The Register talks to Microsoft's European cloud rivals about getting a fair deal If you're a cloud specialist in the EU, things like licensing, Euro digital sovereignty project Gaia-X, and a creating a level playing field are all front of mind. As far as licensing goes, Microsoft recently had an apparent awakening concerning its practices in Europe and vowed to make concessions – accusations of anti- …
Using One Drive as a reason to go after M$, then EU should also look at Google Cloud and iCloud for being the default on their platforms. Are we going to look at every platform and demand apps are broken away from the OS, we are going to have a lot of ballot screens to select this and that software, as one time use M$/Google/Apple app as default won't work, as each user is different?
Then again, a lot of people, myself included would prefer that to happen, a lean, efficient and bloat free O/S, that I decided what is installed, not the manufacturer and it's partners.
The problem is that if the "cloud" drive is bundled with the operating system, it makes it easier for surveillance. You don't have to scan the operating system to find out where the user is storing files but you can go straight to their OneDrive, iCloud or whatever and only then if not found do some more extensive search.
Ideally, though, the services would like to have direct access to user data without having to scan anything.
Just type in your Digital ID and have all your drives listed ripe for slicing and dicing, without you even knowing.
I don't think anyone would disagree, but the complaint here is that if you are dominated in one area (say, operating systems) then you should not be able to offer your other, incidental, services like user directory or cloud drives in a preferential way.
This is exactly what happened with IE and the browser choice screen that was eventually forced on Microsoft, who then kept accidentally removing it with no other repercussions. MS will stall and stall and stall, and hope the other providers go out of business.
I think it's a different market. Amazon is the leader for a particular type of cloud service, and OneDrive is a different type of cloud service. I don't even know whether Amazon has any service that competes with OneDrive, in fact — probably, but Google and Microsoft have so many more individual users that their cloud drive products have a much larger market share.
As to why Microsoft is is cited as example and not Google, I assume it's because Microsoft is bundling OneDrive with a paying product, while Google is technically not bundling anything because everything is free, so the argument is more difficult to make.
"Curiously", Nextcloud aimed at one of the main competitor of its product - and that running on a desktop OS - ignoring Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, etc. Probably because they are interested in the office space.
Also it's funny how Germans like to protect their pharma, chemical and other sectors intellectual properties very hard ("open sourcing" Covid vaccines? NEVER!!!!!) but are very keen on exploiting software open source, since they could never create a thriving software industry in Germany beyond SAP and little else, to avoid to invest there really.
I'm very favourable to open competition, and software licensing prices must allow it - but it can't be an excuse to bend the market from favouring one side to the other. I'm also very favourable to open standards (as in a remote storage protocol) for iteroperabilty, far less in forcing everybody to open their code - which is actually greatly helping the cloud Goliaths to exploit smaller companies.
"Digital sovereignty" then is another matter than needs to be regulated accordingly to citizens' rights, especially since bad laws like the CLOUD Act stand, and companies outside EU can't really safeguard citizens' data as GDPR requires, no matter how many "safe harbours" or "privacy shields" they can devise, unless the other state laws don't provide the same level of protection.
Isn't the cloud business inherently biased towards big players? There's a fixed cost per user in the form of support, but the infrastructure is all about economies of scale. And even support is easier for largest players, because it's easier to find answers online for the big "standard" products.
I mean it would be nice if SMEs could compete with the like of Google and Amazon, but that's going to be even harder in cloud than in their "original" business of search and online shopping, which is already locked up pretty tight.
These people are whining because their [potential] customers want to use MS products. Samo, samo. If they'd spent the last 25 years building a usable commercial alternative to Office, instead of complaining, then Windows would be dead and there'd be no problem. And now they're going to spend the next 25 years whining, hoping that a bunch of unpaid hackers will solve all their problems for them. It's not going to happen, and I'll be too old to repeat this comment next time the reg runs this story.
>These people are whining because their [potential] customers want to use MS products.
That's what drove the growth in PC's !
Lots of vendors building PC's and dropping a copy of Windows on it, naturally MS supported and encouraged this approach.
What has changed is that MS really wants MS products running on MS cloud with all revenues accruing to MS, hence they aren't being so friendly towards third parties. This really is a continuation of the complaints that started when MS first launched 365 and changed the third-party terms to be a lot less remunerative to the third-party resellers compared to on-prem licencing.
But then this is what happens once businesses become established - their strategy changes from one of leveraging others to increase their market share to locking out third-parties and potential competitors...
> These people are whining because their [potential] customers want to use MS products.That's what drove the growth in PC's !
Indeed. But, you misunderstood me. My point was that there's no point complaining if you haven't got what the market wants. Instead of complaining, and running off to the regulators, and creating industry organisations with fancy names, you should just get on with it and fix the problems that caused the market to go elsewhere.
Because of the Cloud Act, European companies should think about moving all their data out of clouds managed by US companies.
It wouldn't be the first time that an US administration gives data from an European company to a US competitor
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
