Microsoft calls the above behaviours “a new on-demand start experience” and says it “helps deliver a lower price point while preserving the full Windows 365 Business value and capabilities partners and customers expect.”

Windows 365 for Business offers three cloudy PCs: a Basic $31/month machine with a pair of vCPUs and 4GB of memory, the $41/month Standard machine with 8GB of RAM, and a $66/month Premium product that offers four vCPUs and 16GB of RAM. All include 128GB of storage. Microsoft sells the same three cloudy PCs under its Enterprise plan. The only difference is that fleets of Business cloud PCs can’t top 300 machines, while the Enterprise plan allows unlimited users.

The lower prices will kick in whenever existing users sign up for a new subscription, and also apply to new users.

Microsoft’s price cuts come at a time when the price of physical PCs is set to rise, thanks to memory shortages and geopolitical issues caused by the USA’s war of choice against Iran. PC buyers may also have spotted analyst firm Gartner’s opinion that cloudy PCs now have lower total cost of ownership than laptop computers.

Virtual PCs have traditionally won favour from buyers in heavily regulated industries that have good reasons to frown on local data storage. Environments where shift workers share hardware, such as healthcare, are also big VDI users.

Gartner thinks more organisations are finding reasons to consider hosted desktops, and has predicted that by 2027, 20 percent of workers will use a cloudy PC as their main workspace, up from 10 percent in 2019.

Lowering the cost of Windows 365 therefore looks a lot like Microsoft trying to win more of the PC market at a time buyers have very good reasons to consider a move.

Microsoft offers two virtual PC products. Windows 365 is its simplified PC-as-a-service offering.

Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) is Redmond’s old-school VDI offering, pitched at power users. Microsoft believes some AVD users will get the best experience when their virtual PCs run on-prem, either on its own Azure Local hardware or on Nutanix hardware: the latter company this week proudly began to offer on-prem AVD as a way to extend its desktop virtualisation (VDI) portfolio.

In recent days, the agreement has made the rounds on social media, where it’s facing plenty of criticism since it seems to clash with Microsoft’s marketing, which positions Copilot as a powerful and useful tool for users and businesses.

“It’s not a good sign when a company won’t stand behind the accuracy of their product. If Microsoft doesn’t trust copilot, why should I?” questioned one Reddit user.

Previous versions of the terms, dating back to 2023, were more vague and said: “The Online Services are for entertainment purposes.”

Another user also noticed that the “entertainment purposes only” phrasing seems to match disclaimers posted on TV programs featuring ghosts or psychics to prevent lawsuits. Indeed, you can find online psychic services that mention the same, noting “readings should be viewed as being for entertainment purposes only and in no way replaces proper legal, financial or medical advice.” Microsoft has already been caught in AI-related lawsuits over ChatGPT data scraping after investing billions in OpenAI.

However, the company is indicating it plans on changing the disclaimer soon. “The ‘entertainment purposes’ phrasing is legacy language from when Copilot originally launched as a search companion service in Bing,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “As the product has evolved, that language is no longer reflective of how Copilot is used today and will be altered with our next update.”

In the meantime, Redmond has faced pushback over its focus on AI, with some critics calling the company “Microslop,” a reference to AI slop. Perhaps in response, a Microsoft executive downplayed the company’s AI focus last month while talking up major improvements to future Windows 11 updates.

In July, the CMA released the findings of its cloud services market investigation, which said that market concentration and barriers to entry in the cloud services market have enabled both Microsoft and Amazon to hold “significant unilateral market power.”

The report found that Microsoft and AWS each had a 30-40% share of the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market — which includes processing, storage, networking and other raw computing.

Following engagement with the CMA, Microsoft and Amazon have set out actions on cloud egress fees (charges related to switching providers) and interoperability, the regulator said.

Amazon said in a statement it was formalising its “commitment to customer choice through clear, comprehensive rights around multi-cloud adoption, data portability, and switching processes.”

“We have also agreed to continued, structured engagement with the CMA as we support their efforts to ensure the cloud continues to power the UK’s thriving innovation economy for years to come,” it added.

“The changes address the CMA’s commitment to ensuring that UK customers can continue to move, deploy, and operate their workloads in the clouds of their choice with confidence, flexibility, and ever reduced friction,” Microsoft’s Smith said.

There’s been growing scrutiny on the reliance of Europe’s business and governments on U.S. tech systems as geopolitical tensions have risen in recent times, with European capitals accelerating moves to diversify tech stacks.