My understanding of how that works (which I admit is an outsider's understanding) is that PC vendors subsidize the price of new PC's by installing crapware on t

My understanding of how that works (which I admit is an outsider's understanding) is that PC vendors subsidize the price of new PC's by installing crapware on them. The race to the bottom in PC pricing basically left them scrambling to find ways to keep their prices low without gutting their already-falling margins. I don't think Microsoft is in a good position to require PC's to stop doing this (unless they were willing to eat the loss of vendor revenue by lowering their Windows license cost, which would effect their own margin). I'm left optimistic by companies like Lenovo, who are now marketing crapware-less machines as a competitive advantage (as a byproduct of their Rapidboot initiative), and hope maybe other vendors will try and compete. I don't remember the last time I bought a Windows PC where the first thing I did wasn't to immediately wipe it and reinstall the OS from an OEM version, although it'd be nice not to have to do that. EDIT: realized I started two comments in a row with "Yeah,". That makes me almost as angry as if I'd littered the comment with "like, you know"'s...sigh