Google Cloud files complaint due to Microsoft's anti-competitive licensing
cloud.google.com
cloud.google.com
Sounds like textbook anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately cloud is super sticky, MS knows this will force folks to Azure and even if it gets thrown out in court the customers won't be able to move back easily.
A cloud having exclusive software and features is expected.
Mostly trying to point out why S3 is not an example of this.
Why is one a problem and the other isn’t besides the fact that half of HN has an irrational axe to grind anytime they hear Microsoft?
Microsoft is charging higher license costs for Windows server on competing cloud providers (but not all competing providers) than on Azure.
For the exact same software.
This isn’t an axe to grind with Microsoft, it’s clearly anti competitive.
> A vendor dictating what hardware you can run it on is expected.
Correct, Microsoft is literally dictating what hardware you can run it on, and what it costs to run it on that hardware. Which has been happening for decades. Either you've never dealt with enterprise software, or you're refusing to acknowledge reality. Oracle has been doing this from the beginning of time, they charge a different "per core" price depending on the type of core you choose, to promote the sale of their own hardware.
They extended the same pricing model to cloud. The only reason you're complaining about this is because it's Microsoft.
https://www.oracle.com/contracts/docs/processor-core-factor-...
https://medium.com/@vbalebai/debunking-the-myth-oracle-in-th...
Then imagine that Amazon charges 50 USD/month for the license for this OS/software if you run it on AWS. But if you run it outside of AWS, it would be 200 USD/month.
This is what Microsoft is currently doing.
Run it on one type of hardware it costs X per core, run it on something else it costs Y per core.
Let me know when Amazon lets me run THEIR S3 stack on hardware of my choice. Until then, all the downvotes in the world won’t change the fact they’re doing the same thing only worse.
PC manufacturers that didn't enter into these deals would have significantly higher licensing costs which put them at a disadvantage to other PC manufacturers, this of course rapidly distorted the market and stunted the spread of alternatives.
Microsoft's cloud tactics of today are so similar that I'm actually surprised that they'd try something like this again.
That's why I find it surprising, they'd made a significant effort to at least appear compliant to the antitrust rulings.
However it was a watershed moment, I believe the verdict was a strong catalyst for education and industry to stop sleep walking with Microsoft, resulting in OSS alternatives taking hold. (Rather than just OSS having Microsoft's boot off its neck.)
If competition was working well a product like teams would have been forced to become much better or it would have died.
That has to be the weirdest argument I've heard for why a company should be broken up.
Microsoft obviously doesn't understand UX nor UI design, hence the company needs to be broken up into parts? I agree with the former, but I don't understand how the conclusion would fix that.
decent? you can't mean teams??
one instance of the client uses more memory and resources than every ircd on the planet combined
Well, there's Google Workspace (and a few smaller, less comprehensive suites) as a very competitive alternative with everything + kitchen sink, but
- nobody ever got fired buying ~IBM~ Microsoft
- MS is already in all enterprises, so it's quite easy for their sales people to position their products
- the people who make the decision to buy M365 aren't the power users who suffer from the poor design in the products
- there's a huge vendor lock-in due to lots of legacy .docx, .pptx and .xlsx files that won't be parsed correctly by 3rd party software due to the formats' intentional complexity
That's not true for Microsoft, and I was forced to buy some Office software for our business because an external company used Microsoft products. Quite infectious.
Yet they could use our tools free of charge, they just refused.
This was not a situation where everyone chose to wear potato sacks instead of Nike. Clothing is a stylistic and individualistic choice, whereas your business's OS, platform, and software have concerns of support, compatibility, interoperation, long-term stability, etc.
Compatibility and interop are things that large software vendors simply can't uphold very well at all. Even if they were magnanimous, generous, 100% committed to interop with everything else, they would incur massive tech debt and support burdens to arrange for those things. So of course they build in unique features. Of course they make breaking changes. Of course they're ensuring you stay as a customer.
More than that, if a business looks around and 9/10ths of their partners use FOOBAR WIDGETS, and 99% of their workforce is trained exclusively in FOOBAR WIDGETS, what widgets are they gonna choose? The network effect has been strong for choice of platform/software, and once a plurality was achieved, MS essentially had a commitment and responsibility to the business world to be their huckleberry. At that point, force isn't necessary when customers are clamoring to be let in to the club. Force isn't necessary when your labor pool is full of MCSEs competing with neckbeards who spit on Bill Gates.
I'm sorry that you're blanket speaking for everyone else, because I certainly did.
I hated MS because they were big, they were powerful, they were my father's favorite. I reviled Bill Gates because of his education and privilege and vision, and I renamed "win.com" to "lose.com" and plastered "Satan Inside" stickers on my AMD-processor machines that eventually ran Minix and OpenBSD.
In college I became an arrogant Unix bigot, and I cultivated a distinct superiority complex, as if I could singlehandedly usher in The Year of Linux on the Desktop.
Eventually I came to accept that it was just software; it was software that everyone else used just fine; and that a uniform installation of adequate software is better for the collective good than some idealistic, unachievable utopia of Richard Stallman's wet dreams.
As in, the first Xbox version or the whole line-up? Sony reports twice as much sales of their current gaming console in comparison to Xbox, but Xbox isn't dead like the rest of stuff you mentioned. (not a fanboy, my last Xbox was the 360 and then I had PS4 and now PS5)
(FD: I made a submission recently that was very pro GCP... I promise I'm not a shill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41648371).
I used to run Windows Server for The Division and Division 2 gameservers and honestly we got completely fucked by this.
I made a slide once that showcased the high cost of licensing on GCP compared to bare-metal, and BYOL (bring-your-own-license) was explicitly forbidden by Microsoft for cloud.
Here's the slides: https://sh.drk.sc/~dijit/devfest2019-msv.pdf slide 35 is what you're after.
Nobody sane runs Windows on the server, and Ubisoft has now completed the multi-year arduous task of porting Snowdrop to Linux (ironically, largely because of Stadia- another Google thing). As has Sharkmob (my former employer) and RENNSPORT (my current employer). Though it cost us 6 months of work, and is thus far my most controversial decision as CTO.
To be completely clear here: our infrastructure spend was millions of dollars, 30% of that was direct to Microsoft, a fee that would not have existed had we used Azure.
If it happens to work well in the server use case it might be very interesting.
We made heavy use of performance features inside Windows such as IO Completion Ports, and we probed Windows itself for information about our processes to make something similar to a prometheus exporter. Because we leaned heavily into the ecosystem, with usage of named pipes for logging and crash collection; Wine simply couldn't do those things, and of course predictable performance was extremely important. (skipped frames cost avatar lives!)
Wine was not working for the gameserver, it wasn't even working for the comparatively simple backend service executables- because we had the same philosophy, sadly.
Where even is still hiring "old-school sysadmins" ? I've got bucketloads of experience in that. I grew up setting up servers and systems for friends in a "pre-AWS" world and now it seems everything is cloud and kubernetes etc and it all just feels overly complex for the sake of it
Not to derail the thread here, but largely it’s hard to know if people are using on-prem, colo, etc or not because theres no brand name term: it’s just “knowledge”. So doesn't sit as nicely on a JD.
We do sysadmin but Ops, too. Central point for all organizational baggage. Everyone outsources their operational garbage, had to make a catch-all role.
Developers don't have release management skills? Security incident broke all your compiled software? Sold an impossible arrangement?
Doesn't matter, SRE will do anything to keep the business running despite the business!
So basically you aren't walking into one of those roles cause you admin'd a bunch of Apache servers back in the day or anything like that.
Point being, there is still a market for "pets above cattle" style infra work. It is just in increasingly specialized and technically challenging areas.
Google filed this complaint to the European Commission - and given the EC’s recent decisions around the tech giants in general- it is probably wise for azure to address this now. This fee is brazenly anticompetitive.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines/tools/market-d...
You could almost compare this to exfiltration costs the different cloud companies have. Where they have clear incentives not to make it cheap to offload all of your data. That does have obvious costs associated to the providers, at least.
Microsoft had clear rules for licensing on prem. You didn’t pay more to use HPE vs. Dell or Dell vs. Surface. If you chose to buy VMWare, same deal, as long as you followed certain licensing rules with respect to migration and other factors.
Now you pay a tax unless you use the favored provider. When I looked a couple of years ago, you could not license Windows client at all in cloud, unless you used on of the MS virtual desktop offerings.
Again, you can almost argue that clouds do this with expensive exfiltration costs. At least that corresponds to work you are asking them to do, though. This is purely a licensing trap to keep people from choosing an option.
The company engages in a wide variety of business behaviors to compel customers to use their service. Anti-competitive behavior like this, license audits where you settle up with Azure credits, O365 tie in, etc.
In the other areas of the cloud market where these is competitive pressure, their offerings are competitive with AWS, GCP and others.
There's certainly a case that can be made that having Windows licencing fees be many times more expensive (unless you use Microsoft's own cloud service) would be an instance of illegal tying.
> Antitrust concerns arise when such arrangements are used to maintain or augment the seller’s pre-existing market power or impair competition on the merits in the market for the tied product
That's such a backwards concept that you have in the US.
"This company is being anti-competitive, but haven't yet reached enough market power so we'll wait to address this problem until they have more market power", how does that make sense? That will only make it harder to fix in the future.
Attack the problem head on, before it becomes too large. But then we're talking about "The Land of Corporations" here so maybe I'm just being idealistic.
And enough on many Microsoft shops, especially due to stuff stuck on .NET Framework, Sharepoint, Active Directory and such.
The EU has demonstrated that they'll narrow the boundary of the market and ignore marketshare if they see there is an EU-centric advantage to be had.
This also lends into Google's opening wording where they frame the behaviour as a threat to the EU, rather than a threat to Google's Cloud business.
Or a more controversial take: The EU has demonstrated a naive over-eagerness to legislate in tech matters despite the absence of harm. (Versus a more conservative USA that is wary of upending industries without proven harm.)
You mean the EU is not as deeply corrupt as good old USA and actually cares about anti-competitive behavior. This is the opposite of the USA that will blow a LOT of hot air but never truly target and penalize any big company that is bribing the political establishment with campaign funding ?
If not, then Spotify would be a deemed a gatekeeper under the DMA. Instead Spotify met with the commission more than 65 times during the development of the DMA. Plus has the lowest pay out rates to artists of the leading music services, the fewest and slowest developing feature profile, the largest targeted consumer ad tracking network, and have progressively raised prices in recent months.
So no, the EU isn’t whatever you think it is.
What is wrong with that ? NO one should be forced to kneel to Apple's ridiculous criminal mafia pricing. Considering that Spotify sells music on its web-site, why should Apple abuse power to force payment through themselves, obtain a free pass on theft and mandate higher prices on everyone ? Blatant American corporate robbery through forced threats of expulsion should no longer be tolerated by the rest of the world and it is good that the EU is fighting back.
Tell me, what do you think 65 meetings are needed for when Spotify's dues to Apple are literally just the annual developer account fee.
So no, the EU isn't some bastion of fairness and moral right. By this example they're more corrupt and persuaded by their businesses than the USA.
Apple requires developers who use the entitlement to pay a 27 percent fee (reduced for subscriptions older than one year and for small businesses) on all website purchases referred by Apple. So if Spotify puts a link in its app and a user clicks it and subscribes, Spotify would owe Apple a 27 percent commission.
Directly after the European Commission's ruling, Spotify on March 5 submitted an EU app update that had information on subscription pricing and links to its websites for customers to make purchases. This was prior to when Apple had announced its entitlement plan.
Apple ignored Spotify's app update, and Spotify complained on March 14 that Apple had not "acknowledged or responded" to its App Store submission. Spotify at the time called on the European Commission to force Apple to approve its app update.
The antitrust ruling from the European Commission fined Apple nearly $2 billion and mandated that Apple "remove anti-steering provisions" for music apps in the European Economic Area.
And that is utterly just. The only "corruption" is Apple becoming a heady tyrant abusing the power of their platform as a hammer to rob the rest of the world. They have the corrupt US administration in their pocket, but thankfully, not the EU. The EU is one of the few governments that can actually stand up to American corporate tyranny and actually win.
As an example: I was looking at remote desktop hosting at work once. Azure lists no pricing; they give you a calculator that has about 40 knobs you can tweak, and it doesn't include the cost of software licenses. Oh wait, software licenses? Shouldn't Microsoft just bundle the cost of the Windows licenses into the cost of hosting Windows? Yeah, you'd think so, but no! Azure remote desktop is actually all BYOL (bring your own license) and you need to either buy special Enterprise SKU licenses (E5/E7 AFAIK) that Microsoft only sells through resellers (at twice the cost of a normal Windows client license[0]) or have all your employees on Windows volume keys that somehow magically license the VMs when they connect to their remote desktop (which... defeats the point of remote desktop).
On AWS they just list pricing for people with their own Windows licenses and people who want to buy a license through AWS. All the licensing costs are bundled into the monthly cost of the VM and they list fairly straightforward performance, RAM, and storage tiers for those VMs. It was at least enough information to inform me that remote desktop was a fool's errand no matter how much it might fix other IT problems. The Azure pricing assumes you're already so deep into the Microsoft ecosystem that you're mainlining volume license keys like heroin and Microsoft has your bank account details on speed-dial.
[0] If you don't want to mess about with separate VMs per user and want, say, Windows Server with a bunch of people signed into one VM, then the licensing costs double again. I would REALLY like to know what would motivate someone to want shared hardware so much that they'd pay twice as much for the Windows licenses over separate machines.
Azure has the same cultural approach as Windows and macOS, in GUI first, while still exposing all features via the CLI tooling.
While overall I agree that Azure can be confusing for pricing, this is incorrect.
Business Premium licenses (as well as 365 E3/E5/F3 licenses) can be purchased without a reseller, and cover Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Windows 10/11 Enterprise usage.
>If you don't want to mess about with separate VMs per user and want, say, Windows Server with a bunch of people signed into one VM, then the licensing costs double again.
Unless you specifically want multiple people logging into Windows Server, the same licenses I mentioned above support AVD Windows 10/11 Enterprise multi-session. You can spin up a single beefy VM and have Business Premium/E3/E5/F3 licensed users connect with no additional costs.
But it could be worse. While we were basically able to do anything we wanted with our internal lab AWS accounts with no questions asked, the one thing we had to get permission for was to stand up RDS/Oracle instances
Let's file more of those complaints!
When will I be able to get Spanner on Azure or AWS or my own hardware?
The complaint is valid.
Isn't this anti competitive from gcp?
As a senior Azure architect. We try to run as much as possible on Linux to avoid licenses. I don't even understand how you end up running Windows Server on GCP. Never ever heard of a corp that does this. Also, most of the new stuff from MS is platform independent.
That's the whole point here. It's so expensive due to licensing terms that no one even tries.