Google submits complaints about Microsoft licensing to UK competition regulator

Google is asking Britain's competition watchdog to make a ruling over its allegations Microsoft abused cloud software licensing in an anticompetitive way, months after taking claims of its rival's monopolistic behavior to the Federal Trade Commission. The Competition and Markets Authority is examining the role of Microsoft and …

[Pascal Monett]

So, Google defending the little guy

Google, the "you have no privacy, get over it" company is defending the little guy ?

No. Google wants to be sure to get its proper share of the market, the biggest one.

You don't fool me.

[captain veg]

Re: So, Google defending the little guy

That was Larry Ellison of Oracle. You're probably thinking of this gem from Eric Schnidt: "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."

-A.

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, Microsoft......and more misdirection............

Quote from Google: "...UK customers are left with no economically reasonable alternative but to use Azure as their cloud services providers..."

Really?

Why not run your own cloud in your own data centre?

Is "the cloud" supplied by AWS or Microsoft REALLY the only place to run Microsoft software?

Is "Microsoft productivity software" REALLY the only option for "productivity software"?

..........or is this just more misdirection (by Google) trying to persuade folk about the "benefits" of "the cloud"?

[FirstTangoInParis]

I’d like a car

and I’d like it to go forwards, back, left and right.

Google: of course, sir. I’ll just add your car to the forward, reverse, left and right groups. I’ll just add you to the 50 mph group too. That’ll be £10 a month.

Microsoft: of course sir. We’ve licensed your car for forward and reverse, but we must warn you that left and right are in preview and there may be some issues. You get 1000 instances of forward and reverse, and then you’ll need to speak to your Microsoft Gold Partner. Each drivers needs their own license pack. Or perhaps you’d like the Family edition, but we can’t tell you how much that is.

[The obvious]

Re: I’d like a car

Google: of course, sir. I’ll just add your car to the forward, reverse, left and right groups. I’ll just add you to the 50 mph group too. That’ll be £10 a month plus some odd usage fee for every mph you go over 28mph but we won't tell you exactly how we work that out. The sat nav will ensure you see all our ads and tell us everything you do and everywhere you go and all the conversations you have while you're in it; we may decide to sell that information to anyone and you can't disable it. If we don't completely own the car market in a few months time we may decide to make it so your car won't work any more.

FIFY

[Cloudy Day]

I reckon this all going to come down to Office…

There are a large number of scenarios where customers need to run MS Office on backend servers to support server based applications (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards etc). There is literally no way to license this as Microsoft have ‘forbidden’ Office licenses to be installed on EC2 or GCE. Word on the street is that Microsoft reps know this and are refusing to provide customers with any option other than ‘move the application to Azure’’.

My personal opinion is that this would seem to be leveraging their monopoly in the desktop application space to force customers in to Azure. Which is surely a bit dodgy from a competition law perspective?

[Doctor Syntax]

"We believe that the market is, with one notable exception, operating competitively and delivering good outcomes for UK customers in terms of quality, price and innovation Technical barriers - which are to a certain extent a natural consequence of pro-competitive product differentiation between vendors - can generally be overcome, and egress fees and CSDs are natural features of price competition. We are confident that the evidence the CMA gathers will show that these three theories of harm are unfounded."

Translation: We do all this stuff as well.