Google formally accuses monopolist Microsoft of trapping people in its cloud

Google, the target of numerous antitrust investigations, has complained to the US Federal Trade Commission about rival Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive practices. The Chrome giant told the FTC in a letter on Wednesday that Microsoft uses software licensing restrictions to keep customers locked into its cloud computing …

[Peter-Waterman1]

Ha - and the rest

This article barely touches the surface of Microsoft's licencing restrictions on its customers who don't want to use Azure.

1. Putting up SPLA licencing costs (Cloud providers must use SPLA) more than Enterprise licence costs.

2. Preventing Windows BYOL on other Cloud Providers but allowing it on Azure, making their customers have to purchase new Windows licences if they don't want to run on Azure.

3. Preventing Customers from running Office in other Cloud Providers.

4, Changing PaaS SQL licencing so that their customers cant use Passive licencing on secondary nodes, except in Azure

5. Preventing customers from bringing their SQL licences to PaaS Services, other than in Azure.

6. Stopping customers using Terminal Services, except in Azure

7. Charging customers exorbitant fees for supporting the end-of-life software anywhere except in Azure.

8. Stopping Customers using MSDN developer edition copies of Windows etc in any place except Azure

9. More that I probably missed..

And this is Microsofts own customers, who have bought Microsoft licences & paid millions of dollars for the privilege. It's time, people. Grab your pitchforks, grab a cancerious copy of Linux, and run that shit anywhere you want to.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ha - and the rest

You'd think that a company remains monitored after having been fined for anti-competitive behaviour, but I don't get the impression that they changed their behaviour one scintilla since.

That said, Google calling them out is rather ironic in itself.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Ha - and the rest

Depends on the judgment. They can be forced to employ a court appointed monitor who's supposed to be able to "access all areas" (at least within the bounds of the court ruling) but this usually has a time limit.

[lockt-in]

Re: Ha - and the rest

Court appointed monitor's family suddenly own a lot of houses, trust funds and shell companies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ha - and the rest

When Microsoft were forced by the EU to show the browser choice screen on Windows 7 for 5 years, they released SP1 a year later. But Windows 7 SP1 did not have the browser choice screen.

The EU said “meh”. So Microsoft don’t even do their punishment and nothing is done about it.

30 years later businesses are still locked in to the Docx file format Microsoft XML, not the ISO OOXML format. One company, is this competitive?

[43300]

Re: Ha - and the rest

"6. Stopping customers using Terminal Services, except in Azure"

Not quite true - you can still run on-prem terminal servers using Windows Server. What you can't do is run Azure Virtual Desktop, which has the W10 / 11 GUI rather than the Windows Server one, on-prem unless you host it on Azure Stack HCI. Nor can you run it on any cloudy services apart from Azure. There's no tecnical reason for this that I can see.

Microsoft has at least, under customer pressure, now backed down and support the Office 365 apps on Server 2022, but they didn't until earlier this year.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ha - and the rest

They have always offered terminal services. Most of their services are terminal. That's the whole problem!

(yeah, yeah, I know, don't give up the day job and all that)

:)

[diodesign]

Microsoft's licensing tax

Yeah, don't worry, we'll get to it -- this article was just to quickly flag up that Google has formally gone to the FTC. We've covered Microsoft's licensing pain previously (see the links in the piece) and we hope to uncover all of it eventually.

One of our editors Paul has been writing about this a lot: feel free to drop him an email <[e-mail]> and let him know more. Cheers!

C.

[cjcox]

Do as I do and not as I do.

I think it's funny when "evil company A" wants to accuse "evil company B" of doing an evil they didn't think of first.

[ChoHag]

Re: Do as I do and not as I do.

Didn't think of? Did you never hear of gmail?

Microsoft are just better at it.

[43300]

Re: Do as I do and not as I do.

Microsoft also controls the main OSs used for general business purposes, along with the main office suite. That provided massive potential for all sorts of hooks into their cloudy services.

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

Re: Do as I do and not as I do.

Yep. If I was in charge I'd order Micros~1 split in 4* - Windows, Office, All Other Software and All Cloud Services. No cross staffing, no products or promotions that cross the boundaries, and no shared ownership. Any business unit buying from the other must pay full retail price - no special discounts allowed, they have to pay the exact same price.

* maybe even more. Maybe every business worth a billion or over should be a separate company?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Do as I do and not as I do.

"Microsoft also controls the main OSs used for general business purposes, along with the main office suite. That provided massive potential for all sorts of hooks into their cloudy services."

Yes, their office suite default file format is quite simply the root cause of ALL of this and other related problems.

In many places that matter Microsoft don't even call it OOXML anymore, they call it Microsoft XML. They never adopted "OOXML strict" as the default file format, despite their assurances that they would do so in Office 2010 onwards. But OOXML shouldn't exist any way, sigh, that person called Alex Brown, I wonder if his friends families own lots of houses, trust funds and shell companies.

It is "King Microsoft", there is no little to no competition in the business workspace, at least not for smaller companies. Governments can fix this but they benefit financially from not doing so.

[Pascal Monett]

The leopard can't change its spots

"Microsoft is using its market power and restrictive and discriminatory licensing terms"

Always has, always will.

Time to break it up !

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The leopard can't change its spots

Spots, leopards, change, don't. Not in that order, unless you're Yoda.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle also at fault

Oracle are no better. They charge twice as much to run Oracle RDBMS on AWS vs Oracle Cloud (cores counted double in AWS) for no valid technical reason I can see. You pretty much can't run Oracle DB in Google cloud without running it on a bare metal instance (which you can virtualise if necessary), losing a lot of the benefits of running in the cloud.

All in all, yet more reasons to move to Postgres or another Open source database type...

[Mike 137]

The primary purpose of "cloud"

The fundamental function of "cloud" for general office users is vendor lock in. When first mooted, cloud services were supposed to be universally inter-operable (rather like the web), but that concept was stillborn as it was rapidly recognised as counter to the profit motive.

I suspect that the proportion of cloud service users that actually rely on such cloud attributes as dynamic scaling is very small indeed. Almost every business seems to be using it merely as an excuse to scale down the internal IT department, and domestic users quite probably don't even realise they're using it by default until they lose their files.

Storing your data on someone else's computer over which you have no control is inherently too dangerous for common sense unless there's a compelling reason to do so, and it also gets darned expensive over time compared with the cost of managing your own server. But as Larry Ellison famously said "IT is even more fashion driven than ladies' fashion".

[ecofeco]

Re: The primary purpose of "cloud"

The PC was created to free us from the mainframe and here we not just begging to be put back in chains, but PAYING to be put back in chains.

[DV Henkel-Wallace]

Two dwarves fighting over the scraps

Amusing to see Google (what, #4 in cloud?) fighting #2 (only because they bundle all of their own web services into "Azure" too). Meanwhile the 800 kg gorilla doesn't even notice, regardless of its own violations.

[lockt-in]

Re: Two dwarves fighting over the scraps

Let them fight, let's hope that the outcome improves competition for all, including small cloud companies.

[Ashto5]

Seriously who cares ?

Google or Oracle or Microsoft or Apple

Each one guilty of creating walled gardens with an entry but no exit.

Apple being the most powerful company in the world I am glad that these corps have each other to fight

Imagine what would happen if they expanded in to finance or property

We would really all be FUBAR

[Anonymous Coward]

Not letting customers run Office 365 is the biggest crime

As a result of Microsoft licensing, Customers cannot install Office 365 software on AWS, GCP or Alibaba. This is a real problem, as microsoft have for years been pushing customers to O365 and the vast majority of customers (only) have O365 licenses. So, this means you cannot run VDI workloads on AWS/GCP/ Alibaba, nor can you run RPA agents (as they require Office). But the killer is server based business applications. Many of these applications require a locally installed copy of Office (on the server) to function. Customers cannot use their O365 licenses, nor can they buy a ‘new’ Office Professional license. So, when they then raise the issue with Microsoft, they are told their only cloud (hyper scale) option is Azure. This is clearly using their market dominance in the desktop applications space to drive customers to Azure. Is this legal I wonder?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not letting customers run Office 365 is the biggest crime

Probably not legal in several jurisdictions. But then Office 365 is a poor set of sub standard tools*, so why people still pay good money for it I don't know.

* I have used it at work for 25 years, this represents my experience. If yours is different, please, tell me what antidepressants you're taking so I can get some.

[druck]

Once a convicted monopolist...

...always a convicted monopolist.