If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year.
Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.
I moved to New Zealand from the US recently, and the tech industry here is mostly on .NET and Azure. My coworkers keep looking at me like I'm a moron because I've always deployed to AWS via Jenkins and don't know their weird homebrew system to deploy things to our on prem windows servers.
Ignoring anticompetitive behavior, Windows is the only thing that works on most computers and is usable by most people. If you buy a computer, and it's not a MacBook, Windows is the only option.
I'm not convinced this is true in any sense at all anymore. Can you name a piece of hardware that isn't supported by Linux? I was gonna suggest maybe the surface tablets, but a quick googling suggest even they run it just fine.
20 years ago hardware support was a major concern for us Linux aficionados. 10 years ago it was a minor concern. Today I think you may have some issues with newer apple hardware, but it's not like you can install windows on that either, and there are projects with some progress towards running Linux on those too.
Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.