There is just no real competitionAnd we have a winner!
We have voluntarily allowed much of our society to become dependent on IT facilities where a key element was provided by a de facto monopoly. We are now learning a hard lesson in why that is a bad idea.
The geeks among us may flee to Linux. The quirky or curious might try Apple (though they don't exactly have a stellar reputation for looking after their desktop OS either in recent years). But for "normal" people, if you buy a new PC today, you get Windows 10 and all the negative baggage that comes with it, and that's just how it is.
I have been convinced for some time that statutory regulation with real teeth is now the only way to protect normal people from the nasty, greedy parts of the tech industry.
I suspect the most plausible alternative -- and that doesn't mean actually plausible, just less wishful thinking than anything else -- is for popular sentiment to turn sharply against these practices and make it a liability for Microsoft to continue down its current path. We've seen a couple of issues recently in my area that went from the general population being ignorant or ambivalent about issues that really should concern them to quite suddenly becoming much better informed and demanding action.
However, it usually requires some very obvious catalyst for people to rally behind. It's not hard to imagine what that could be in this sort of scenario: a massive data leak resulting in huge inconvenience for lots of people, a bad Windows update bricking millions of laptops, a security vulnerability in phones or cars that leads to widespread damage and real people getting hurt or worse. It's sad that I suspect it would take such a damaging event to really wake people up to what's happening, though.