It wasn't microsoft that killed the margins, it was amazon. Back in the DOS, windows 3.x and even windows 9x era the OS was just as commoditized, yet people wil

It wasn't microsoft that killed the margins, it was amazon. Back in the DOS, windows 3.x and even windows 9x era the OS was just as commoditized, yet people willingly paid high margins. They did this because they wanted the service of their local PC store and therefore were willing to pay their margins. With the boom of online stores and easy exchanges/returns the brick and mortar stores went away and with them went the cushy margins. The thing that really doomed the PC market was not that the easy margins went away, it's that OEM's responded by making their products worse. They cut hardware quality, they bundled crapware. The PC experience got worse year after year. Truthfully, windows 8 did not help, but I still think that if the OEM's had just bundled touch screens across the board it would not have been such an outright disaster. The reduced quality forced people off the platform, to macs at the high end, and to chromebooks at the low end. Granted, mobile would have always caused PC sales to decline, but not as much as they did. It is only recently that the OEM's have started investing again in quality hardware with a pure windows experience, and unsurprisingly last quarter PC sales went up YoY for the first time in five years.