A: I personally prefer to buy retail licenses, precisely for the ability to move it around - like, I have an older license of Windows Vista that I still use (unfortunately the upgrade opportunity has come and gone). And I never pirate btw and I respect my licenses, so it has been installed on at most one PC at a time.

According to this new policy, what will happen with retail licensing? I presume that it will be either very expensive, or available only for enterprise/volume licensing, or simply not available anymore. Now that would suck.

B: while I'm sure that their intentions weren't malicious, I strongly disagree with you and with them.

First of all, encryption on Windows 8.1 standard edition is only available if your hardware supports TPM and SecureBoot on ConnectedStandby. There's absolutely no reason for this limitation. Linux's dm-crypt or ecryptfs do not need it. DiskCryptor does not need it. I smell lock-in.

Also, what is the problem with available encrypting solutions? What is wrong with remembering and inserting a password which would be required only on boot and not on waking up from stand-by?

Also, I repeat ad nauseam my biggest problem with the NSA revelations - if the NSA has the capability of installing back-doors and to coerce companies into doing whatever they want, what's stopping organized crime syndicates from doing the same thing, possibly using NSA's trails OR with their cooperation? It's only a matter of cost. Therefore, an encryption method that's saving the keys on Microsoft's servers is extremely flawed and for no good reason.

This also reminds me of OneDrive versus OneDrive for Business. Basically OneDrive for consumers does not have versioning or a fucking log of the events that happened (like both Google Drive or Dropbox do), because by their own admission, that's for businessy/enterprisish things. If for whatever reason a file disappears, a file out of tens of thousands like I have - well, you'll never know when or how. And also, synchronizing things on-disk is extremely hard because at any moment you've got multiple sources of truth that contend on the same files, with no good way to synchronize shit, which means that all clients are more or less buggy. And regular folks are non-technical and they might not know how to look at the log of events and do debugging, or to recover previous versions of a file, but non-technical folks usually have friends or access to professionals for hire ;-)

And I'm thinking that this is my biggest problem with Microsoft (but not only them) - they treat regular people as dumb fucks that have to be hand-holdem, for a monthly subscription of course (which is a totally understandable thing, since you don't own anything). And then you discover that what Microsoft's notion of personal usage does not apply to you and so for the features you need you need the Awesome edition which costs at least twice, possibly available only on volume licensing.

Now, as far as the whole desktop market is concerned, OS X has always catered to grandmas and to software developers refugees from Linux or other Unixes, Linux has always catered to die-hard backend software developers, while Windows has always catered to the people in between, the middle of the bell curve, the people that can get around their computer, but that don't know its internals, the power users. What we are seeing now is that Microsoft has totally lost the developer mind-share and the results are showing - Microsoft has lost the Internet-wide server-side and its app ecosystem only holds because of inertia, otherwise Apple's ecosystem for native apps is way more attractive.

And now Microsoft is going to lose the power users too, because according to their new directions, their user base are only the grandmas and the dumb ones that never made it to high-school. They are even ignoring the needs of the enterprise. And if that wasn't enough, on ultra portables they are also competing with iOS, Android and Chromebook. Tough times ahead for Microsoft.