Comment by SrslyJosh

> And to understand that while Apple's mission is to provide a walled garden, Windows has been and is used in a million different scenarios.

You're conflating the vertical integration of hardware and software (Apple's walled garden) with Microsoft's current direction (you can't use Windows without MS online services).

Microsoft has never given a damn about customers being free to use the software the way they want to. In light of how the company is behaving today, the "openness" of Windows WRT to hardware was clearly only about market share.