The reasoning behind this made a lot more sense to me once I started to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
There can't have been that many end users who had Windows 10 Pro and went into group policy to turn off the store. So you're looking at small businesses who were using PCs with Win10 Pro on them (likely that came with the PC) that were turning off access to the store but can't any more. The IT admins for these companies are the people Microsoft wants to upsell.
Lets say that there are 500 businesses who care about this feature each with an average of about 20 PCs (probably a high estimate for PCs, low estimate for number of businesses). That's 10000 PCs that Microsoft could potentially convince to upgrade, at (a quick guess based on Google) $120/PC, to Win10 Enterprise, or a potential $1.2M more in revenue that doesn't cannibalize one of their other businesses (assuming more changes to differentiate Pro vs Enterprise). Probably the people who will upgrade are people with factory computers running Win10 Pro.
And for people that don't upgrade, they get to promote their app store. Win-win.
Your small business is already an O365 E3/E5 customer, and Microsoft is tricking your users into signing up for Microsoft accounts ontop of O365 accounts (which creates all sorts of unnecessary sign in complications, like OFTEN having to choose WORK over Personal TWICE in a row.) Now you have all sorts of training issues and confusion when peoples onenote notes end up in their Microsoft account and not their O365 account (oh and their surface eraser only opens the metro app, which doesnt work with 0365 accounts.)
This is a classic example of two divisions who cant get along, both fighting for the same territory.
It becomes painful when you type in your username, to have to wait for it to ask work or personal TWICE, for EVERY SINGLE MICROSOFT APP. Word, onedrive, skype, sharepoint sometimes prompts 3,4,5 times in a row with slightly different interfaces. I shouldnt have to type my O365 password EVERY SINGLE time I open a Microsoft app on iOS (except outlook which only forgets it like once a month)
A new user would get prompted for their password
1) sign into windows
2) activate office
3) sync sharepoint library
4) sync sharepoint library didnt pass the last cred to the app right.
Microsoft's credential management is atrocious for end users. Guess how many times Chrome and Facebook have made me retype my password when logged into my own computer this year.
I've been working on a web app that integrates with Office 365 using OpenID Connect. If someone is signed into their Microsoft account instead of their corporate account, the sign-in process just gives a generic error page with light-grey text explaining the error at the bottom of the page.
Wow, I'm impressed. Looks like Microsoft managed to an even worse job than Google with managing the duplication of work and personal accounts and integration of that with OAuth.
>So you're looking at small businesses who were using PCs with Win10 Pro on them (likely that came with the PC) that were turning off access to the store but can't any more. The IT admins for these companies are the people Microsoft wants to upsell.
Or you're looking at small businesses (4-80 users) in regulated industries who have remained on Windows 7 and the IT folks who have recommended doing so in large part due to the ongoing concerns with what Microsoft is doing.
As a simple example: regardless of whether it does this or "just disable that (and work out something to ensure that Microsoft doesn't silently turn it back on)," I don't want to have to EVEN BE CONCERNED about the possibility that a local user searching locally for documents containing the words "John Smith neoplasm" has just submitted PII and PHI to Microsoft.
I suspect that the removal is actually an artifact of them saying that later versions of Windows will be incremental updates to Windows 10. Normally they would just wait until Windows 11 to make the change, but since they can't do that any more, they just roll it out in an update.
Yeah it was a bait-and-switch for small businesses.
There can't have been that many end users who had Windows 10 Pro and went into group policy to turn off the store. So you're looking at small businesses who were using PCs with Win10 Pro on them (likely that came with the PC) that were turning off access to the store but can't any more. The IT admins for these companies are the people Microsoft wants to upsell.
Lets say that there are 500 businesses who care about this feature each with an average of about 20 PCs (probably a high estimate for PCs, low estimate for number of businesses). That's 10000 PCs that Microsoft could potentially convince to upgrade, at (a quick guess based on Google) $120/PC, to Win10 Enterprise, or a potential $1.2M more in revenue that doesn't cannibalize one of their other businesses (assuming more changes to differentiate Pro vs Enterprise). Probably the people who will upgrade are people with factory computers running Win10 Pro.
And for people that don't upgrade, they get to promote their app store. Win-win.