Google Accuses Microsoft of Anticompetitive Cloud Practices in Complaint To FTC

After years of publicly alleging that Microsoft used its dominant position in enterprise software to push customers toward Microsoft's cloud services, Google on Tuesday formally filed a complaint to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which has been examining such issues, according to a copy of the document reviewed by The Information. From the report: Microsoft used the licensing terms in its Office 365 productivity software to lock customers into separate contracts with its Azure cloud server business, Google's complaint said. Microsoft is the second largest cloud provider after Amazon, and Google is a distant third. Google previously complained about Microsoft's cloud licensing practices to European regulators. Under pressure, last year Microsoft agreed to change its licensing practices in the region to make it more affordable for Azure customers to use additional cloud providers, but the changes didn't apply to U.S. customers.

Re:kettle meet pot

[wierd_w]

No fucking shit.

Google is the goddamn size-queen of tying unrelated digital services together into a single bundle against user wishes, and with regressive tiered pricing structures to boot.

Their complaints about such practices to the FTC should be met with uniform ban-hammering to BOTH companies.

The O365 thing has more merit than most

[HBI]

O365 is leveraging Microsoft's most lucrative monopoly to get Azure market share. I mean, leave aside the fact that O365 is a mess internally at Microsoft, the linking of the two products has worked. It was a matter of time before the investigations and legal fireworks started. Having spent the last 5 years trying to sell Azure within a very large public sector market, the reason why we scored many wins was the linkage to cloud-delivered applications like O365 or Azure Devops. Just about everyone prefer

Re:

[KlomDark]

You are correct, but I personally find it much easier to do things in the Azure environment. AWS is a mess compared to it. I get depressed working with AWS, but Azure doesn't have that effect on me.

Re: The O365 thing has more merit than most

[simlox]

Where I live far the most companies use Azure for a Kubernetes cluster and are coding in C#. Very few use AWS. Why? Microsoft is the easy choice when you let the MS dominated IT department decide. But when I talk to people who have actually tried or just evaluated both, they all day Azure is crap.. It stinks of unfair competition.

Re: The O365 thing has more merit than most

[KlomDark]

Same here, but I love c# and it's paid my bills for 2 decades now. Took a job last year doing Java and it was disgustingly bad. Hate that language and it's sad dev environments. Glad to transfer a few months ago to another department that's all c#. I'm much happier now.

Too much or too little

[DarkRookie2]

The kitchen utensils are talking to each other again.

The Big Four of Tech

[nightflameauto]

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta/Facebook - the big four of tech.

ALL of them use their positions to leverage yet more power, more sales, more data scraping, more advertising, more more more. And while it's fun to watch them bat at each other like cats playing with a ball of yarn? It shouldn't be up to these behemoths to regulate each other. If we had an actual government that operated like a civilized nation's government, we'd have some form of oversight and would have never gotten to this point with these mo

Re: The Big Four of Tech

[ch-chuck]

A legal beagle the other day commented he never expects congress to ever do anything to inconvenience a major business - from Standard Oil on it takes decades of abuse of power before they take action.

Re:

[splitstem]

The US is an example of regulatory capture as its finest. Regulations seem to be more to ensure new players cannot enter an industry than anything else.

Re:

[DigitalCH]

It is a trade off. Regulation reduces crime and improves stability of the area it regulates, but it also reduces competition by creating a moat you have to get over in order to play in that space.

Treating Your Customers Badly Isn't MSFT's Fault

[Cask Strength]

EOM

90s are back?

[HnT]

Sounds like the 90s Micro$oft is back after all? No more look at me I am sooo open source super nice guy!

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Office 365 while it works very well with a lot of Azure services is completely optional and you can happily use O365 and AWS or GCP as many corporations already do.

Google is alleging that Microsoft used one kind of contract to pressure people into signing another kind of contract. And unless you're one of these "The EU is just after American corporations" guys, then reading the rest of the fine summary should serve to enlighten you. (If you are one of those guys, then there's no having a rational conversation with you — the EU goes after EU companies, too.)

what took you so long

[Locutus]

The people at One Microsoft Way have been embedding Asure into everything but their office toilets and pushing devs onto it too. For three decades they have leveraged their monopoly on the corporate desktop OS, and to some extent corporate servers to funnel developers their APIs and software stacks. Think about it, Microsoft was third to the game after Amazon and then Google defined the cloud space yet for some reason Microsoft Windows developers jumped to Microsoft's solution?

You're at least 5 years late