This is not new. Microsoft has been pushing users further into their SaaS ecosystem for years. Creating a local account on Windows 10 is more difficult than signing up for a Microsoft account. That’s by design. It just goes along with the transition of their core business away from desktop software and into hosted solutions and data processing. Annoying? A little. Surprising? Hardly.
One of the first things MS did after buying Mojang was to slap Azure AD on it for account management; and it’s been a number of years now since they switched to that being the only way to authenticate to Minecraft.
This has definitely been the frog boiling strategy at Microsoft for a decade or so. It’s likely a big part of why Windows 11 exits, too.
This is not new. Microsoft has been pushing users further into their SaaS ecosystem for years. Creating a local account on Windows 10 is more difficult than signing up for a Microsoft account. That’s by design. It just goes along with the transition of their core business away from desktop software and into hosted solutions and data processing. Annoying? A little. Surprising? Hardly.
One of the first things MS did after buying Mojang was to slap Azure AD on it for account management; and it’s been a number of years now since they switched to that being the only way to authenticate to Minecraft.
This has definitely been the frog boiling strategy at Microsoft for a decade or so. It’s likely a big part of why Windows 11 exits, too.