I think Microsoft was actually a force for standardization here: they didn't want to make multiple versions of Windows for multiple IBM PC implementations. So e

I think Microsoft was actually a force for standardization here: they didn't want to make multiple versions of Windows for multiple IBM PC implementations. So everything is designed in a way that you can have one OS image that boots on a wide range of hardware. Now compare that to ARM :). Here basically every device/SoC family needs its own linux build.