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.
