Microsoft Finalizes Plans To Fix Unfair Licensing in EU (thurrott.com) 8
Responding to a three-year-old complaint, Microsoft today said that it would fix its unfair licensing terms in the EU. From a report: "We recognize the importance of a competitive environment in the European cloud provider market, in which smaller competitors can thrive," a new post to the Microsoft Corporate Blogs notes. "It is therefore critical for us to remain mindful of our responsibilities as a major technology company." In 2019, several Microsoft customers in the EU complained that the software giant was making it prohibitively expensive to run Windows and Office workloads on non-Azure cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud, triggering inquiries from EU antitrust regulators. Microsoft immediately responded that the complaints were "valid," but it did nothing to address them in any material way.
In May 2022, Microsoft finally came up with a response, announcing that it would make it less expensive for customers to run Microsoft software like Windows, Windows Server, Office, and SQL Server on non-Microsoft cloud platforms in the EU. But it wasn't until today that the software giant announced the details and timing of this plan. Now, Microsoft says that it will implement "major revisions and upgrades to its outsourcing and hosting terms" that go into effect on October 1, 2022. It will be easier and more cost-effective for customers to use Microsoft software on competing cloud platforms, it says, and for its partners to build hosted desktop and server solutions that meet their customers' needs.
In May 2022, Microsoft finally came up with a response, announcing that it would make it less expensive for customers to run Microsoft software like Windows, Windows Server, Office, and SQL Server on non-Microsoft cloud platforms in the EU. But it wasn't until today that the software giant announced the details and timing of this plan. Now, Microsoft says that it will implement "major revisions and upgrades to its outsourcing and hosting terms" that go into effect on October 1, 2022. It will be easier and more cost-effective for customers to use Microsoft software on competing cloud platforms, it says, and for its partners to build hosted desktop and server solutions that meet their customers' needs.
Re: (Score:3)
Found the troll who didn't RTFS
Microsoft is under threat of regulation, and this is their attempt to avoid it. This is not Micr
Big Pharma method (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Translation: Microsoft says it will abuse its cloud monopoly/oligopoly less rigorously in the EU because they don't like the fines that come with that behavior.
What a pity (Score:3)
The problems is (Score:2)
That it is almost impossible to run ms products efficiently on your own VMware platform. You need so many hardware clusters to comply with licensing, which mean that utilising the the hardware to gain some of the economic benefits of virtualisation is gone.
And it is all down to software licensing costs.