this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Also, users won't own their most basic data anymore, nor will they be able to control how it is used. Canceling a subscription (or being locked out) could mean loosing it all.
For a business, I see this as a strong benefit for this design. The work done for a company is the property of that company by most hiring contracts, so the work done on a remote system can by tightly controlled. At the same time, it would allow someone to use their own thin client to do both professional and personal work and keep things isolated. For someone doing freelance work, it makes sharing a natural extension of that process and access can be granted or revoked as it relates to contracts. That seems like an advantage to corporate IT departments.
As for individuals, I don't see how this takes away ownership. Regulations will be updated to allow users to request their data in compliance with GDPR requests, so nothing would become completely locked up. Should that be challenged ever, I don't think any jurisdiction would say that Microsoft owns the data. What a user will be able to do with the bits they receive is a different question.
I understand your point (regarding protection of intellectual property and having a homogeneous and controlled IT infrastructure), but I'd like to add that as a business (disregarding what my employees might like or consider more effective) I am still not in control of anything if my data and applications are somewhere "in the cloud" and I have no control over it. As a company I would be bound to that provider (in this case Microsoft) and would have to pay whatever they require for whatever they offer(good or bad services). A small alleviation would be to have that "cloud" on premise, but I think that that's highly unrealistic. In this regard, a business is very similar to the plain user in my previous reply.
Also, don't forget that GDPR doesn't apply everywhere. That's just a EU requirement which might or might not be fully implemented, even when required. As I mentioned, there's no guarantee that your company data is not misused when it's completely out of your hands. Not even to think about what a security breach or outage would mean and what kind of impact it would have.
Please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to spread FUD, but I am general skeptical and trying to think critically. Moving "everything" in "the cloud", in the hands of one single actor requires a level of trust which I'm not able to provide and introduces single points of failure which I wouldn't like to have, neither as individual nor as company.
Thanks for reading my longest post ever. ;-)