This behavior is in fact limited to "consumer" Windows 11 SKUs (so Home and Pro), and also disables when using Pro domain-joined. But bet on it migrating to the business SKUs eventually.
Bingo. Microsoft is careful to only screw consumers who don't know any better (they already surrendered their personal data and ownership of their digital purchases and devices to Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Sony, Samsung, etc. what's one more?) and to not fuck over their most loyal cash cow (businesses).
There is a large segment of crossover where small non-IT centric companies will run it on whatever was on sale at their local reseller and a couple of Cloud services for CRM and accounting and no IT staff/policy.
For those to sign up with a Microsoft partner and buy into the full packet could be an significant market, Though it could end up a net loss for MS if this segment start to go Chromebook in a major way the way a lot of school districts did.
>There is a large segment of crossover where small non-IT centric companies will run it on whatever was on sale at their local reseller and a couple of Cloud services for CRM and accounting and no IT staff/policy.
Sure, but even small businesses get Office 365 nowadays and that automatically unlocks your home/pro edition of Windows into a business one, the movement you sign in with your company Office 365 account.
If you go for Google Workspaces instead of Office 365 then that's another matter entirely.
I think your making the assumption that business user means someone sitting st a desk with a PC writing letters in word or doing calculations in excel and not someone with a shovel doing gardening or driving a van around.
For the average small business the only thing they cant do on their smartphone is file their taxes or interact with whatever bookkeeping/banking system their accountant ashed them to use. And the only applications they have is whatever came preinstalled on the acer laptop they bought from the local big box store.
For MS and their partners the goal is to actually sign them up with an business account through an MSP, which might not be the rational thing for any small service sector business to do as there is nothing in the o365 that will aid them in performing the services they sell to their customers.
Consumers can easily get the Pro edition instead of Home. There used to be even a update purchase link in some control.exe applet.
It is the Enterprise and LTSC editions, that consumers do not have access to. But for the purposes above, Pro is enough (and most popular in business).
There's Home, Pro, Enterprise (E3, E5); with variants for N (no media) and Education. That's it.
Enterprise doesn't have Appstore crap preinstalled, and has some features that you wouldn't want at home anyway (it is enteprise-oriented crap instead). Not every business runs Enterprise edition.
