You're right that Microsoft can't afford to change much. Windows is a principle point of lock-in that open businesses up to the rest of their services. Without Windows, the justification for their cloud services etc is minimial so they literally can't afford to run users off to their competition. Something that you overlooked in my opinion was its ballooning TCO with every iteration that eclipses their competitions by a large margin, especially with regard to persistent maintenance costs after purchase and downtime over the life of the product. Not only do they need to listen to their beta testers, they're going to need to reinvent their entire hollow approach to quality to have a chance. One consequence of platform agnostic cloud solutions is that it's made switching to different platforms easier than ever which is bad for Microsoft when Linux and MacOS generate fractional amounts of TCO compared to Windows PCs. This is why IBM switched to Mac for example.