[epistasis]

This threw me off as well. I thought Microsoft was supposed to be security conscious, but putting in small, arbitrary limits in places where they don't belong is not reassuring in the least.

They also make it insanely difficult to use a password manager, as the login page URL redirects from outlook.com to some randomness that's 205 characters long.

[kmfrk]

I can sympathize with it being a preview and all, but the consequence will nevertheless be that there will be a bunch of people out the who will enter <= 16-character-length passwords and forget all about them.

I mean, unless Microsoft explicitly prompt them with a reminder of sorts, when they flip the switch on a sane password length, but what are the odds of that happening?