Ask Paul: November 11 (Premium)

Happy 11/11, happy Friday, and happy Veteran’s Day! Let’s kick off the weekend a bit early with a great set of reader questions.
Calculated
agilefrog asks:

Tone deaf email. I received an email from Microsoft this week that started "Microsoft is committed to improving your Microsoft 365 subscription," but then ploughed on to detail how they were ceasing support for personal email addresses, and rolling outlook data into your one drive allowance. [Laurent wrote about these changes here. ---Paul] Neither of which is an improvement! Do you know if there is a major overhaul of 365 in the works that this could be pre-work for? Otherwise it feels like a tone-deaf step at a time when most consumers are trying to drive greater value from their subscriptions, rather than less. I get that personal email integration is likely a niche feature, but I'd bet that a sizeable number of sole-traders/small businesses rely on this.

We’re seeing this all over. Apple, for example, just raised the prices of many of its online services and it’s the most profitable company on earth.

My suspicion is that this is tied to what Microsoft is doing on the commercial side of Microsoft 365, where services that were free during the pandemic are now moving into paid add-ons or subscriptions (like Teams Premium). In other words, the free ride is over. I don’t think we’re going to see a major revamp of Microsoft 365, though. It’s more likely that Microsoft will simply wait until after the holidays to raise prices on Microsoft 365 Personal and Family (much as I expect it to do across the Xbox subscriptions).

The good news on the custom domain front is that you have a year to set that up if you haven’t already, and when the feature disappears in November 2023, your custom domain will continue working. (I’ve had the same custom domain on my primary Microsoft account, a Hotmail address that is literally 20 years old, for years, and it still works fine. In fact, I sign into Windows 10/11 PCs with it.)

But those who wish to use a custom domain going forward are going to have some choices to make. Unless something changes, your only option from Microsoft will be to switch to a Microsoft 365 commercial account, and while that may be acceptable for an individual, it won’t be for a family: the lowest-cost option, Microsoft 365 Business Basic, is only $6 per month per user ($72 per year) and it supports custom domains (and 1 TB of OneDrive), but it doesn’t include access to the desktop Office apps. If you need those apps, you’re looking at Microsoft 365 Business Standard, which is $12.50 per month ($150 per year) per user. That’s 50 percent more than Microsoft 365 Family, and that account supports 6 users.

With regards to the email attachment storage now coming out of your OneDrive storage, that probably won’t be an issue for most: the Outlook.com email attachment limit is pretty small anyway, and I suspect most people won’t notice much o...