Google exec: Microsoft Teams concession 'too little, too late' Google is urging regulators on both sides of the pond to tackle Microsoft's alleged software licensing abuses in the cloud before it is too late, claiming it may already be too late in the collaboration services market, which is also attracting interest from antitrust authorities. Back in 2019, Microsoft introduced some …
A lot of Microsoft customers woes have been bought on themselves by choosing Microsoft. There were - and still are - other choices.
I can't help but feel sometimes it's like a Tesla owner complaining they can't fill their car at a gas station ... well you did buy a fucking Tesla. Which everyone knows as you won't shut up about it.
Except, notably, it's not really Microsoft's customers complaining but Microsoft's competition . . . who are also known for abusing their monopoly power in their own domains. It's a bit rich for Google and Amazon to complain about Microsoft using its market dominance to lock in customers when both other companies are demonstrably guilty of the same thing. All of them want the same lock-in, and all of them are happy to shaft their customers when it suits them. God help us all if any of them achieves full dominance over the others.
"Except, notably, it's not really Microsoft's customers complaining but Microsoft's competition . . . who are also known for abusing their monopoly power in their own domains. "
Yes, Tou are absolutely right. But what I would like to see is this thing going ahead, and Microsoft getting condemned.
And then, to get back at competition, I would like to see Microsoft egging the regulators against its competitors.
And let them burn one another to the ground on the courts.
"but in some other areas, such as Windows Server, customers simply aren't allowed to run the software on so-called "listed" providers - which Redmond classifies as AWS, Google and Alibaba".
I think anybody choosing Windows Server or SQL Server in 2023 deserves all they get.
The words "stable" and "Microsoft" only belong in the same sentence if they're kept apart by the words "not".
The amount of resources I have to use to get a stable service on a Windows platform totally dwarfs what I can get away with for the same performance and stability on Linux.
In my opinion, resilience and redundancy are not there to cover the deficiencies of the software you run.
Windows can be quite stable. At least ever since apps started becoming 32-bit so they could take advantage of the protected memory functions of x86 and the GPF errors became a thing of the past. Just like Linux can be quite unstable. A lot of it is down to the skill of the admin and the quality of the hardware. A good Windows admin will pretty much always achieve better results than a shitty Linux admin. There's absolutely nothing inherent about Linux, or any other Unix(-like) OS that makes it automatically better than any other OS from a separate evolutionary tree.
I'm not sure how Linux can be elitist when it's the majority of the server market and the vast majority of the *new* server market. My commiserations for being on the wrong side of history; it's like listening to a Solaris advocate circa 2008 or mainframe advocate in 1995. But if there's not too much of your career left, stop tilting at windmills, sit back, relax and enjoy. Surfing the trailing edge can be lucrative - your skills are increasingly at a premium.
SQL Server runs under Linux and even in Docker. Not to mention PostgreSQL does more than MS SQL Server in many ways and has a better dev experience overall, while supported by every major and second tier cloud provider.
There is literally no compelling reason to choose MS SQL Server for a new project.
As to Windows Server, sure if you want more complex deployment and live to pay more money to run your software. Even for the C# apps I've written in the past decade, they're all containerized and deployed in Linux.
"PostgreSQL does more than MS SQL Server in many ways and has a better dev experience overall"
Native DB functions, maybe, but for me the compelling selling point for MSSQL Server was the BI suite that comes with it. SSIS is far from perfect, but a big step up from coding an Enterprise Data Warehouse ETL with just native SQL. SSAS is equally far from perfect, but the end users love being able to do on-the-fly analysis without having to wait for everything to recalculate. And the suits love that the BI suite comes essentially for free with the SQL Server license (on-premises at least)
Build something from scratch all around the "new paradigm" of microservices and dozens/hundreds of very small databases on excessive ressources, postgresql and even mysql are absolutely fine. At the other end of the spectrum live the 100 TB databases with hundreds of thousands of tables handling tens of thousands of requests per second, and that's where sql server (or ugh... oracle) flex their muscle.
"Microsoft has so much market power that they can decide… how the market will evolve based on their rules,"
Well they would know, wouldn't they?
How anyone can come out with this bullshit with a straight face beats me.
Maybe that's why members of the C suite are so richly rewarded.
Soon it will be Microsoft's turn to moan about the stranglehold Google has on the online ad business and search and how that is unfair to a struggling browser owner like themselves.
Hypocritical, entitled and just downright loathsome the lot of 'em.
I'm terribly sorry, but I just can't bring myself to sympathise with anything a Google mouthpiece complains about.
You are hoovering up every bit of data you can (with and without permission), storing it forever in bit barns the size of Texas, and using and abusing that data to sling stupid ads for which you get paid all the money.
You have no right to complain about anything.
What gets me is MS still forces Teams on you. Every new install I have to go out of my way to remove it from a Windows 11 install. How is it that Dell and other manufacturers allow this as they are leveraging their dominance on the Operation software to push the other products it's the same thing they got in trouble with regarding IE yet it is still going on. EU is on it and just a matter of time before the US get's it stuff together.
Never had a problem with either.
Teams is convenient and does the job.
SQL SERVER just works and works at pace other DB maybe available but I have not had a need to use them.
Google Amazon and other complaining about price gouging makes me smile.
I should have trained as a lawyer as this is one mega gravy train and it will never stop.
Don't get me wrong, no one is getting fired for buying Microsoft, just like 20 years ago no one got fired for buying IBM, but I did use the oligopoly positioning to close Teams and other non enterprise infrastructure stuff by leveraging the Enterprise Agreement negotiation and any MS employee is lying if they say they don't use the enterprise positioning to close Teams, Dynamics, PowerBI deals.
Our business is a Microsoft outfit. ~90% of our servers are Windows 2019-2022, all our workstations are Windows 10, we used to run on-prem Exchange and even Skype for Business then Lync.
One day I got poked by a Microsoft drone with a notification about them sending auditors our way, to evaluate our license uses and all. A hell of a clusterfuck of a bad time ahead.
Luckily at that stage we had just started a big migration project move off-prem to Microsoft 365 stuff including Teams, and I was able to placate them with a kind of "We're already moving to Teams/Office 365, bad time for an audit, if you force this the only result will be us going to Google Docs instead", and that placated them. (In the end, that's what they wanted after all. everybody on fully controled subscriptions).
We're perfectly fine in the Microsoft ecosystem, but I 100% agree that they will leverage the hell out of their position, just as the other big ones will.
Silver lining I suppose is we're not dealing with oracle licensing.
Seriously?
This journey to Teams has been a long one for Microsoft. The instant messaging was there in Exchange, then moved Live Communications Server adding voice and video. We then had Office Communication Server, Lync, Skype for Business.... for years these were bundled into the MS Office licensing and nobody really cared. Microsoft kept innovating and adapting...
It's been 20 years to get Teams where it is. It had to compete against traditional telephony brands running both analog and digital voice (Ericcson, LG), then VOIP (Mitel, Avaya, Cisco), Conferencing services from Polycom, Cisco and others... and it competes against online conferencing services such as Zoom and Google Meet. I'm sure many of you will be able to add a heap of other brands I have missed.
For many years it was a product that arguably not many people cared about. The market was probably small and I would dare say innovation was limited.
I would suggest COVID changed that with more people working from home. Suddenly this bundled extra was important. Now the market is worth more and other players want a greater share. I would suggest they are also trying to distract from their own monopolistic practices.
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