You are correct and there’s a larger issue that one might call cynical or even sinister.
Microsoft, obviously, is a publicly traded company. With each new version of Windows - whether the public wants the new version or not - Microsoft starts bragging to Wall Street about market share and uptake of its new OS - with the obvious wink-wink nudge-nudge to investors that Microsoft’s future results will be solid because their new Windows has, say, 30% of market.
This is evidenced best by two items:
1) Microsoft riding herd on PC manufacturers to offer the newest OS even if it’s an unstable, bug-ridden, security nightmare. Microsoft would even prefer that OEMs stop offering the legacy OS altogether.
2) Microsoft’s disastrous - for them and the user base - attempt to force (push) an automatic, overnight upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It bricked computers in some cases; rendered untold number of applications and utilities, many of them expensive, useless; and annoyed one and all with its Big Brother tactics.
Similar to Classic Shell, one intrepid developer wrote a utility to wipe all traces of the Windows 10 nag icon and messages and to exclude it from Windows Updates. Once again, MS is less interested in computing and more interested in selling soap.
Fortunately, the OEMs had a bit more business sense and plain old humanity and have been offering Windows 7 for quite some time despite Microsoft’s wishes.
Imagine that: Microsoft had a stable, usable, widely-accepted version of Windows that was reasonably secure. Their overriding instinct was to trash it.
Yes.
I really am a Free Market kind of guy, but there are unpleasant consequences to such a system. Microsoft would see revenue dry up if they released a perfect OS which never needed to be upgraded. They would indeed be better off to trash such a thing.
Similarly, with government, if your schools are doing great, and if you ask for tax increase to make the schools even better, voters will not approve it. Hey, the schools are great, so who needs a tax increase?? BUT if the schools are terrible, the voters will always support a tax increase -- gotta fix those schools! It's an incentive for government employees to have awful schools. You make more money that way.