back to article Antitrust clouds continue to gather over Microsoft's European business

A trade association of mostly European cloud providers and Amazon Web Services has filed an application to "actively participate" in a probe by Germany's competition watchdog to examine the dominance of Microsoft. The Bunderskartellamt – Federal Cartel Office – announced in March it was considering whether Microsoft posed a …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Its déjà vu all over again, Yogi

    2009: Microsoft hit with €9m fine over German pricing

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cry me a river

    If the competition's products were better, Microsoft would not be as dominant. That's business.....

    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

      Re: Cry me a river

      If the playing field was level, you would be right.

      But in case you hadn't noticed, this article was not about products from other companies not being competitive, but about MS's ability to make it more expensive to try to compete, thus reducing their ability to try.

      When it comes to Slack, it's about MS being able to give away a product to remove a whole market segment that other companies inhabit. And when their competitor's products are no longer viable, and Teams has become ubiquitous, MS can ramp up the price, either of Teams itself, or more likely the subscription for MS Office 365, or whatever it's called nowadays.

      This is why it's being examined by the competition watchdogs.

    2. Zippy´s Sausage Factory

      Re: Cry me a river

      How's the weather in Redmond today?

    3. Cloudy Day

      Re: Cry me a river

      The issue is that Microsoft cannot compete technically with the likes of AWS and GCP, so they have to try coerce customers in to Azure using dodgy licensing practices that leverage their dominance in the Office productivity space. It is the legality of driving Azure adoption through restrictive Office 365 licensing terms that I suspect will be scrutinised by the regulators.

      1. Pot

        Re: Cry me a river

        Yes Azure is an extension of their Office and Windows monopolies.

        They effectively bundled away Slack by including Teams.

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