There must be an immense amount of value in the data collected by Microsoft Accounts for Microsoft to make a move like this that will, in my estimation, infuriate a significant portion of its SMB customers and/or power users.
I mean, yeah... think about all the data websites go to remarkable lengths to capture about you already, now imagine if they could capture _everything_ your computer does. Do you think they wouldn't? That's the part that really pisses me off, I bought a Windows Pro license to specifically avoid requirements like this, and now I can't anymore.
"I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."
It lowers the barrier for people to buy into subscriptions and their store environment significantly. Problem is that they will only serve good deals until they have enslaved their users.
Well Microsoft is pivoting into being a cloud services provider, the OS provides ui integrations for these services to make them more compelling, but the thing itself isn't the OS.