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It may be recency bias, but I cannot think of a worse response to a security issue than what we've seen with Zoom over the past few days https://t.co/qmTOc5XGr8

— Greg Otto (@gregotto) July 10, 2019

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Apple has a new neighbor in London — and it happens to be one of its biggest competitors.

Microsoft unveiled its first European store on Thursday, which is just meters away from Apple's own London flagship.

We visited the two stores and see how they compare. Here's what we found:

In the USA, we sure do love pickup trucks. Especially full-size pickups, which are at the heart of the market.

Since 2014, Ford, Chevy, and RAM — the Big Three of pickup brands — have each redesigned their bread-and-butter (Meat and potatoes?) truck.

I've driven them all, but I've also checked out the Toyota Tundra, a solid pickup that sells outside the top three, and that hasn't been revamped for a while.

These are all pretty good trucks, and for this roundup, I've highlighted some of their best features (by the way, I skipped towing because all four trucks can tow weight that's within the expectations of this class).

The Federal Trade Commission is gearing up to hit Facebook with a staggering, record-breaking $5 billion penalty.

Wall Street is viewing this as a good thing.

And the reason why speaks volumes about the sheer scale and power of Facebook today.

Some background: For the last year, the FTC has been investigating Facebook's various privacy snafus. The agency started with a probe into whether Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of 87 million users' data amounted to a breach of the company's 2012 consent decree with it. It later expanded the inquiry to incorporate the California tech giant's myriad other recent privacy scandals.

This process is now drawing to a close. According to multiple reports, the commission has agreed to a settlement that would include a fine of roughly $5 billion.

Read this: The FTC has approved a roughly $5 billion settlement with Facebook

That amount is extraordinarily large. It's an order of magnitude bigger than the previous record penalty imposed by the agency — the $22.5 million fine it levied against Google in 2012. But when the news broke on Friday, Facebook stock actually rose, trading up around 1%.

This is likely because, despite the penalty's unprecedented size, it's still just a drop in the ocean compared to the gigantic amount of cash Facebook regularly produces. The company makes billions of dollars in profit and generates three times the total settlement amount in revenue every three months or so. It also set $3 billion aside in preparation for this back in April 2019, warning investors that it expected a penalty between $3 billion to $5 billion — meaning the cost of the settlement was already baked into the company's share price months ago.

In fact, Wall Street seems to be breathing a sigh of relief, as evidenced by the slight stock uptick, that the penalty wasn't more severe.

We don't yet know exactly what the settlement will look like, and the devil will be the details. Both Facebook and the FTC declined to comment about it when approached by Business Insider.

But it seems unlikely the deal will require the kind of fundamental changes the company's staunchest critics have called for and that could significantly affect its bottom line. To wit, The New York Times reported that "none of the conditions in the settlement will restrict Facebook's ability to collect and share data with third parties."

Accordingly, the settlement has drawn criticism inside and outside the FTC. The Democratic members of the commission reportedly voted against it, pushing for harsher penalties.

Meanwhile, David Cicilline, a Democratic congressperson for Rhode Island, labeled it "a slap on the wrist" and said "the FTC just gave Facebook a Christmas present five months early." Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal called it a "seemingly inadequate, unconscionably delayed, and historically hollow result" and called for a congressional hearing.

Georgetown Law attorney Lindsey Barrett added: "Anyone saying that a [$5 billion] fine without other meaningful restrictions for a company that made [$22 billion] this year and has repeatedly engaged in illegal conduct at a massive scale is spinning, and spinning for a reason."

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Tropical Storm Barry is getting stronger as it heads for New Orleans, and is likely to become a Category 1 hurricane by the time it makes landfall in Louisiana tomorrow morning, according to the National Hurricane Center.

A hurricane warning is in effect for a swath of the Louisiana coast, and forecasts suggest the Mississippi River could crest as high as 19 or 20 feet— the highest level the river has reached in New Orleans since 1950. (The river has already swelled to 16 feet.)

That could create the biggest test ever of the city's river levees, which were built in 1927.

Louisiana Gov. John Bell Edwards has declared a state of emergency and warned that there could be "a considerable amount of overtopping" of levees in Plaquemines Parish, a suburban district southeast of New Orleans.

Here's everything you need to know about what levees are, how they work, and what the system looks like in New Orleans.

Levee systems rely on embankments, flood-walls, and pumps

Most levees are trapezoid-shaped, elevated embankments that separate bodies of water from inhabited flood plains. They're meant to protect those areas in the event a lake or river level rises.

Roads and railways sometimes cross a levee, so flood-walls — which are usually made of concrete or steel — and other structures are used to close those gaps. Flood-walls are also often built to supplement levee systems in high-density urban areas where there isn't enough space for a large levee.

The US Army Corps of Engineers classifies levees by the environment they protect (urban or rural) and the body of water they protect it from (river, coastal, or estuary).

A view from the top of the levee that protects the Ninth Ward from the Industrial Canal is pictured as Tropical Storm Barry approaches land in New Orleans, Louisiana.Jonathan Bachman/Reuters

Different types of river levees can run parallel the main river channel, encircle a protected area, or provide backup or protection to an existing levee.

New Orleans has two levee systems along the Mississippi River

Two levee systems hold back the Mississippi in New Orleans: the East Bank System and the West Bank System. Together, these systems boast 192 miles of levees and 99 miles of flood-walls.

But it's unclear just how much water the river levees can withstand. The official levee database run by USACE shows levee heights as low as 18 feet above sea level in some parts of the city. That puts it below forecast for peak river heights due to Tropical Storm Barry.

However, the Army Corps has disputed the information in its own database. Ricky Boyett, a Corps spokesperson, told The Times-Picayune and New Orleans Advocate that the group's model still "does not show overtopping of the levees in the 9th Ward."

The Corps even has an internal analysis of the river levees in New Orleans that ranks both the East Bank and West Bank System as at moderate to high risk of a breach.

Levees can fail, and this will be the biggest test yet

If the river water rises higher than the levee it will spill over, but a levee breach is not just a question of height. Levees can also crumble under pressure due to poor maintenance, inadequate foundations, or erosion.

Too much water can seep through a levee and cause it to slough away, or simply seep through the ground below and spout up on the other side in what are known as "sand boils." Animals also burrow below levees sometimes, creating unintentional paths for pent-up water.

Of course, a levee that breaks is far more dangerous than a levee that's too short. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused a New Orleans coastal levee to break, releasing a wall of water. The flooding killed over 1,000 people. Since then, Congress has invested $15 billion in repairing the levee system around New Orleans.

The river levees at risk of a breach due to Tropical Storm Barry, however, held during Katrina.

Mark Zuckerberg must be feeling a bit like President Donald Trump now.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, a confident Trump famously said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York and "wouldn't lose any voters."

After the news on Friday that the Federal Trade Commission is close to finalizing a settlement with his company for a mere $5 billion, Zuckerberg has got to be feeling similarly untouchable. If, after all the privacy and security fiascos Facebook admitted to over the past two years — including, but not limited to, the Cambridge Analytica scandal — it gets off with such a small penalty, he's got to think he probably could get away with murder.

Read this: The FTC has approved a roughly $5 billion settlement with Facebook

Of course, Zuckerberg's felt he could act with impunity for years. When Harvard students uploaded photos and other personal information to his newly launched Facebook site soon after it launched, he notoriously derided them as "dumb f---s" and offered to share with a friend such details of anyone of interest to the person. He repeatedly pushed privacy boundaries in terms of the data Facebook collected from its users and what it did with that information. When controversies arose about that — as they repeatedly did — the company simply took a step back only to quietly push forward again soon thereafter.

Even a previous FTC investigation proved to be little more than a hiccup. The settlement in that case resulted in no fine. While it was supposed to restrict some of Facebook's activities and protect users' privacy, it turned out to do very little of either. Despite numerous complaints from privacy advocates that the company was violating the terms of the settlement, the FTC didn't take any enforcement actions against the social-networking giant.

This time could have been different

There was reason to think that things would be different this time around. The Cambridge Analytica imbroglio resonated much more widely with the public than the company's previous privacy missteps. That's probably because of the scale of the data leak — up to 87 million users were affected — and because of Cambridge Analytica's ties to Trump's election campaign.

Facebook was already under scrutiny for the hijacking of its service by Russian-linked figures to spread propaganda that benefited Trump's campaign during that election. The Cambridge Analytica leak suggested its service had played another hidden role in Trump's victory, allowing Trump's campaign to exploit the data of Facebook users — collected without their knowledge — to target election ads.

And it turned out that the Cambridge Analytica was only one of numerous privacy and security scandals Facebook faced. The company later acknowledged that malicious actors had separately collected data on "most" of its 2 billion users, that some 14 million users had been affected by a bug that made their supposedly private status updates publicly viewable, that data on some 30 million users was compromised in a hacking attack, and that photos from some 7 million users that were intended to be kept private might have been shared with as many as 1,500 apps.

What's more, the company knew about the problems related to Cambridge Analytica as far back as 2015, according to court filings. And, according to a report in The New York Times, the company gave preferential access to its user data to certain companies even after supposedly curtailing access to it to most companies.

On top of all this, the political environment has changed. Not only are Democrats upset with Facebook, but so too are Republicans. Led by Trump, they've accused the company and other social-networking corporations of censoring conservative voices. And both sides of the political aisle have been calling for an antitrust investigation into Zuckerberg's company and new rules to limit its power.

So, if government regulators were going to get serious about reining in Facebook and holding it accountable, you would think now would be the time.

But you'd be wrong.

To Facebook, this is a slap on the wrist

The FTC settlement, at least as it is described in numerous reports, will amount to little more than a slap on the wrist. Facebook will get to put to bed all of the agency's investigations into its privacy practices. Although it will face some additional oversight over its privacy practices, it won't have any restrictions on its ability to collect or share data with other companies or organizations, according to The New York Times. And it doesn't look like Zuckerberg will be held personally responsible for any of his company's multiple failings or be under any particular scrutiny going forward.

Depending on how that oversight shapes up, the only real cost of the deal for Facebook is likely that it will have to pay that $5 billion fine.

That might sound like a lot — and it is a huge amount to the average person. It also would be the largest fine ever assessed by the FTC, a fact the agency is likely to tout quite a bit when it officially announces the deal.

But to Facebook, $5 billion just isn't that much money. It represents less than 1% of its $580 billion market capitalization. Heck, it's only about 7% of Mark Zuckerberg's net worth.

Put another way, Facebook is such a profitable company that it generates $5 billion in cash — even after accounting for all its day-to-day operating expenses — every 49 days. The company will be able to pay its $5 billion fine and still have money left over to put in the bank at the end of the quarter — that's how meaningless this fine will be to the company.

Wall Street recognizes this. Facebook's stock actually rose on the news of the settlement, even though the fine is now expected to be at the top end of the range the company offered investors in April.

The two Democrats on the commission appeared to recognize that the agency was letting Facebook off easy. They reportedly voted against the deal. It will go forward because the three Republicans on the commission approved it.

They can fool themselves into thinking they've dealt sternly with Facebook, but everyone else knows better. More importantly, Zuckerberg knows better.

If he and Facebook were able to get away with so much with so little consequence this time around, one can only imagine what they'll try to get away the next time. "Dumb f---s," indeed.

A group of Amazon's tech workers are openly supporting the planned strike by Amazon warehouse workers in Shakopee, Minnesota, next week during the online retailer's Prime Day shopping event.

Some of them will even be flying out to walk the picket line and give speeches during the strike, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, the employee activist group organizing this show of support, said.

Others are publicly sharing letters and words of encourage to the strikers via Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, with multiple employees saying they are ashamed of the treatment of the fulfillment center workers.

"The treatment of FC workers is a source of shame to me as an Amazon employee," the Amazon employee Nancy Urban wrote in a blog post shared by the activist group.

"All Amazon employees should be proud to call themselves such. It is shameful that while Amazon chooses to be the industry leader in so many aspects of their employment policies, and yet continues to allow other aspects of their policies to be worthy of being called 'inhumane,'" another anonymous employee wrote in the blog post.

"When I was working as an engineer in Fulfillment, I spent a few days working in the warehouses and could not even come close to meeting the individual productivity quotas. The quotas are unrealistically high for most humans. I support FC employees in Minnesota who wish to lower quotas for safer and more comfortable working conditions," Joey Siracusa wrote in that same post.

Read: Amazon CTO Werner Vogels shared a powerful response to the ongoing protests of the company's involvement with ICE

This show of support for their fellow employees was organized by a group with a primary mission to push Amazon to better combat climate change.

Matt Cardy / Stringer / Getty Images They want Amazon to stop using fossil fuels in its operations entirely and become a zero-emissions company in a timeline dictated by science. Amazon does have numerous green initiatives, such as building its own solar and wind farms. It has also promised to eventually use 100% renewable energy for its global infrastructure, but it has been vague as to the timeline.

Meanwhile, Prime Day, the retailer's annual shopping event, is coming next week. While Amazon customers are anticipating the bargains, these Minnesota workers are using the spotlight to push for better conditions.

They want higher pay, more reasonable workloads, and better opportunities for advancement. Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment to this story, but Amazon has said in reaction to the strike that it already offers the workers what they are asking for with its $15 minimum wage and pay up to $20.80 an hour, plus benefits like healthcare, parental leave, paid education, and training.

In addition, Amazon just this week announced a program to train 100,000 of its employees with new tech skills, including new programs available to warehouse workers who want to learn how to code. It will also be offering more tuition assistance to those who want to train for other high-demand occupations.

Read more: This Amazon exec helped Alexa work with 60,000 devices, but says he only really understood its power when his kid came home from school

But new training options don't combat the perception that the warehouse job involves inhumane expectations.

The company recently endured another round of criticism when John Oliver, the host of the HBO show "Last Week Tonight," showcased the warehouse situation. His segment featured employees talking about how hard Amazon pushes them, their inability to take bathroom breaks, and showed Amazon's anti-union training video.

The Amazon exec Dave Clark, the senior vice president of operations, said Oliver's portrayal of the job is untrue, adding that the company even offers tours of its warehouses. That's true, the tours are limited to specific warehouses, but the Shakopee, Minnesota, facility is among them.

Still, Business Insider previously reported that the company does appear to treat its warehouse workforce like robots. It even uses an automated system that tracks warehouse workers' productivity that can automatically generate the paperwork to fire them for failing to meet expectations.

One anonymous Amazon tech worker said in the blog post: "You guys are the lifeblood of Amazon! Keep raising the bar and insisting on the highest working standards! You have the support of Seattle!"

Facebook is facing a penalty of about $5 billion from the Federal Trade Commission for violating a privacy consent decree set in 2011.

The multibillion-dollar penalty — which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Friday — is poised to be the largest of its kind against a tech company, eclipsing a $22 million settlement with Google. For Facebook, though, it looks to be an easy bill to pay, given the roughly $45 billion in cash it has on hand.

For Facebook, $5 billion is about 9% of its total revenue for 2018, which notched in at $55.83 billion. For a more recent figure to put it into context, Facebook generated about $15 billion in revenue in the first three months of 2019, averaging out to about $5 billion a month.

Indeed, earlier this year, Facebook announced that it had already set aside $3 billion to deal with any fine from the FTC, which it had already estimated would be around $5 billion.

The other thing

What could be more of a headache to Facebook than the monetary costs of the settlement is any oversight of its business going forward. The Wall Street Journal reported that terms of the settlement were "expected to include other government restrictions on how Facebook treats user privacy."

However, it's not immediately clear what such restrictions might entail, as The New York Times reported that the settlement didn't place any conditions on Facebook's ability to collect and share data with third parties, though it does have provisions for more "comprehensive oversight" of how the social network handles users' data.

That's likely good news for Facebook's core advertising business. However, that oversight could still introduce more overhead to the company and put a damper on new products and plans — we've already seen skepticism from politicians such as President Donald Trump over Libra, Facebook's new cryptocurrency initiative.

In other words, for a company made famous for moving fast and breaking things, this could force Facebook to slow down a little bit.

Read more: Trump blasts Bitcoin and says cryptocurrencies, including Facebook's Libra, should be 'subject to all banking regulations'

It also remains to be seen whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be held personally liable for future infringements on the FTC consent decree, an idea that has been previously floated but is considered unlikely to come to pass.

History lesson

The expected multibillion dollar penalty comes as a result of an FTC investigation into Facebook's Cambridge Analytica affair, in which the personal data for tens of millions of Facebook users was improperly accessed by the data firm.

The main question of the investigation was whether Facebook's handling of user data in the case violated a 2011 agreement with the agency — as part of the terms of a settlement at that time, Facebook agreed to take steps to protect user data.

The $5 billion that goes into settling the inquiry may not have a tremendous influence on the company's bottom line. In fact, Facebook stock closed up 1.8% on Friday and climbed slightly higher in after-hours trading, even in the wake of the report of the settlement.

However, depending on the additional terms of the settlement, this could have ripple effects on Facebook's business going forward. And if nothing else, remember that there's nothing stopping the FTC from opening another investigation, should circumstances warrant it.

Ask anyone around you and they'll most likely say they have an Amazon Prime membership. At less than $10 a month, it offers many convenient benefits, making it a great investment for its price.

A regular Amazon Prime membership is $119 a year. Students not only get 50% off Prime memberships ($6.49/month), but also enjoy exclusive discounts. They can get a free six-month Prime trial here. Meanwhile, Prime is also discounted ($5.99/month) for qualifying customers with an EBT or Medicaid card.

100 million subscribers worldwide evidently think it's worth it, but if you're still on the fence about buying a membership, we've rounded up its many benefits below.

You might even already have Prime but aren't using it to its full advantage, in which case this list will be a nice refresher for all the benefits you should know about.

You can experience all the benefits with a free 30-day trial of Prime to see if it's worth it for you.

Remember, if you want to shop on Amazon Prime Day 2019 on July 15-16, you need to be a Prime member. This year, it will be live for 48 hours, starting at 12 a.m. PT on July 15 and ending at 11:59 p.m. PT on July 16. Find all our Prime Day 2019 coverage here, or head to our master list of the best Prime Day 2019 deals directly.

Get a free 30-day Prime trial

Some standout benefits to an Amazon Prime membership include:

Below are the 31 Amazon Prime benefits you should know about.

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Louisiana residents are preparing for their first hurricane of 2019.

Currently, Tropical Storm Barry is 70 miles from Morgan, Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. The National Hurricane Center expects it to make landfall as a Category 1 hurricane around 7 a.m. local time on Saturday.

That's because Barry is gaining strength as it approaches the coast; the storm's maximum sustained wind speeds are hovering around 65 mph, but speeds over 73 mph would upgrade Barry to hurricane status. If that happens as predicted, this would be only the third time in 168 years that a hurricane hits the Gulf region in July.

Read More: Tropical Storm Barry could hit Louisiana as the year's first hurricane tomorrow. New Orleans' river levees will be put to the test.

According to Barry's current course, it could make landfall near Marsh Island, about 100 miles west of New Orleans in Vermilion Bay, Accuweather.com reported.

Tropical Storm Barry is expected to make landfall early Saturday morning on the central Louisiana coast. National Hurricane Center

As of 2 p.m. ET on Friday, a hurricane warning is in effect for the stretch of coast from Grand Isle to Intracoastal City. A storm-surge warning is in effect from Intracoastal City to Shell Beach and Lake Pontchartrain (these areas include New Orleans).

According to the National Hurricane Center (NHC), Barry is expected to weaken back into a tropical storm as it moves over Louisiana on Saturday (with winds between 39 and 73 mph). As the storm continues north through Louisiana on Sunday morning, it will be downgraded further to a tropical depression (which means wind speeds would fall below 39 mph).

The weather pattern is slated to reach Arkansas 24 hours later, then Missouri after that, followed by Indiana.

David Fox makes a call from his business on Poydras Street in New Orleans after flooding in New Orleans, July 10, 2019. Matthew Hinton/AP

Currently New Orleans mayor Latoya Cantrell has advised residents to shelter in place. Cantrell told reporters at a news conference on Thursday that the city only mandates evacuations for major hurricanes — Category 3 or higher — according to Accuweather.com.

So New Orleans and other coastal Louisiana residents are preparing for days of heavy rainfall. The NHC has forecast up to 20 inches of rain across Louisiana over the coming days, which threatens to overflow New Orleans' already-strained Mississippi river levees.

The extreme rainfall, coupled with overflowing rivers and potential storm surges, will threaten urban areas with life-threatening flooding.

On Thursday, during what was supposed to be an ordinary keynote address by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels to a crowd of tech workers in New York, protests interrupted.

Protesters repeatedly interrupted the talk, taking issue over the family separation policy at the southern border of the US executed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Amazon Web Services' dealings with the agency.

On Friday, the fallout continued when Vogels tweeted a powerful response.

"I let trolls be trolls. But to yesterday's group who feel that because of my name I (and thus Amazon) must be the next incarnation of WII Nazi atrocities: I am Dutch. My parents sent to forced labor in Germany and were fortunate to return where many were not. Do your research," he tweeted.

Vogel appears to be commenting on the fact that the Tech Workers Coalition New York, one of the groups responsible for the protest, has been comparing the detention centers on the US southern border, where migrant children taken from their parents are kept by authorities, to Nazi concentration camps.

The Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940 and shipped thousands of the country's Jews and political prisoners to forced labor concentration camps. World War II ended in 1945 making Vogels a baby boomer. He was born in 1958, according to Wikipedia.

Read: Microsoft bows to the backlash and will not start charging its sales partners to use its software

Recently, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sparked a fierce public debate over the description of these facilities as "concentration camps," after she used the term to describe the detention centers.

The Tech Coalition New York has been using similar language. On Thursday, during the protests that interupted Vogel's keynote, it tweeted: "Technology will always be used by the powerful to further their own ends. As workers, we must band together and say no - we will not repeat the horrors of the past. We will not build concentration camps. We will not build the deportation machine. We will not separate families."

It also tweeted: "As was pointed out by a speaker in the protests outside, we can't forget that IBM played a crucial role in providing advanced technology to help murder thousands of jews [sic] and others during the Holocaust, and actually profited from the genocide."

The protests were organized by several groups including Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, who demonstrated outside the event. Some of the protesters were shouting out Vogels' name during their disruption, calling on him to stop Amazon's association with ICE. Hundreds of others were outside disrupting traffic.

Read more: Protesters repeatedly disrupted a top Amazon executive's presentation at a tech conference

The protesters take issue with Amazon's association with Palantir, which has acknowledged it works with the Homeland Security Investigations unit of ICE, and which reportedly uses AWS cloud services. Amazon has also met with ICE officials to pitch sales of its facial recognition tech and other AWS services, as revealed by emails between Amazon and various government officials obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundations.

Amazon employees are ramping up their protests internally, too. A group of them have sent a second letter this week demanding the company take a stand against ICE and cease its dealings with Palantir. Employees had sent a similar letter a year ago, specifically demanding that the company stop providing its Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, a spokesperson told the Washington Post that companies and government organizations should use technology "responsibly and lawfully" and said it is working with lawmakers on regulations for AI tech.

Amazon also has not yet posted a replay of the much-interrupted keynote speech online. However some reports said that during the livestream, the video had filtered out the protesters' voices.

After some 6,000 people signed an internet petition in a matter of days, angrily demanding that Microsoft not take away a valuable perk — resellers' rights to use Microsoft software — Microsoft has bowed to the pressure and reversed course.

On Friday, the day before its annual partners conference, where thousands of partners will descend on Las Vegas to learn how they can make money by helping the tech giant sell its wares, Microsoft canceled the policy.

The company had been planning on doing away with the perk that was included to those that pay an annual subscription to be part of its official sales channel. As of July 1, 2020, the tech titan was going to stop allowing its partners to use Microsoft software internally to run their own business for free as part of their subscription.

"In announcing these changes it's clear Microsoft is going to war with its partners," the petition reads, in part. The author of the petition calculated that even a small partner with 15 people that uses Microsoft's Dynamics to manage its customer interactions would suddenly be on the hook to pay Microsoft $2,400 a month. Under the old system, these partners got free software as part of their annual subscriptions. Those subscriptions ranged from $475 a year for small partners to $4,730 a year for its gold-level partners.

Microsoft had for decades allowed business partners to use its software internally, and even provided them with technical support, because it made business sense. They wanted partners to know and customize the Microsoft software they sold, just like they would do for Microsoft customers. In the tech world, this is called eating your own dog food.

But in light of the uproar, Gavriella Schuster, Microsoft's corporate vice president of One Commercial Partner, announced in a blog on Friday that Microsoft is simply canceling the policy. Partners will not be required to pay for their software use — nor will they be pushed into obtaining specialized new certifications to help Microsoft sell its cloud.

"We listened to you, and we have acted," she wrote. "Our decision to rescind these changes required a thorough review, and a key determining factor was the connection and trust we have with you, our partners — a valuable asset we do not take for granted."

A cynical analysis of Microsoft's attempt to charge its sales partners would go like this: Microsoft started viewing the tens of thousands of companies that sell its wares as an untapped source of revenue, rather than as an extension of the company.

And Schuster said about as much in an interview with Business Insider.

"We have essentially let them run their environment on Microsoft for free. Now, just like every other customer, they'll have to pay for the services that they use," she told Business Insider's Rosalie Chan.

Read more: Microsoft's reseller chief explains why it's angering some of its partners by taking away a key perk: 'We can't afford to run every single partner's organization for free anymore'

The move was a bit more complicated than that. Microsoft also wants its partners to stop using on-premise software and use its cloud instead, as part of a broader push at the company toward cloud services like Azure or the Office 365 suite.

And Schuster said that if it were to offer free cloud services, the way it offers free software, this creates an ongoing expense for the tech giant because Microsoft has to pay for the servers, storage, and data center.

"We can't afford to run every single partner's organization for free anymore, because it's not free," she said.

Schuster characterized uproar over the new policy like this: "You have to start paying for something we've been giving for free for a long time. It's like when your kids turn 20, and you tell them they have to pay rent."

But given the backlash, which was threatening to overshadow Microsoft's upcoming announcements at its partner conference next week, Microsoft was wise to rethink the policy.

As for how the about-face will influence Microsoft's bottom line, think of this: if Microsoft can afford to offer 5 gigabytes of cloud storage to millions of consumers in the world for free, and 100 gigabytes of storage for just $2 a month, it seems likely that the company won't be bankrupt by continuing a perk as part of their annual reseller subscription, just as it has for decades.

Are you a Microsoft insider with insight to share? We want to hear it. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. DM on Twitter @Julie188 or contact via Signal.