How licensing works for work and school accounts in the new Outlook for Windows

In order to continue using Mail, which has worked for years, our small business needs to upgrade from paying £294 per year to £1086. (That's $1370.) For a handful of users. That's the cost for Business Premium for 5 users.

All this thanks to the "New improved Outlook" - a "WAVE OF INNOVATION" as this article puts it.

*edit: I wrote the above after attempting to upgrade Business Basic licences in the 365 Admin Centre. When clicking into Marketplace, it only shows "best sellers for small and medium business" which does NOT include the "Standard" licence, only the "Premium" option was available. However when I then clicked on "Details" under the Premium option, it then presented me with three licensing options including "Standard". So although I now understand that "Standard" is the minimum requirement for using "New Outlook" (not "Premium"), it's another aspect of MS licensing that seems opaque, pushy, and unkind to smaller businesses. I would be more than happy to share screenshots that I took, showing the user experience here. It was not a pleasant user experience.

"New Outlook" was forced upon me this morning after months of nagging. And sure enough, I can no longer read my work email as my various business accounts needed to be removed.

Microsoft should really be SUPPORTING small business owners like us, not forcing us to upgrade.

I run a couple of different very small businesses (IT and photography), so I have a small handful of different domain names and different user accounts. Probably only about 5 in total. It's not a small amount of money that our business already pays for Business Basic. Sure - it's a drop in the ocean for large business, but not for very small businesses like ours.

Windows itself is a paid product. It's an operating system. Operating systems should include the basic apps for productivity. They shouldn't upsell and try to make more money. Windows Mail was wonderful, I used it daily for years. Now it's gone, and I'm left having to get my wallet out. I actually paid for my Windows Pro OS licence as I bought a laptop that had Windows Home on it. I paid over £100 just for the OS to run on my laptop. I have paid £hundreds over the years in MS subscriptions for 365 Business Basic.

And yet I still can't read my business email on my own laptop.

It's really upsetting and seems like such a cynical move from Microsoft.

I wish I had the good grace of another commenter on here to ask questions instead of taking to the comments section to rant like this, but really I feel we have been trying to speak to Microsoft for the last 6 months about this on various forums but - until now - there has been no official response. And so it grates a lot when the response (i.e. the article on this page) talks of "innovation", and talks about all the things you CAN have with Premium versions, without putting it bluntly that you can NOT have it if you use Business Basic. I'm referring to this paragraph:

"Using the Microsoft 365 plans for small business as an example, a Business Standard or Business Premium plan provides access to a Microsoft 365 email address and the desktop versions of Outlook (and the rest of the Microsoft 365 apps). The Business Basic plan provides access to our productivity tools through the web and mobile versions of Outlook and Microsoft 365."

It's like being delivered really bad news by someone with a huge smile on their face - blink and you miss the meaning behind that paragraph! How about saying it like this "So to confirm, users who only have Business Basic accounts can not use these accounts with New Outlook". Why sugar-coat it, it's even more upsetting that way.

p.s.  before I've even managed to USE "New Outlook", I've discovered it's riddled with bugs. For example I have one account that was previously added to the old Mail which was a shared mailbox. It has no password. The "New Outlook" is asking me for a password, and when I close the dialog box, the "remove account" button is simply greyed out, despite the fact it's not technically possible to sign in to that email address as it's not technically an account, it's a shared mailbox. So I'm left with this email address that has an error and can't be removed. I've noticed a good number of other bugs too. It's not "innovation" when you replace something that was modern, well-developed, and useful for a wide base of users, with something that is buggy, frustrating, and upsetting.

Please Microsoft reconsider your choices here. We may be a small and insignificant user base to you, but our voices matter should matter as much as higher paying ones.