At the moment microsoft is sort of at it knees with any server side software, and their only real big grip hold on the computer world is the fact that DX is license protected.
What if MS was to release their EOL OSes to the opensource world. E.g. Win xp, and the free world could morph the kernel from here on.
Imagine a raspberry pi running windows xp, it would be 'quote Wendel' "Amayzing".
Wouldn't that tactics make more sense then scrapping the whole OS forever, cause of "reason"(money really). The software that XP(Windows) today runs wouldn't be able to execute on the rasp version though, but developers could make windows software, and release it for different platform at allmost a whim, once compilers and so on were properly created for the platform the new windows version now ran on was developed, which deffinetly would make a better incendent to use MS products in the future, than the IP nightmare it is now a days, since i could use a low energy computer to surf the net. And if you're gaming i would still run windows 10 on a beast of a computer, and so on.
And the best thing is that microsoft would be totally hands off since it was open source, no money invested, no obligations, unless they decide to invenst in the projects themself.
My guess it would make a drastic shift towards their current cruddy and locked down platform, and make everyone happy, not to mention it would make a stupid amount of free ad for M$.