Originally posted here by UpperCell
Let me see if I can find some quotes or articles to back that up, I've heard it over and over again from people I considered experts, and from my point of view, it's perfectly reasonable, at least for buisnesses, to be forced to have always on inet to use these services, and you know ms will come up with a way to have a client prog that only works as itself, not through a browser. they will no doubt do this under the guise of 'the latest software' or 'the way todays buisness works' and other companies like corell will most likely be forced to develop similar services or their products will be considered out of date.

*IMPORTANT* Don't take my word for it, I'll try and get some stuff to back it up, if I can't just ignore my post it's pure speculation at this point.
But see that’s where you and MS are wrong. In my industry we are required to guaranty customer data privacy. If suddenly there are untested (untested wit hour software) patches hitting our systems, and third parties accessing our server we are in violation of the law and face stiff penalties / loss of licensing that’s a very bad thing. The new MS EULA violates those regulations and if they where to enforce them we would be SOL so ya this is a very big concern.

And if you hadn't noticed MS patches have a bad habit of breaking other programs, this is why we test all patches on a secondary box first...if the patches are pushed at us without our knowledge we could be doing a lot of restoring from backups.