You can operate without a local account - source, I‘m on Windows 11 and I‘ve never had a Microsoft account - but it‘s a massive PITA and takes a lot of playing around and disconnecting from the internet during install, and stuff like that.
You‘re right that 99% of people won‘t know/won‘t bother to go through the hassle and that Microsoft through the years have been making it harder and harder to have a local account, but at the moment it‘s still technically possible.
The channel‘s called Some More News
The issue there is that even at that pricepoint, Microsoft is still operating CoPilot at a loss. If they drop it more, they’ll be making even more of a loss. Which is the standard business model for new products these days, but the losses on AI products dwarf things like Netflix and Uber during their “operate at a loss to drive everybody else out of business” phase.
Of course, that would all be fine if CoPilot was some killer product that people quickly found themselves unable to work without. Instead, the feedback shows that workers find that it’s not useful or reliable enough to be worth using, and Microsoft’s own latest advert for CoPilot in Excel contains data which shows that at best operation it doesn’t work 46% of the time, and that figure can be as high as 80%.
I’m not sure these problems are really surmountable - you’ve got an incredibly expensive-to-run product which doesn’t do much that’s useful and is bad at the things that it actually could be useful for. It’s not just Microsoft, it’s the entire tech industry that’s facing this problem.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham.
The broader point, though, is that the scenario of The Lord of the Flies has actually happened. We’ve had a small group of kids trapped on an island for an extended period of time and what happened is that they built a peaceful and harmonious society, which included spending time and resources caring for one of their number who broke their leg.
And there‘s still no compelling use-case for the average consumer. Coders and scientists? Can be. But most people don‘t really have a use for it in most situations, even in business contexts. It‘s mostly a solution in search of a problem, and even then it‘s so unreliable that even things trying to sell you it as a solution have to add the disclaimer that you shouldn‘t use it for anything that‘s remotely important.
So even if the costs were markedly less than they are, there‘s still no real path to profitability because there‘s no real call for it.
The only use I‘ve found as a consumer is using something like Perplexity as a search engine. And that‘s not a testament to how good Perplexity is, but instead a testament to how bad other search engines have become. Perplexity just avoids things like SEO and is mostly quite good at finding sources which aren‘t themselves AI-generated.
And…I really see a near future in which AI-SEO becomes a thing and Perplexity et. al. become just as useless as google.