Imagine if there would've been a way to force 100% of people who got Windows in China, India, and other poor countries all over the world to pay up $100 or more

Imagine if there would've been a way to force 100% of people who got Windows in China, India, and other poor countries all over the world to pay up $100 or more for their copy. If that would've been at all possible, I think Linux would've had higher than 50% market share in the PC market today. For that kind of poor countries, Windows licenses were and still are prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of their citizens, so if being forced to buy Windows instead of pirating it, I think most would've just gone with Linux, and its adoption would've exploded within a few years, from the moment everyone in poor countries had to make that decision. Therefore software support from the big vendors would've arrived relatively quickly. Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for Microsoft), there was no way to force people into that decision, so we were left with a Windows monopoly for the past 2 decades.