I don't understand Microsoft's angle with all of their telemetry in products like Windows, VS Code, Edge, etc. Microsoft's biggest businesses are; * Azure *

I don't understand Microsoft's angle with all of their telemetry in products like Windows, VS Code, Edge, etc. Microsoft's biggest businesses are; * Azure * Software licensing fees (Windows/Office/etc) * Gaming stuff (XBox, etc) None of these benefit from having tons of data on their customers. Some of them might even lose sales because of it (do enterprises want their data sucked up into the cloud when using Office or Windows). Bing Ads make up such a small amount of Microsoft's income that they're pretty much irrelevant. It seems to me that the rational thing would be to take the Apple approach. Use privacy as a feature that Google can't copy. Take advantage of the fact that one of their biggest competitors is mostly funded by targeted advertising and go where they cannot. Since Microsoft is not doing that, and they're not stupid I must assume that I am missing something.