UK CMA early findings indicate Microsoft restricts cloud choice

The UK’s competition watchdog says that Microsoft has a “significant degree of market power” in key software products, and that its licensing practices may therefore influence customer choice of cloud providers. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) kicked off a probe into public cloud services last October, following a …

[Tubz]

Let's be honest here, the big boys are happy with the status quo, they don't want to see big shifts in % of the cloud business moving around as that will cost '000s millions. The losers are the smaller players as they can't compete in what is not a monopoly but a cartel with a small powerful membership that most countries can't fight with.

[Cloudy Day]

I fail to see..

…..Why license compliance would be ‘worse’ in the cloud than on-prem. MS are telling fibs as well about being able to run all of their software on all clouds’. Try finding a way you can license PowerBI Server, or an M365 Unattended Agent on a listed provider for example….

[MatthewSt]

Re: I fail to see..

In Azure, you just tick a box to say you already have a server license you want to use.

There are certain elements of InTune (for example) where you just tick a box to say that you have the correct kind of licenses to run the reports.

There are bits of Entra ID where the functionality lights up when you have _any_ of a particular license, and it's up to you to make sure only users that are licensed for it use it.

That first one makes sense as it would be difficult to track without entering licence keys, but I wouldn't be surprised if the others are by design, because they make it harder to stick with the cheaper licenses and should be enforceable from a tech standpoint.

[streaky]

Really?

This is the same CMA that allowed MS to acquire Activision Blizzard?

.. really?

Horse has bolted on ever keeping MS under control ever again. Might as well train your sights on something else, we're all gonna be working for MS in a few years, one way or another.. Maybe US regulators can do it but they don't seem very interested in trying.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Really?

You acting like the CMA is monolithic organisation. For one that Actvision-MS merger was investigated by... Mergers, whereas this Cloud investigation is run by Markets who operate on a different set of frameworks.

[hoola]

Changing Cloud Providers

I don't get this argument that Microsoft are making it difficult to move. They all are, it is a fundamental concept of anything to do with a subscription of using a service.

What do people expect?

You cannot take an SQL database and put it into RDS, the same the other way. You cannot put RDS into Oracle.

You can move data from a Storage Account into an S3 bucket but there are costs.

Why should it be free of charge to get all you data back?

People choose to move to the cloud clear in the concepts, limitations and restrictions.

As far as licensing goes I see many unlicensed copies of Windows, on-prem, AWS, Azure, basically everywhere however there are a smaller proportion on Azure VMs,