Re: "a thorough review"
No, it would never be anything this subtle or involve the required effort to create a cost/benefit spreadsheet in the first place.
Someone has looked through partner subsidies and decided that if MS didn't provide them as subsidies they would instantly turn into revenue because MS partners all love MS products so much and would never consider alternatives for themselves or their customers.
Based on other companies doing this (there are so many examples but HP server firmware/driver updates is similar) it's only really a sensible move when your business has started to decline and you don't see any other way of extracting more revenue.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
