bit inconclusive because there are multiple desktops, etc. - but using "KDE" instead of the OS name yields two results that seem to be preview vulns, the rest isn't.
So no. Not all horses run equally fast, even if they all run. Some definitely have only three legs.
Previewing files is much harder than armchair engineers from the peanut gallery will ever care to understand.
Nowhere did I claim that it's an easy task. But if your software engineers are not aware that the user path to a preview is very different from the user path to opening a document, and offer you fewer or no opportunities to ask for confirmation or make security checks, then again that's a manufacturer fault.
And let's stop letting people off the hook for security fuck-ups with the "oh, but it's all so complicated" excuse. If it's too complicated for them, they shouldn't be writing software.
It's later than you think, the joint Russian-American space mission has already begun.
