Microsoft Faces EU Antitrust Complaint About Its Cloud Computing Business (reuters.com) 20
Tech giant Microsoft is facing an antitrust complaint filed by three European rivals in the booming cloud computing business, one the plaintiffs said on Thursday. From a report: The complaint, filed with the European Union's competition watchdog months ago, alleges that Microsoft's contractual and business practices make it costly and difficult for users of its cloud computing services to opt for those of a competitor, a source close to the matter said. French cloud computing services provider OVHcloud confirmed in a statement that it had joined the complaint against Microsoft. "Through abusing its dominant position, Microsoft undermines fair competition and limits consumer choice in the cloud computing services market," OVHcloud said.
No details shared, but this sounds weird (Score:1)
All of that aside, their most basic "hosted VM" infrastructure offerings are similar to AWS. So the only "contractual and business practices" I can imagine are their price lock-in options you'd sign-up for to obtain a deeper discount throughout the terms of the hosting agreement.
The global accounting st
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No 12 month end of life - force upgrades (Score:1)
Microsoft azure lifecycle has a 12 month from retirement announcement to removal of an api or azure service. Microsoft does not even have to provide a migration path or a replacement service. Your $5 million enterprise cloud based solution could be dead with no platform support in 12 months.
This is the elephant in the room for cloud services and why our development teams use only the minimum Azure services.
from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com] "What is the policy for Azure SDKs? Microsoft will provide no
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Microsoft azure lifecycle has a 12 month from retirement announcement to removal of an api or azure service. Microsoft does not even have to provide a migration path or a replacement service. Your $5 million enterprise cloud based solution could be dead with no platform support in 12 months.
This is the elephant in the room for cloud services and why our development teams use only the minimum Azure services.
from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... [microsoft.com] "What is the policy for Azure SDKs? Microsoft will provide notification 12 months before retiring an SDK to smooth the transition to a supported version. "
Dig a bit deeper and you will find that Microsoft can announce any Azure service as removed in a 12 month time frame.
Dig a bit deeper and you will find that long term support for frameworks now is just under 3 years. That's a forced upgrade risk for business customers.
This applies to literally all hosted solutions. Sometimes you're given days to weeks to service deprecation; if you're in Russia, you're given 24-48 notice that Western corporations are halting operations in the country.
I'm not saying the grievance of service deprecation is not real (it totally is) but I'm saying it's not exclusive to Microsoft; it's pervasive across the entire global economy for practically all services. So that's really a non-issue.
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Also possible would be data egress fees. It can be astoundingly expensive to move terabytes (or tebibytes if you prefer) worth of data off of any of the hyperscalar providers. Still, that's not unique to Azure, either.
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And it is reasonable to have a charge for that movement. I don't think it is abusive to cover the expense of tying up that much energy and bandwidth as can happen when a whole business changes platforms. It is akin to paying movers if you move the physical location. Data movement isn't cost free, even though it is relatively cheap to centuries of physical asset movement.
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They are however dominant in corporate settings, including desktops, typical corporate servers, and a lot of application software/services. They are then leveraging this dominance to promote their other products (including the cloud services) which otherwise wouldn't have sold as well.
I've worked with many companies and dev teams who would have gone with aws or a local provider, but ended up with azure because they had an existing line of products from ms.
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They are however dominant in corporate settings, including desktops, typical corporate servers, and a lot of application software/services. They are then leveraging this dominance to promote their other products (including the cloud services) which otherwise wouldn't have sold as well. I've worked with many companies and dev teams who would have gone with aws or a local provider, but ended up with azure because they had an existing line of products from ms.
Generally speaking, there's no intrinsic restriction from deploying any of the technologies into AWS or other cloud providers. It may be a business decision for corporations to entrench themselves with Microsoft, but other providers remain options -- and I know several large corporations who've chosen that path initially (but only after 5-7 years did they veer towards Microsoft because of bad experiences with other providers).
Re: No details shared, but this sounds weird (Score:2)
One anti-competitive thing Microsoft does is requiring dedicated tenancy for certain products is you use them on any cloud system besides their own. That means you canâ(TM)t share hosts with other customers so itâ(TM)s a lot more expensive.
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One anti-competitive thing Microsoft does is requiring dedicated tenancy for certain products is you use them on any cloud system besides their own. That means you canâ(TM)t share hosts with other customers so itâ(TM)s a lot more expensive.
This sounds like it's a licensing issue whereby the Virtual Guest instances require their own licenses distinct and separate from Virtual Host devices -- which could itself be a virtualized Windows Server instance deployed within an AWS environment.
Microsoft's customers had previously pushed them to bake in some licenses whereby a VGuest OS instance can share a seat with the VHost OS instance -- and eventually pushed that from consumer realm into the enterprise realm (which saves maybe 3-5% in licenses f
Re: No details shared, but this sounds weird (Score:1)
Maybe AWS is not as dominant, as it once was.. Heard something like this a few days back.. Dunno, if it's the right link.. Or even the orginal article...
https://info.flexera.com/CM-RE... [flexera.com]
Also, you never know.. Maybe Azure is dominant in France?
Sounds like small players are just generally mad (Score:2)
make it costly and difficult for users of its cloud computing services to opt for those of a competitor
Sort of like AWS's free ingress and pricey egress?
Or how on-demand VMs cost an arm and a leg, but you can cut those prices in half by agreeing to pay for that same VM for a full year via a contract?
Seems to me like all the big cloud providers play this game.
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make it costly and difficult for users of its cloud computing services to opt for those of a competitor
Sort of like AWS's free ingress and pricey egress?
Or how on-demand VMs cost an arm and a leg, but you can cut those prices in half by agreeing to pay for that same VM for a full year via a contract?
Seems to me like all the big cloud providers play this game.
And Cable Companies . . . except for the half part. Somehow, you still pay more . . . WITH the contract . . .
OVH is the 4th largest hosting provider globally (Score:2)
Quick Google search turns up, ranked by size: GoDaddy, Ionos (1&1), Bluehost, OVH.
I dunno what OVH's beef is. They've got VPSes, cloud, etc. that beats Microsoft Azure at least on the cost front. As far as any Business Corporate Bean Counter Overlord (BCBCO) is concerned, cost is what matters. And the OVH VPS instances I've used have comparable performance to DigitalOcean but at less cost and slightly less friendly customer service. DigitalOcean is, IMO, the current gold standard of what instance d
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I'm no fan of MS, and frankly, they can suck up all the litigation anyone wants to bring, whether they really deserve it or not.
But OVH just isn't even comparable to Azure/AWS/GCP. These guys make using the cloud *easy* - they have the best APIs, a half-decent web console and facilities up the wazoo. OVH by comparison has very few features, has a slow, mish-mash of multiple web UIs (which you can't always protect with MFA), an impenetrable mess of multiple APIs, all wrapped up with shitty support. That said