Plenty of businesses aren't necessarily businesses already.

My company partnership numbered five in the beginning.

This isn't a unusual headcount for a family home that's represented by a ad hoc bunch of pcs, phones, printers, and possibly a consumer NAS in the most prominent form likely a cable box or network movie disc player.

No Active Directory licences involved here.

But why not?

My brother is a retired professor of transportation sciences and setting Windows Update is not a use of time he'll entertain. I think he just isn't aware that he's not enjoying his new SSD storage how he should. Startup time is 5KRPM SATA quick for his main machine.

I am going to provide a Microsoft 365 account and licenses for him from allocation for ad hoc consultants to work on their own personal laptops but our operating system image and our network not touching anything about their environment at all.

However I'm positive I can provide very close to the same by simply buying a Office 365 Premium CAL from the local pc world store. This won't include any cloud W10 license not the virtual machine runtime and asynchronous mirroring for a DR facility and neither is the extensive endpoint security system included that's a real selling point now iPhone and iPad and Linux are to be supported sny day now.

But just roll out the sum of the above for a "family office" license (includes one academic license without further application) for say $50pcm .

I know that I am going to sell countless such hypothetical licenses if they made available to retail. Upgrade payments get you the virtual machine runtimes, storage lakes and archives, mail order Microsoft hardware tokens/2FA sold under Xbox xtranet branding (I could think of better but I could also register and sell a good name too) which is something that I cannot wait for giving the kids to secure their phones and laptops at school because they will accept the device and not reject it because they will need it to log in to their games after school as well and they will be able to signal their achievements with flare and graphics emblazons on their keys and their parents are going to be able to secure the kids against forced access by ovrrreaching school administrators (who did so to our wrath on unfounded allegations of cheating last semester) because we'll be able to require no line zone simultaneous authorisation by one of us via another channel and assuming we paid for content security we'll be able to prevent copying and searching by anyone we don't wish to all the while nobody can accuse the girls of withholding their passwords and I best not start on the enforceability of contractual allowance for such invasions upon minors whilst parents guardians nor anybody's got any legal rights to bind a minor to such impositions as far as our counsel advised...

This is easy a couple of hundred of millions of "small business " Azure/Intune sites to connect and the arguments are wholly relevant to our immediate lives and very strongly represented by many other means without any advertising to us at all.

Microsoft is to our knowledge the sole major cloud computing business who spends real money to deflect warrant less and unlawful ingress into accounts by LEOs. Apple appears to be protective of customers whenever it protects Apple. This notwithstanding, the Santander case being the one to watch, iPhone or rather the now almost usable iPad OS, after gaining Microsoft endpoint security (another paid upgrade to reach the magical $75pcm mark equal to LinkedIn and far more than a office license costs in real world pricing) that's what this is about.

This is a theoretical two hundred billion dollars in revenue coming on stream in effect possible any time Nadella is up for it.

How to handle this network load?

That's why David Cutler was pulled from retirement to bootstrap Windows on the Xbox and why they're selling serious workstation class hardware for peanuts in the guise of a gaming console.