Good morning everyone, For a school project, I've been working on an open letter to Microsoft for the past few weeks. With assistance with the dear respected Richard M. Stallman (who can be found at stallman.org), I have written a letter to Satya Nadella, current CEO of Microsoft Incorporated; the corporate conglomerate responsible for a monopoly on the personal operating system market and, excusing my language, enshittifying said personal operating system market with adware, bloatware, privacy violations, backdoors, and much, much more. Below you can read my letter, and with it, I encourage you to stand up for your freedoms and install GNU/Linux.
Dear Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft,
For years you have represented this company in its mainline product Windows, with your company proclaiming that it is the most private, user-convenient operating system to be developed and used by the masses. Yet in the last couple decades, you were sued for securing a monopoly in the personal operating system market by the US Government, and even more recently in 2026, you have essentially ruined your operating system, with poor user experience and retention with forced adware, broken systems, and privacy violating maneuvers. Instead of working for profit and pleasing investors, I believe that you should harmoniously work with users to ensure compliance with the right to modify, copy, distribute, and run your software, and work towards a privacy and freedom first future. Otherwise, I believe your users, who are already moving to different operating systems than your own because of its bad reputation, will advocate for such an operating system.
Beginning in the 1990s, I’m sure you remember that your End User License Agreement (EULA) with any copy of Windows at the time stated that anyone who bought a PC could request a refund of their unused copy of Windows through their PC manufacturer. However, the manufacturers themselves were not informed of this clause, and so users upset at this predicament protested in numerous locations across the world, most notably at Microsoft Headquarters. This day would be called Windows Refund Day, and despite these protests, users at this event would not be given refunds by you, and would be forwarded to their PC manufacturers, showing how irresponsible and careless you are towards your userbase.
Two years later, in 2001, You would be sued by the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals for illegally monopolizing the web browser market on Windows by legally and technically restricting users and manufacturers from installing programs. The Department of Justice had required you to share its application programming interfaces with third parties, and appoint a three-investigator team with access to Microsoft’s records for five years to ensure compliance. Although you would comply with this lawsuit, you would still use your majority market share to your advantage into the future.
In the day-to-day user’s eyes, the protests and lawsuits against the company was nothing but unique news to read about. They were never hindered by bugs, adware, violations of privacy, and other problems in this period of time. Yet, when large language model AIs came out in 2023, You strived to incorporate AI into the development of Windows as a means of “efficiency” in terms of both costs of human employees and software production. Not only this, but your end users would genuinely be affected by the harmful additions created by your actions. Users would be pushed through dark patterns with brand partnerships, would be forced to sign up for a Microsoft account online with no offline support, and be violated of several of their privacy rights such as facial recognition, a NSA backdoor within Windows, and their “AI Recall” feature, which takes screenshots of the user’s computer every couple seconds.
AI usage within the development of Windows has also served to negatively impact user experience due to the countless crashes or complete failures of hardware. In one of your updates, it led to the constant failures of hard drives and your solution was to “uninstall KB5063878 [the update] and pause updates temporarily,” and another one of your updates preloads the file explorer, a crucial piece of software to graphically browse the system’s files easily, because it causes bad performance when not preloaded. These aren’t even the worst, as yet another update gave users the inability to recover their system. All of these crucial problems have been covered by the technologically-inclined press and have left bad tastes in consumers, while Microsoft proudly boasts that “30% of their development is made with AI”.
Because of this, users have been quickly flocking to other operating systems. After the End of Life announcement of Windows 10, you have left users on low end hardware unable to upgrade to Windows 11, and are stuck on this no longer secure operating system. Instead of buying new hardware that supports Windows 11, 25% of your users actually plan on staying with Windows 10 with their current hardware, yet 6% plan on switching to GNU/Linux. As I’m sure you’re well aware, GNU/Linux, an operating system developed by Richard Stallman’s GNU Initiative using Linus Torvald’s Linux kernel, first started development in 1984 and was released in 1992. What’s special about this operating system, is that users would have the rights to freely copy, distribute, modify, and run their operating systems. By having these GNU freedoms, users are free from corporate tyranny and privacy-violating surveillance.
Your users are flocking to GNU/Linux distributions as an escape from your now unsupported operating system. Protests have been made, lawsuits have been filed, and now users are migrating from Microsoft Windows 11 because of its buggy, unreliable, and resource hoarding nature.
GNU/Linux has evolved far enough in its life to create a user friendly environment for beginner/migratory users to set off to, rather than being known for the stereotype of being overly complicated with its well-renowned terminal interface.The majority of software supported on GNU/Linux are completely free (as in the GNU freedoms) open source software alternatives that can be much more powerful than what users are used to (Kden Live, a video editing software, or LibreOffice, an office suite), and if needed, ports of existing nonfree software (such as Chrome, Steam, etc.) exist for those who use it. With the benefits of free software, users can look at and tinker with their programs however they wish, forming an educational benefit when following this doctrine
As a user of GNU/Linux, I am thankful for all of the positives and possibilities that this operating system provides, for the smooth runtime and user experience it gives me, and the non-existent push for advertising except for donations to the hardworking volunteers who make this system exist. Even if I encounter any rare problems during my use of the system, I often find researching and fixing the problem myself an overall fun and satisfying experience. I would recommend any and all users who are stranded on Windows 10 or 11 to immediately switch to this system in order to be free from the cuffs of Microsoft, and I’m willing to bet that even you, Satya, use it too. Even if it’s for simple maintenance work, playing around, or even ironically as your daily operating system because even you got tired of the constant adware on your operating system.
With conclusion in mind, I suggest you support your users, not your investors.
Thank you,
Malingen
You can find the works cited within this letter here.