Microsoft 'Irreparably Damaging' EU's Cloud Ecosystem, Industry Group Claims

An anonymous reader shares an ArsTechnica report: This fall, Microsoft claimed to have addressed anticompetitive cloud infrastructure complaints from a few smaller cloud services providers in Europe. In a blog, the company announced it would be partnering with small to mid-sized cloud providers to give Microsoft customers more options for non-Microsoft cloud infrastructure. Notably, these Microsoft licensing changes excluded its biggest cloud competitors, Google and Amazon, from participating as partners. This, unsurprisingly, drew prompt criticism from a trade group with members that include both the smaller cloud providers as well as Amazon. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) group claimed that Microsoft's response failed to "show any progress in addressing Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior."

Now, CISPE has filed its own complaint, urging the European Commission to open a formal investigation into how Microsoft is allegedly "irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments." According to CISPE, the group had no choice but to file the complaint because Microsoft allegedly has "not provided the detail, clarity or assurance that it truly intends to bring a swift end to its anti-competitive licensing practices." Rather than address complaints from smaller cloud providers like OVHcloud and Aruba -- which are also CISPE members -- CISPE suggests that Microsoft added new unfair practices this fall. These changes, CISPE Secretary General Francisco Mingorance told Ars, created "an existential issue for many of our members and without an investigation and action it could spell the end of a European cloud infrastructure sector."

Yeah but what are you gonna do?

[rsilvergun]

I mean, they're a large corporation. Essentially modern day Kings. What right do we have to question them?

Re:

[Tailhook]

Kings pointing fingers at other kings. Cry me a river.

Imagine thinking anyone in Europe is capable of delivering a competitive public cloud.

I know, right

[rsilvergun]

what do the Europeans know about technology? [wikipedia.org]

Re: Yeah but what are you gonna do?

[sixminuteabs]

Yes we must do everything we can to help Amazons fledgling cloud business. They are only the dominant platform in the industry they need our protection

Re: Yeah but what are you gonna do?

[StormReaver]

The only reason Microsoft's cloud services are so successful is because of their operating system and office monopolies (the former lead to the latter, by the way, and should have resulted in an antitrust breakup decades ago). Without those, their cloud services would have withered on the vine.

Re:

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

What?

Azure is just an aws clone. And not a very good one.

Re:

[StormReaver]

Azure is just an aws clone. And not a very good one.

Correct. Without the operating system and office monopolies to back it up, it would have been stillborn.

Re:

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

That's not why 2 of the places I've worked for wanted azure. Not at all. We made *zero* use of windows anything (well ok one place had a single 2 box windows thing for some stupid internal legacy app from a tiny company we bought years earlier).

We used azure as a fail over and back up site to aws for our Linux production stack we ran our SaaS business on. The CTO liked saying we were multi-cloud. It was the buzzword at the time. He even pushed to get us into google so we could be triple cloud but they

And History will repeat

[scalptalc]

the company announced it would be partnering with small to mid-sized

Embrace, Extend ,Ext...

Re:

[Z00L00K]

Embrace and Absorb.

Re:

[Brett Buck]

It is the will of Landru.

Re:

[Z00L00K]

The cloud is basically someone else's computer.

I'm just waiting for the cloud backlash. What would happen if one of the big ones just decides to pull the plug because it's not profitable?
"You have until the end of the month to copy your data."

Or even worse one of them tanks abruptly due to some unforeseen circumstances - like a 9.7 quake in Redmond.

Re:

[PPH]

like a 9.7 quake in Redmond

Likely no impact. Azure probably leases their server space from Baidu.

Re:

[Z00L00K]

All you need is to trash a key function that's used to keep the services together. If it takes a month to rebuild the services then it can kill the business.

You might have the key to open up the systems, but you need to get over the ocean and the airlines will shut down because their systems is in your cloud service so you can't get any ticket to fly so you need to do like Greta and sail, then you'd need to wait a week in the passport check because of course the passport system is also in your cloud.

And you

Re:

[iAmWaySmarterThanYou]

Uh yeah and none of those services have a failover site, any redundancy at all, a backup plan, etc etc etc.

You clearly have never been involved or anywhere near a real 24x7 production site in the real world.

"All you have to do is...". Riiiiiiight! *eye roll*

Riiiiight....

[EvilSS]

There are two groups mad about this: Google/Amazon and small "cloud" providers who don't actually provide a cloud infrastructure but were selling SPLA licenses to customers that were used on Azure/AWS/Google. For actual non-behemoth cloud providers, the changes are a net positive and put them into a position to be more competitive with the big providers. But I'm sure the CISPE is totally looking out for those guys and not the huge American companies who were left out of the changes.