This lead me to wonder if retail Windows licenses are expensive because they used to include a phone support and then, when people learned how to Google for problems, Microsoft dropped the phone support but kept the price because "customers are used to this price tag"?
I recently bought a Windows 11 machine that came with Windows 11 Home, I felt the need for some Pro features and went to check the price for an upgrade and my jaw dropped. Years of "free upgrade to Windows 10/11" lead me believe those licences were less pricey nowadays.
They have basically done the same thing with software assurance support recently. A few years ago when we had a SQL issue in pre-deployment testing we opened a ticket and spoke to an engineer who knew what they were doing. Last year when we did that we had a 1x/day email back and forth with an out-of-country third party contractor who ultimately was unable to help us in any way. We ended up figuring it out ourselves (that Visual Studio version somehow conflicted with that SQL version such that data errors would get introduced (WTF!?)) while said support contractor was still trying to get in touch with real actual SQL engineers for us.
It was something like that; I remember my friend’s mom arguing for a hour to get the mouse for free (it was advertised as such or something on any new PC and the sales guy wanted to say it didn’t apply) and they forgot to charge for windows 95.
Of course soon is was bundled with any prebuilt but back at release those were relatively rare and expensive.
I recently bought a Windows 11 machine that came with Windows 11 Home, I felt the need for some Pro features and went to check the price for an upgrade and my jaw dropped. Years of "free upgrade to Windows 10/11" lead me believe those licences were less pricey nowadays.