Piracy of Microsoft products that allow offline use is rampant, especially in poorer countries. A cloud service is a really good tool to prevent piracy.
If it's so easy to pirate office then the cloud-based authentication service only serves to cause issues for those who legally purchased the software.
The problem is that recent OneNote versions (at least on Mac), require Microsoft signin and can't even open local note files.
especially when it comes to poor economies! the cost of a windows/office license is a good portion of (if not an entire) yearly salary in some countries! removing the tools that help them to compete with more affluent economies is pretty poor form
In poorer economies you can just adjust the price to be comparable to local yearly salaries. It's not that piracy means that end users get the licenses for free any way: there are many people who sell pirated versions of Windows and Office.
> removing the tools that help them to compete
You can be just as competitive with Libreoffice and GNU/Linux as you can be with MS Office and MS Windows. The cime of piracy steals a giant market of hundreds of millions if not billions of people from Libreoffice and GNU/Linux and turns these people into second-class citizens.
How do you draw the line between "if you weren't going to pay anyways" and "well we don't have to pay, so we ain't gonna"?