I'd like to sympathise, but I'm afraid this is looking like a general trend for modern Microsoft, and if your group isn't doing similar shady things then it's the exception.
Some other examples:
I was going to try a bit of C++ programming on Windows for the first time on a new PC a little while back, so I looked into what is now called Visual Studio Community. Whereas Microsoft used to make the basic Express tools to develop on its platform free and readily available, I now have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use Community. I don't know exactly what that does, but after probably half an hour of reading on Microsoft's site, I do know that it seems to involve uploading data to Microsoft, multiple very long privacy policies, and no guarantee that I could find that potentially sensitive things like the actual code I'm working on wouldn't be included.
We were looking at getting some office software for that PC as well. I thought MS Office still came as a standalone desktop application as well as the online service-y thing, but I couldn't find anything in more than 20 minutes of looking around Microsoft's site that even mentioned the former any more. Again, it's all online-this and subscription-service-that now, and I have no interest in renting important software or sharing whatever I do with it with Microsoft.
Obviously the new PC itself, which we specifically ordered with Windows 7 because we didn't want any of the more recent versions, also needed lots of updates immediately uninstalling just to clean out all the spyware, adware, and so on.
There have been related concerns with other MS products, such as the gaming and console line, in the more recent generations as well.
For many years, I have generally been positive about Microsoft, and considered Windows, Office and Visual Studio the gold standards for useful software. I'm sorry to say that none of that is true any more, and I'm now actively hostile toward and distrustful of anything associated with Microsoft. It's a great pity.
Disclosure: I was one of the people that signed the petition to ask the EFF to get involved. The stories from people whose computers were taken out by upgrades that they were tricked into just got too much. If you think that this kind of thing is totally surprising, though, I'll refer you to the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI changes, and the swamp that has been the Windows Update experience lo these many years.
http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/
For all Satya's promises, nothing _really_ changed.
