This feature seems to me to be a real mistake from Microsoft. From a PR standpoint it's terrible, and it's a tiny feature that I'm sure drives very few sales.
What does microsoft care about sales? This isn't the sort of thing that would make someone used an MS product over an Apple or F/OSS product. Such decisions are generational, occurring only once or twice the life of a company. So at the end of the day this is a "feature" being added into a product that people are already using. Nobody really chooses to have it or not. It just becomes an option that will sit quietly in every office machine or remote access account just waiting for an evil manager to flick the switch.
Hey Microsoft! Can I pay extra for fork of windows/o365/office/whatever that doesn't and will NEVER have this ridiculous feature? I am putting my marker down. I am willing to pay MORE money for LESS evil in my machine. The more evil ideas you come up with, the more I will be willing to pay to keep them away. That is the reality in which we live.
I’m pretty sure this would be illegal to enable in many places. At least in Sweden the law explicitly prohibits monitoring of work performance in computer systems.
This is the kind of thing that is used to stop unionisation and in most cases to check if there's a serious productivity bottleneck, it is probably more valuable to microsoft than sales in the long run.
How come? In many countries it is enforced by law, and in some of them, everyone on the building gets it, regardless if they are cleaning bathrooms, or doing CI/CD pipelines on a random cloud deployment.
