In parallel, the Commission has opened four market investigations to further assess Microsoft's and Apple's submissions arguing that, despite meeting the thresholds, some of their core platform services do not qualify as gateways:
Microsoft: Bing, Edge and Microsoft Advertising
Apple: iMessage
Under the DMA, these investigations aim to ascertain whether a sufficiently substantiated rebuttal presented by the companies, demonstrate that services in question should not be designated. The investigation should be completed within a maximum of 5 months.
Not trying to defend Microsoft, but making it available to the fraction of a fraction that would actually download it is probably not worth it because you still would have to maintain it, making sure it's compatible with new windows versions and providing security updates.
It's a lot easier to just kill it outright, and those that do actually really really want it can find some third party who has uploaded a version of the exe file somewhere.
I remember hearing about a study that claimed that backing into parking spaces could have you hundreds of dollars per year, since doing the reversing while the engine is hot uses less gas.
I think it's fair to say that those in their late teens now are the first generation raised online. Sure, previous generations where raised alongside the internet, but the current generation is raised with a much larger presence of the internet.
I imagine this is more of a "If we give people the basic stuff for free when they are small, they are more likely to buy our better stuff when they grow and need to update"
From the article