Amazon Latest To Criticise Microsoft in UK Cloud Market Probe

Amazon has told Britain's antitrust authority its rival Microsoft uses business practices that restrict customer choice in the cloud computing market, the second major company to criticise the U.S. tech giant's operations. From a report: Britain's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into the country's cloud computing industry in October, following a referral from media regulator Ofcom that highlighted Amazon and Microsoft's dominance of the market.

In a letter published on the CMA's website on Tuesday, Amazon said changes to Microsoft's terms of services had made it difficult for customers to switch to alternative cloud providers, or run competitors' services alongside. "To use many of Microsoft's software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software," Amazon said. "This often makes it financially unviable for a customer to choose a provider other than Microsoft."

That's a fair jury

[christoban]

That's a fair juror. LOL!

Re:

[Calydor]

I think Amazon's role in this is more like a witness than a juror. Also a defendant, sure, but it's not uncommon for defendants in a trial to turn on each other.

Microsoft needs to be broken up

[DMJC]

They're still leveraging their market size/position to push into new markets at the expense of everyone else. It's just getting ridiculous now.

Well, there's your first mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

"To use many of Microsoft's software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software," Amazon said.

Nobody actually owns software, you only buy licenses to use it.

Re:

[bn-7bc]

Yes I usually say the same thing when ever this discussion comes up. But I just reakize what people mean in with "owning software" in this conrext they mean owning a license that allows you to use said software for ever ( or at keast as long as the underlying os and hw will allow you to ) as opposed to the SAAS model. So what we really are talking about it owning a license vs renting a license, but for some odd reason most people ( even a lot of people here on slashdot) seaam to confuse owmig a license

Just because they say it doesn't mean it's true...

[jezwel]

"To use many of Microsoft's software products with these other cloud services providers, a customer must purchase a separate license even if they already own the software," Amazon said. "This often makes it financially unviable for a customer to choose a provider other than Microsoft."

I saw our most recent cloud migration data and the vast majority has been to AWS, even with a lot of Microsoft licences under maintenance that could defray the cost.

Why?

The simplest reason I can deduce is that under AWS the TCO of the entire service stack is easily chargeable to the client, whereas under Azure you would have some hybrid-licensed infrastructure with discounted pricing that may support several different customers - and therefore be a nightmare to recover.