Microsoft facing multibillion legal claim over how it sells software A legal claim has been brought against Microsoft over alleged licensing practices that could result in a multibillion-pound payout for UK customers. The claim alleges that "the software giant abused its market dominance and engaged in conduct that restricted competition to its new licenses from pre-owned licenses for Microsoft …
Anyone that has had to figure out why a family member's M$ Office package suddenly "stopped working" should know that issue well enough.
M$ managed to get my father to "upgrade" his fully paid for version of Office 2016 with a Office 365 freebie pop-up, from my understanding using their typical shyster tactics to tuck away any choice of opting out in a location where it's harder to see. When that freebie subscription expired, it locked him out of the software and demanded a subscription payment.
Unfortunately this was five or six years after the original install and he didn't have the documentation or install disc any more, so M$ was given the finger and the latest Libreoffice installed on his iMac instead. Problem solved, and no more dealing with those bastards.
I ran a very simple calculation on Microsoft revenues from the UK (£8bn) and how many households there are in the UK (28.4million).
Each household "pays" £281 per year for Microsoft.
Of course businesses etc., pay vast sums, so each household analogy is just to show how much they cost the UK in simple terms.Yet, everything in the UK exists in part due to the people using business products and services.
My laptop is a secondhand M1 MacBook Pro and I have five or so systems running Rocky Linux around the place.
Not one bit of MS (or Google) sofware in the lot of them. Yes, I know that both contribute to Linux by there is no MS paid for software on any of them and things like Google Search, Docs. android and Chrome in any shape or form is banned from the network.
There seems to have been a bit of misunderstanding about which office of the county archives holds a specific document. When one of them suggested I reach out to the other I reckoned that things had come to a pretty poor pass. I replied that I'd contact them.
> Very glad to see ElReg didn't "reach out" to Microsoft. Perhaps we're winning the American v. English debate.
"reach out" isn't good American, or never was. I first saw it in customer support staffed in India. If so it could be lingering British influence, re-interpreted?
----
However, Google reveals 'In 1979, an AT&T advertising campaign co-opted the expression to praise long-distance calls. The campaign became one of the most successful in the history of advertising. It had its own addictive jingle ("Reach out, reach out, and touch someone!").'
Yeah that's called sexual harassment these days and inappropriate touching... ... to be fair though if i were to "reach" out to m$ it would be to strangle it until it stopped twitching....
But i would wait till after folks got some $ back from them first.... maybe
When I see "Reach out" in an e-mail it always sounds like someone struggling with mental health issues asking for help (and would feel like an appropriate turn of phrase in that context).
If I need to tell someone at a NOC that there's packet loss across a router I'll just, you know, tell them.
Microsoft wins because it has a joined up ecosystem, even if some parts are technically rubbish. Linux doesn’t, but if someone was to integrate all the bits that do what Windows with AD and office did, and you could pay for it and get support so the C suite would like it (as in they’d have someone they could sue if it all went wrong), I’m pretty sure they get a decent market share fairly quickly, especially if the hardware could be made to last longer. Oh and a management system that didn’t have a zillion moving parts exposed to the sysadmin please, and just did what you needed.
"so the C suite would like it (as in they’d have someone they could sue if it all went wrong)"
How many C suites have successfully sued Microsoft for things going all wrong?
I doubt Microsoft sales are actually making it a selling point so if C suites are actually thinking like that it must me some of Microsoft's fellow travellers pushing that line. Maybe somebody sitting in IT whose status comes from his big budget spent on Microsoft.
@Doctor Syntax yes that's not a selling point, but you'd be surprised how many projects go for a second rate product from a company they could sue if things go wrong, rather than a first rate product from someone they couldn't sue (eg open source provider, own company dog food, etc). Not that they ever would sue because that costs a huge amount of money, but it looks good on their risk register.
Remember the old mantra : You wont get fired for buying IB sorry microsoft.
Companies know m$ stuff is mostly 2nd rate, but as everyone else buys it, then no one will dare buy anything else. and besides, what C-level inhabitant is going to listen to the oiks in the IT department when we prattle on about systemic flaws in the software?
We're only here to fix the failures when someone answers the phone to a random caller asking to reset their account name/password, then tell the caller what that is so it can be tested. (see M&S hack story)
Everything about MS's pricing and selling strategies is insidious and predatory. Take for example the hotly debated topic of MS forcing a microsoft login onto each new computer. In a small business scenario, it basically means it forces every user to have their own (paid-for) microsoft 365 login to their own computer. Got a shared computer (very common in small businesses)? You can't easily have just one generic login (because of 2fa) to the computer. Yes, you can do it, but the way the system is designed makes it easier to just buy an extra licence.
The alternative is simple - use one of the alternative products on the market. There are a multitude of OS's now.
Buy a Chromebook. Where you have to have a Google login for each user...
Or buy a Mac.
Or buy a PC and put Linux on it.
Or buy a laptop with HarmonyOS on it.
Or buy an Android device and plug it into a monitor.
Or buy an iPad.
Microsoft are no longer a monopoly, so realistically, they can make the choice how their software works.
I'd love to do that with our customers. But they want a cloud sync solution and they want office apps. People don't like libreoffice for some reason and I know it's not fully compatible with MS 365 Office. People like Outlook, even New Outlook compared to Thunderbird. IMAP email is fiddly to set up. Microsoft Exchange isn't.
I would love to move over to Linux for at least some of the companies we support but it really doesn't look possible.
We've tried a couple with Apple Macs. One user outright hated it because it was different from everyone else in the office. Another die-hard mac user ("I have only ever used macs") couldn't cope when we replaced his 15-year old Macbook with a new one, because it "was different" and "not how my old mac was".
We have other users who use macs and are OK but it's limited in scope and we all know macs are very expensive up-front. I use one and love it.
And then there's apps like Sage, Bluebeam, autocad, Visio, Project, Adobe stuff - yes there are alternatives but nobody's got time to learn something completely new.
If it not fines for monopolistic behave that goes into the coffers of the state, not to the citizens who overpaid or suffered losses due to unfair competition practices, then it are all the backdoors MS operating systems provide to governments and often foreign three letter agencies allowing easy access so they can spy on their citizens.
Those writing that Linux is bad and unusable are probably foreign agents employed by MS or governments, the price for the supposed easiness of using MS products is high in terms of money and loss of privacy.
It is amazing that one can find much information proposing a breakup of google in Standard-Oil style, while nobody talks about breaking up MS. It would make a lot of sense to split it into an OS division, a division for building applications like MSSQL server and office products and an Azure hosting division.
The world would greatly benefit from this split, competition flourishes and prices would go down.
The absence of such ideas shows how much MS is married to governments that have an obvious regulatory blind spot for MS as long they can extort a few 100 million from it every 3-4 years and easy access for spying on all the users of said MS products.
I'm so glad to have switched to Linux 22 years ago and avoided so much problems and trouble. I was tired of paying and paying for this , that. Viruses trojans rootkits .. at some point sometone told me " try linux " Yeah there WAS a steep learning curve but it paid off in the long run. Now using Linux is as simple as using windows. if not simpler. There's good software for everything and by helping in return certain projects , i feel perfectly fine using it being poart of the FOSS community. One day , try it , a live on a USB key . THat may be the day where you tell MS to kiss your behind goodbye and do yourself a favor.
"Guilty!! Guilty as charged!! We find for the plaintiff."
(Lawyers get their cut ...)
"If you are a member of this class, please provide your full legal name, physical address, telephone number, email address, a photocopy of your driver's license (both sides), and the ORIGINAL sales receipt from a decade or more ago when you bought the covered MICROSOFT product(s), and you will be sent a cheque for €1.77.
Please allow 12 to 16 weeks for processing.
Yours truly,
Dewey, Cheatham and Howe, administrative designee for MICROSOFT CONSUMER COMPENSATORY FUND "
Been there, did not get the t-shirt......
Back in the noughties, British Airways was found guilty of price fixing transatlantic flights with Virgin Atlantic.
The compensation fund required one to provide details of any relevant travel made during that period.
Claim duly made and ...........
SILENCE
I'm not sure this will get anywhere now. Microsoft no longer have a monopoly in either the OS or Office space. Their market share in the OS space is about 25% - if you try to narrow it down to a more device specific OS, then it becomes a bit difficult to define due to overlap between devices and OS usage. Office software? Microsoft has only around 10% of the market now, with Google Workspace being the dominant player at almost 80% of the market.
So, I'm not sure you can claim Microsoft have a dominant position in either. And I'm also not sure a third party license reseller should be able to dictate how a company licenses its products.
I'd be curious to see the source of your numbers.
I will grant that for SERVERS, yeah, Linux is probably king, numerically, at least. But desktops, where office software runs? I'm pretty sure MS is still king, even if a lot of it is "pre-Windows 11"
I work for a google-apps company, but because the company is basically broke and bankrupt, and supposedly because we got a "Free" teaser license. A while back, we were looking at Chromebooks and ChromeOS Flex, because we aren't going to be buying new computers for Win 11 and new Win 11 licenses. (it doesn't seem we are going with Chromebooks and ChromeOS Flex, either, so I'm sure our Windows 10 systems will join our unsupported Win 7 and Win XP systems. And you see why I'm Anonymous Coward).
We correspond with other companies (LOTS of big companies use our services), and I've never seen any evidence of other companies using GoogleApps. Obviously some do, but I've seen no evidence of 80% using Google Workspace.
Why do you narrow it down to "desktops"? There is so much overlap with device types and usage now. People do their jobs using tablets, and use office software on those. On laptops, desktops, remote desktop in a browser etc... The numbers are from statcounter for OS share. Office suite numbers from 6Sense. Other stat services have different percentages but none of them give Microsoft Office a dominating lead. All of them give Google a majority of the market.
OS market share covers basically any user device, not just traditional desktop PCs - as the world doesn't utilise just desktop PCs. Eg. I just had a meeting and the rep didn't use a laptop at all, they did their work via their phone, taking notes etc...
Can't find anyone saying google is 80%, most of the sites i've looked say it's closer to 45% and puts ms office at around 30%. Still that's surprising. Lot of people in my offce and strictly office. us governent listed at 86% office usage. Of course that workforce is shrinking rapidly, so if trump has his way that could be 85% of nothing unless MS give him a big bribe, perhaps a nicer jet than the one he just got.
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