It's not. But not all unacceptable things are illegal. And just as immoral people will do legal-but immoral things, immoral corporations will do the same.

What they're doing might actually be illegal under antitrust law, since it's effectively 'tying' a market-dominant desktop OS to provision of online services. If they are genuinely determined to get rid of the existing workarounds, there might be grounds for a formal complaint on that basis.

So there's three revenue streams, all of which are incompatible with offline usage: locking and upsell on cloud services, exfiltrating and selling your data, and showing you ads.

In an ideal world, that would be a triple decker antitrust problem!

Fair enough, but I really meant that it's not illegal (far as I know) to lie about their motivation for doing this. It may well be illegal to do it in the first place.

It's dumb on every angle. How many people are going to these lengths to avoid an MS account? Even if they suck it up and stick with Windows, will this really convert them into MS Store app buys or whatever? I doubt it.

They make people mad, they lose some customers... Maybe that's the whole point? I just don't get it.

Maybe governmenral apparatuses are pushing them to add this so they can track more people, especially the types that don't want to be tracked.

governmenral apparatuses use Windows mostly. So they are making it easier for the enemy governments to hack them.

That goes for many other governments, and since Microsoft is American you can see which direction this favors.

Because it's how the entire society functions. There's an entire class of lies that are not only accepted, but actually expected. Case in point: imagine saying "Hi, how are you?" and someone replying "I hate living like this".

I always answer that question honestly. Doesn't seem to get me into trouble. Often breaks the ice.

It is standard practice to stretch the truth to a breaking point. In this case, Microsoft could argue that a connected account leads to a better experience. It also (more tenuously) argue that it leads to better security, in terms of protection against ransomware via OneDrive backups.

I hate this practice.

The only way to limit it would be with regulations and regulations are a bit taboo.