You can make the same argument for the old CDs-in-boxes model too. "If there's a recession, sales will go down".

The difference is that recurring payments vastly improve your cashflow situation. Instead of giant pulses every 3 years you have a smoother pipeline of cash coming in all the time. Even if that pipeline shrinks, it still flows.

It's far easier to plan for a 10% reduction that happens continuously than a 3 year plan with lots of "??$??" sprinkled throughout it. And far easier to recover from mistakes.

What kind of reoccurring microsoft expenses would an organization be able to shed? Can't really cut back on costs for word and excel/office suite. If your data is in Azure already, it would cost even more probably to move it all off and administer it yourself. Seems like they're pretty well locked in.

There is efficient usage of the cloud and inefficient usage. How data is processed, moved around and things like fleet size can all greatly impact your final bill.

Most companies don't optimize for cloud costs to great lengths.