HA! GOOD!
(I made a submission recently that promotes 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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft also proposed to buy the complainants behind another antitrust complaint on OneDrive bundling, led by Nextcloud.
Let's file more of those complaints!
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
> 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.
*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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
the pot calling the kettle black