Here's hoping they'll rethink that at some point and follow Apple's approach of having just one desktop OS instead of nickel-and-diming the masses for features such as BitLocker.
On the other hand, compare Windows desktop marketshare with that of macOS. When you're tiny, limited choices makes sense. When you're huge, product differentiation makes sense. When you're a premium product, you can charge whatever you want. Windows appeals to people who spend $0 on an OS and also people who can spend $300 on an OS. If they cut that down to one product, they'd be losing money.
This is true, but fragmenting your platform is an existential threat. Nickel and diming customers just isn’t worth it. The problem is Microsoft thought they were so powerful and had such strong lock in that it didn’t matter. They were wrong, hence the radically simplified SKUs for 10.
But they just can’t bear to actually get it all right, so still try and stiff people to switch off ‘S’ mode.
Here's hoping they'll rethink that at some point and follow Apple's approach of having just one desktop OS instead of nickel-and-diming the masses for features such as BitLocker.