You might boot laptops straight into a cloud OS in the future
If this happens, will it be a mass exodus to Linux/Mac? Or will people just live with it? The fact that the Steam Deck has shown great promise in playing games on Linux has made me reconsider Windows yet again.
People is already moving away from having a desktop at home, and younger people are not even interested in having laptops, phone and tablet seem to suffice for most of them. From that perspective it makes sense to have a cloud computer that you can use no matter what device you own. Businesses are already moving this way with different types of VDI and cloud-native apps.
For us hardcore computer users, most likely we'll finally jump to full-time Linux, but for work will still use the Cloud Windows when/where required.
For me it would be better to just have both options, and let me select, but knowing MS, they will make it near impossible to chose (like they currently do with the online account vs local account to sign in to the computer).
And no, installing offline does not force a local account anymore, it just keeps asking you to go online unless you do another workaround usually too complicated for the average user.