If it's post-Windows, Microsoft has only itself to blame!
I have been a reseller of Micrsoft products for many years, of necessity, but not because I make any money selling their stuff. Microsoft has not exactly made friends its of distributors, smaller system builders, and resellers. My price from my distributor for any Microsoft product is a percent or two less than the retail selling price. In turn, my distributor pays Micrsoft a couple of percent less than he sells it for. Talk about a dis-incentive! Microsoft products are must-sells at near zero margins.
I can make very nice margins on the hardware, but when it comes to the software I have no room real to mark it up. Why should my customer pay me $400 for a copy of Office Professional, for example, when he can buy it for $350 in the big box store and install it in minutes? So I "sell" Open Office when I can and I can also sell refurbished computers with the official Windows stickers already on them. If I could convince people to run one of the ten thousand Linux distros, I would. But the Linux crowd shoots itself in the foot with too many distros that look way different than one another, several different UIs on top of naked command Linux, and childish names for programs like Konqueror, KAddressBook, and Kontact, which everyone thinks is oh, so cute!