Inside the new Files On-Demand Experience on macOS

dario_s The problem with that hypothesis is that is relies on the assumption that Microsoft didn't want exactly these changes. Microsoft has never made a secret of the fact that they believe all organizations and individuals should store all of their data in Azure. Getting all your data and all your compute into Azure literally is Microsoft's #1 strategic goal, and has been for over a decade.

Microsoft does not want any of us to be using on-premises IT. They're "all in on the cloud". They love the cloud because that means they get to charge subscriptions for everything, and they get to hold everyone's digital everything hostage, Hotel California style. In case you hadn't noticed, there are lots and lots of tools designed to help get your data and workloads into the cloud, but getting out of it is as high-friction as possible.

So why would Microsoft lean on Apple to change anything? It's the perfect excuse to get this crop of users into the cloud permanently. And if they lose a few of us, destroy a lifetime's worth of data for some, make it impossible for others to be employed...what does that matter to anyone at Microsoft? The more people firmly locked into the cloud, the bigger the bonuses. Lost customers don't matter, because any that fall away are either the type who don't want to be sticky-glued to Azure, or can't afford to be for some reason.

What needs to be understood here is that Wall Street values subscription revenue much higher than other revenue. If you brought in $10M of non-subscription revenue on a product in a given year, you could expect to see a stock price increase of $X. But if you brought in $10M worth of subscription revenue, you could expect to see a minimum of $3X stock price increase. That's right: subscription dollars are worth bare minimum three times as much as other dollars...at least according to Wall Street. This is Wall Street pricing in the fact that subscription services have significantly higher change friction, as well as the part where you can't just "sweat your assets" with subscriptions. You must pay and pay and pay and pay forever.

And that's all there is to it. That's the Holy Grail of our entire industry. Microsoft, Amazon, Apple...even companies like Synology or Western Digital! Everyone in tech is chasing subscription revenue like mad fiends precisely because of the significant increase in valuation it brings, and it simply does not matter to them how many customers/users are inconvenienced or outright harmed in the meantime.

Now I know it might at first blush sound crazy to lump changes to OneDrive into that, but let's look at this slightly more broadly. Microsoft has been evolving Sharepoint for ages, and it is now the underlying storage mechanism of...everything. Teams. OneDrive. You name it. Microsoft's vision is to have all your organization's files go into Sharepoint on Azure. There, it can be indexed, searched (hahahahahahaha *sob*), and otherwise operated on by Microsoft applications (both cloud-based and downloadable).

Once all your data is in Azure, does it really make sense to have your workloads be on-premises? No; there's too much latency. Toss them in the cloud where they're more proximate to the data. And for that matter, why have fat clients? Microsoft offers Desktop as a Service. And for that matter...

All available only for an increasing % of your organizational revenue per user per month, your firstborn, and your family's souls.  Just make sure you never anger them, because once you, and me, and he and she and they and them are all utterly dependent upon Azure for everything they get to choose whether or not you can access any of it at any given time.

This is a terrible timeline.