Microsoft: Our licensing terms do not meaningfully raise cloud rivals' costs Microsoft has responded to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) probe into public cloud services and licensing by insisting that its terms "do not meaningfully raise cloud rivals' costs." In its response to the investigation, which landed alongside multiple submissions today the company insisted that Amazon …
: “The day Micros~1 gives up on anti-competitive behaviour is the day they file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy...”
Don't you mean Chapter 11 bankruptcy and only after MS has patented the procedure.
Imagine a world where the DOJ had broken up Microsoft for anti competitive practices back in the early 2000s. I wonder if Azure would be so happy about the state of licensing prices if they had to pay the same rates as AWS and Google do, rather than the effectively free licenses they get now since its just money moving around internally between different divisions of Microsoft.
Microsoft can only compete through licensing threats and coercion. It’s the only sales technique they know. It’s how they sold software in the past and it is how they sell cloud services today. I worked in sales there for about 20 years so I should know…,
Anyone who has priced a migration in Azure vs a migration in a ‘listed provider’ will laugh out loud at Microsoft’s assertion that there is a level playing field. Microsoft just assume that regulators and customers are too dumb to understand the mechanics of how they are twisting licensing rules to force workloads in to Azure. Everyone is focused on the cost of Windows Server, but there are many, many layers of complexity below the cost of Windows Server. Entire Migrations are being blocked from GCP and AWS because, for example, there is literally no way to license Office to support the server side requirements of applications like SAP, JD Edwards etc. And Non Prod….. 50% of customer servers are likely non prod. Regulators should have a long, hard look at how Microsoft are behaving with regards to non prod licensing and MSDN…..
Google and AWS are both heavy Open-Source users. For both of them it would mean peanuts to significantly boost Open-Source software initiatives, encourage software developers to support MS free platforms and promote those with reduced tariffs for MS free cloud VM's.
Within a few years, MS would start feeling the pain induced by a sustained loss of business. MS may seem invulnerable, but they depend on returning license fees, anyone who is able to successfully attack this revenue stream will harm MS in a significant manner.
Given the lackluster competition between Windows and Google Chromebooks, it seems US Big-Tech divided the market into sections where they don't compete.
This whole thing is probably smoke and mirrors to suggest the existence of competition to the public.
>” Google and AWS are both heavy Open-Source users.”
As are Microsoft, remember Azure is largely Azure Linux, not Windows Server…
Hence as Azure grows MS are correct in saying “Windows Server was declining relative to Linux regarding cloud OS share”.
A question has to be what platform Microsoft Azure SQL Database actually runs on, ie. Is it actually SQL-Server on Windows Server or is it SQL-Server on top of something like Wine on Azure Linux. In which case the statement “ SQL Server remained second-ranked to Oracle” is probably also correct, just that MS aren’t interested in changing this by selling more SQL-Server, as that is on-prem compute whereas Azure SQL Database can be something totally different.
Azure runs on Windows Server, the problem is that they charge more for less each year it seems. If they want to be competitive they need to bring down their prices. Surprisingly, Windows Server on-prem still holds around a 72% marketshare, and it hasn't changed much in years. It is great for a full fat server, but it just isn't there when it comes to containers, plus the licensing to use it is too complex. They need to simplify it.
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