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Google Cloud files complaint due to Microsoft's anti-competitive licensing (cloud.google.com)
156 points by HieronymusBosch 48 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 104 comments



> One of the most significant restrictions occurred in 2019, when Microsoft adopted new licensing terms that imposed extreme financial penalties on businesses wanting to use Windows Server software on Azure’s closest competitors, such as Google Cloud and AWS. Microsoft’s own statements indicate that customers who want to move their workloads to these competitors would need to pay up to five times more.

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.


Back in 1994 the United States filed a civil antitrust complaint against Microsoft for their practice of entering long term contracts with PC manufacturers in which the PC manufacturer would pay Microsoft a fee to license their OS based on the number of systems they sold, regardless of whether or not that system actually came with Windows. This of course made it more expensive to engage Microsoft's competitors such as IBM's OS/2.

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.


The business tactic may not be different, but the regulatory environment is - we haven't really forced corporations to follow competition law in two decades.


While I consider Microsoft's punishment was rather soft - they did however make a huge effort the publicly act like they were changing, including embracing open source instead of trying to kill it.

That's why I find it surprising, they'd made a significant effort to at least appear compliant to the antitrust rulings.


I think they only started embracing open source when they could directly benefit from it with people running it on Azure.


Do you think this was profitable for Microsoft, even after the antitrust fines?


The punishments against Microsoft were at the time criticised as being too soft. They have received far stronger penalties from much smaller actions since then.

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.)


I assume Amazon is going to let you run their S3 stack on Microsoft or your own compute? If not, how is it any different?


S3 is probably the worst possible counter-example given that Amazon hasn't made any moves against S3 being cloned verbatim by their competitors, even though they probably could block them from using the S3 trademark to market their services as "S3 compatible" if they wanted to. They even let you use the official AWS tools and libraries to interface with third party S3 clones. That's about as fair to the competition as it gets.


Note that it's normally legal to use trademarks descriptively as in "S3 compatible" though maybe it would have to be S3™ compatible or S3® compatible to be totally up to scratch. But even then, the reason Intel CPUs have marketing names at all was judges telling them that 386 wasn't a good enough trademark


Nobody is stopping you from cloning windows functionality on something else. You’re free to run samba or WINE all day long.

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.


Why would AWS let you run something they don't even sell licenses for? your attempt at an equivalence makes no sense


Exactly. They're even more anti-competitive. At least MS will sell you a Windows license. Amazon will only let you run their software on AWS. Apple will only let you run MacOS on their hardware.


100%. Amazon is the anti-competitive king. They just copy everything thats popular. unfortunately you cant just copy your way to sql server. Apple, Google, they all do the same. Sour grapes the MS does it better.


Not the same in the slightest, this would be like AWS allowing you to run S3 on Azure but charging you 4 times the same licensing cost in Azure as you would pay in AWS.

A cloud having exclusive software and features is expected.


Windows Server isn't a cloud software feature though, so S3 is not a good analog. This is a lot closer to the bundling shenanigans that have repeatedly gotten MS in hot water (Internet Explorer, Teams, etc.)


True, I was mostly trying to tie it into what the OP had said then really a valid example. Maybe should have added "and s3 was software that was generally available outside of the cloud" or something like that.

Mostly trying to point out why S3 is not an example of this.


An OS having exclusive software and features is expected. A vendor dictating what hardware you can run it on is expected.

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?


Neither of those things are happening here.

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.


>Microsoft is charging higher license costs for Windows server on competing cloud providers (but not all competing providers) than on Azure.

> 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...


I'm surprised you think that people don't complain about Oracle.


Imagine if Amazon has their own OS or software you could run yourself.

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.


So literally what oracle has done for 30 years?

Run it on one type of hardware it costs X per core, run it on something else it costs Y per core.


Now imagine it’s reached such a market dominance that the product you’re attempting to host requires Amazon OS


Yep. It's kosher. If you don't like it, don't use Windows Server.


How much is Microsoft paying you?


It's deeply frustrating to witness how MS is able to force their often inferior products on everyone through their dominance.

If competition was working well a product like teams would have been forced to become much better or it would have died.


Teams is legitimately such awful software that it alone serves as evidence that Microsoft needs to be broken up. At any given point of using the software, there are between 5 and 7 "..." buttons on the UI hiding menu options. There is no "test audio" button. You have to call their loopback server. Nobody can compete with Microsoft's office suite all-in-one + the kitchen sink bundle, though, so it persists.


> Teams is legitimately such awful software that it alone serves as evidence that Microsoft needs to be broken up

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.


The argument is that Teams is so legitimately terrible that it's dominance is proof that market forces aren't working and that Microsoft is using its dominance in one area to enter other areas.


Why is that weird? A product that would not have stood on its own, would have 100% failed, has only finally been made DECENT almost 8 years later due to the fact its bolted on to O365.


> has only finally been made DECENT almost 8 years later

decent? you can't mean teams??

one instance of the client uses more memory and resources than every ircd on the planet combined


> Nobody can compete with Microsoft's office suite all-in-one + the kitchen sink bundle, though, so it persists.

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


Interesting factoid about Google Workspace: if you send me a google docs link, I, with any Google account (even Federated identity account) can use and modify that document as a regular user.

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.


It's deeply frustrating to see people who resent giants because they're strong. MS did what anyone else would do in their position, inferior or not.

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.


People don't hate MS because they're big. They hate them because they make shit software and are force people to use it with anti-competitive practices. If each of Microsoft's products had to compete individually, most of them would go the way of Windows Phone, Zune, Internet Explorer, and Xbox. Their few good products would benefit from this too by increasing interoperability with other software. They need to be broken up.


> most of them would go the way of Windows Phone, Zune, Internet Explorer, and Xbox

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)


The brand isn't doing so hot and is on the decline while their competing platforms (Steam, Playstation, Nintendo) are posting record numbers. They've started releasing their in-house developed games on their competitor's consoles because sales on their own platform are so abysmal. Analysts are saying it's likely that Xbox is going to exit the hardware business unless they can turn things around in the next console generation.


> People don't hate MS because they're big.

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.


Okay? Being a rabid schizo who grinds their teeth at non-foss software is obviously not healthy, but shit software is shit software regardless, and the government should intervene when market forces are being abused.


rabid schizo or corporate drone, which way western man?


HA! GOOD!

(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.


Similar experience but with RDS at a non-profit, we were running everything on AWS with SQL Server BYOL and when they yanked support for BYOL on AWS, we were left scrambling. This was in 2017-2018 and they kept getting away with it, from giving free non-prod licenses only on Azure to expanding the terrible licensing to other products. No one checked them on it and here we are...


"AWS experts cost way more than old-school sysadmins"

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


HPC and Mainframe basically, but they both have quirks and extra bits required for the role due to the unique nature of the environments that never really existed in traditional old school web based sysadmin work from the 90s and 2000s, and sometimes the title isn't Sysadmin.

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.


I think you’re responding to my blog article.

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.


Nobody. Everyone is now looking for xOps, where "x" is the latest acronym. Yesterday it was MLOps and AIOps, not sure about today.


Those of us who moved on and accepted a degree of madness call ourselves SRE. It's supposed to be Site Reliability Engineering... but find it's just as well to replace the 's' with 'software'... or 'shit', if we're honest.

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!


Out of complete curiosity, did you ever attempt to run the server software in Wine?

If it happens to work well in the server use case it might be very interesting.


Yes, I tried- I was (and, am) a bit of a FOSS zealot, though a slightly more pragmatic one.

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.


A stumbling block here might be that neither Azure nor Windows Server has that big of a market share in the wider cloud market. In that case it could be argued that no matter how unfair, their pricing is not illegal; market power is afaik fairly significant aspect in anti-competitive lawsuits


That’s a stretch. Windows is dominant in significant sectors of the IT market. They own enterprise, government and education.

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.


The problem here is leveraging a dominance in another market to influence the newer one, though?

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.


It’s more than that.

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.


But does Windows Server "dominate" server OS or especially cloud server OS market? Vast majority of servers in cloud run Linux....


But that is somewhat missing the point. This locks in people that are currently doing on-prem servers so that they are cost prohibitive to move to a cloud that isn't MS.

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.


They can move to different OS if they don't like MS licensing policy. I'm sure IBM and Oracle etc are more than happy to take them as customers, MS does not have monopoly on server side.


Enterprises are moving more and more workloads to cloud, and they tend to have 70-80% Windows OSes on their virtual server workloads. With Microsoft's licensing constraints it is a very real barrier to them choosing any cloud except Azure, and this is a multi-trillion dollar market space, larger than the current hyperscalers combined.


Windows Server has a complete monopoly on the Windows Server workload market. It's the same argument that folks use to defend Apple and iPhones. A market can be fairly "niche" but have a massive value capable of anti-competitive practices.


Relevant market definition is not so straightforward in antitrust matters. I'm not a product area expert (but do have experience in antitrust litigation) and am certain that Microsoft's attorney's would say that such a market is too narrowly defined.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines/tools/market-d...


I think this is why they filed in the EU instead of the United States.

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.)


> The EU has demonstrated a naive over-eagerness to legislate in tech matters despite the absence of 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 ?


The EU uses “anticompetitive” concern as marketing for protectionism.

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.


Are you referring to the €1.8 billion Anti-trust fine against Apple ? Where Spotify met the EU commission 65 times during the course of its investigation ?

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.


Lol, Spotify has precisely -zero- customers through Apple's IAP.

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.


It seems you are either uninformed or deliberately ignoring the real issue.

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.


> market power is afaik fairly significant aspect in anti-competitive lawsuits

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.


While kind of true, it is still out there, about 40% of Azure workloads currently.

And enough on many Microsoft shops, especially due to stuff stuck on .NET Framework, Sharepoint, Active Directory and such.


*In the states

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.


Windows has previously been ruled to have a monopoly market share in both the US and the EU.

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

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/tying_arrangement


If Windows Server has ~50% of the overall server market and is trying to use that to support Azure it's a legitimate complaint.


What does the 50Z unit refer to? I have not come across the term


Sorry, I'm not sure how that typo slipped in.


That is big if though. Afaik even in Azure MS has said that majority of servers run Linux, and on other clouds I imagine Windows' market share is significantly smaller


Again, I am not talking about the cloud market. The overall server market is ~5x larger than cloud.


Am I misremembering or did Oracle do this exact same thing to try to get people to use their cloud? Struggling to find anything on it now, but were they sued?


I keep picturing the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme.


Curious what Google Cloud is doing that's equivalent?


I'm going to be honest, every time I've evaluated Azure - either for personal use or at my job - it's seemed less like a competitive cloud offering and more like a sink for IT departments overly burdened with money. I mean, all cloud is like that, but at least on AWS the pricing is fairly straightforward if you want to economize.

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 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).

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.


On my experience, Azure > AWS > GCP, on the easiness and expressive capabilities of their graphical management consoles.

Azure has the same cultural approach as Windows and macOS, in GUI first, while still exposing all features via the CLI tooling.


Weird, the exact inverse of my perspective.


I worked at AWS ProServe and we had the same issue when going into MS shops.

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


Microsoft also proposed to buy the complainants behind another antitrust complaint on OneDrive bundling, led by Nextcloud.

Let's file more of those complaints!


Can we get one for Teams?


This complaint seems hypocritical. Microsoft doesn't have to offer their software on other clouds at all.

When will I be able to get Spanner on Azure or AWS or my own hardware?


They offer shrink wrapped software that says "if you install it on hardware at location A you will be charged X, but the same Intel chip at location B means it costs more".

The complaint is valid.


So if they would say "you can only install it on cloud A" (like a lot of cloud software, such as Spanner), it would make it better?


It would make it different. I don't remember having to buy any licence to use S3, or CloudSpanner.


they might raise a valid point. But I don't think enterprise companies will migrate to google cloud, given how products are frequently killed. Now compare that to AWS and Azure. Both AWS and Azure have kept a lot of zombie services running even if they save 1/1000%.


Idk... Can I run bigtable or bigquery or spanner locally?

Isn't this anti competitive from gcp?


Yet another good reason to run Linux in the cloud.


[flagged]


Google may use many anti-competitive practices, but that doesn't make them wrong when pointing out specific anti-competitive practices in their competitors.

I'd be quite pleased for ALL the big companies to point out their competitors' anti-competitive practices.

Edit: For context, the parent commenter was saying something similar to "The pot calling the kettle black"


I am all for a good Google bashing session and if you search for “crack addled flea”, you will see my opinion of Google’s attention span and business strategy.

But I haven’t seen Google do anything this egregious. But I’m in the cloud space.


Google Takeout is a masterful ruse. "You're the owner of your data! Export whenever you want!"

Perhaps my Drive files are recoverable. (Except, of course, for the linchpin Docs/Sheets/Slides.) The main issue I found with Takeout is, there's no corresponding "Import" function anywhere, to anyone, not even Google themselves!

At least 3 times, I've started projects in one Google account, then had a need to move that specific stuff into another. Takeout won't do it. Lossy exports means that you're leaving significant data behind, especially in YouTube and whatnot. Anything with timestamps or historical, how would that work? I basically found myself starting from scratch, losing metadata and manually recreating things like playlists and Maps lists. Photos? Forget it!!!

There's no export for settings or preferences, and certainly no import or programmatic management. You get comfortably ensconced in Workspaces, and there's no exit strategy.

Compare that to when I set up a new Google Pixel: it automagically cloned itself from my Motorola, without very much warning or consent, it had all my preferences and accounts in the blink of an eye. Granted, this was beneficial and welcome, but I doubt that the process would've been smooth if I'd chosen an iPhone.


Because it's a takeout service not an account migration service?


"Takeout" at a restaurant typically implies that the food you took is edible and digestible. WTF I do on my Android with 3GB of PKZIP JSON?


idk why that would be google's concern or how anyone but you could answer. what are you asking for?


Well, Google's concern may be a two-way path for import+export for people like me who did wish to migrate accounts. That seems the most useful and ideal situation, because Google gives you control of your data, yet they get to keep you in their system.

Export functions usually anticipate the format of the importing system: "do you want this contact exported in Outlook format, Apple, Google?" "Calendar export for iCal, etc." "Image export in jpg, png, webp format?" "Save as PDF, .docx?" So it's utterly strange to be exporting stuff where there's no complementary import function, like at all. Like Google itself has no such thing. You can't import back to Photos, or YouTube, or Gmail, or Workspaces. Forget it. Upload new content or GTFO. That's just lock-in.

But it's more like "malicious compliance": "here's your data! it's really yours! we let you have it! good luck now!"

I see that there are some guides on how to use Photos Takeout data and merge it back into something useful, reconstruct an EXIF or whatever, but they seem quite ad hoc and that addresses only one out of many products/services. There's simply no way to recreate YouTube accounts.

I've often simply built a playlist in one account, and/or I subscribed to dozens of channels, then I've got an alt account and I want to migrate all that over. There's no possible recourse but manually reconstructing all of it, click by click.

Sure, not Google's concern, I suppose. They've got your data, they don't need to offer Takeout service at all. It's mystifying to me why they would, other than checking a compliance box. It would seem that if "Import" were easier they would gain more users going through there, yes? Unusable exports are painless to them, because they can be sure no customers would just set up shop on MS 365 in an hour, but lack of Import functions must be detrimental to adoption rates.


I think the expression implies they’re both in the wrong.


the pot calling the kettle black


I think this is the most desperate and pathetic claim for a long time. I mean, it's Google. Google is a dead company. They destroyed the only hand that feeds them. The search engine. They did this on purpose to increase the number of searches. And then I really hate what they done to Google play.

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.


> I don't even understand how you end up running Windows Server on GCP. Never ever heard of a corp that does this.

That's the whole point here. It's so expensive due to licensing terms that no one even tries.


No, because nobody needs to run anything on WS. Even we people that build stuff for Azure avoids WS. The whole claim is just stupid.




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