Brit reseller given 2022 court date for £270m Microsoft SaaS licence sueball's first hearing

British software licence reseller ValueLicensing has a trial date for the first part of a £270m legal showdown against Microsoft after accusing the US behemoth of breaking UK and EU competition laws. A High Court hearing of Microsoft's attempt to strike out ValueLicensing's case will take place on 30-31 March 2022, the British …

[elsergiovolador]

Fingers crossed

I hope they win, as the "rent-seeking" behaviour should be stamped out from the market.

[John Brown (no body)]

On the one hand...

On the one hand, sometimes things change and that means some specialist businesses go to the wall because their market dries up. You don't see many buggy whip makers these days. On the other, it's pretty clear that MS are offering significant discounts to get their on-prem licences transferred to SaaS cloudy licences because they know in the long run it will be far more profitable for them when the tipping point is reached and the prices start the inexorable climb beyond the cloud into the azure blue sky.

[stronk]

Seems a reasonable case, but...

I'm writing from 10 years in the future (it's much the same, except the toasters are sentient).

This case is just wrapping up and sadly ValueLicensing lost because Microsoft managed to show that they had lots of other reasons to move to SaaS models and that this on the whole benefited customers. The courts agreed, though due to some solid legal gymnastics from Microsoft, evidence from actual customers of the SaaS product was not required.

[Trigonoceps occipitalis]

Re: Seems a reasonable case, but...

I'm writing from 100 years in the future (it's much the same, except the toasters run the world).

I'm glad to report it is all over for Microsoft. The United Nations declared last year as "The Year of Linux on the Desktop."