US Regulators Plan To Investigate Microsoft's Cloud Business (ft.com) 20
The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to launch an investigation into anti-competitive practices at Microsoft's cloud computing business, Financial Times reported Thursday, as the US regulator continues to pursue Big Tech in the final weeks of Joe Biden's presidency. From the report: The FTC is examining allegations that Microsoft is abusing its market power in productivity software by imposing punitive licensing terms to prevent customers from moving their data from its Azure cloud service to competitors' platforms, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
Tactics being examined include substantially increasing subscription fees for those that leave, charging steep exit fees and allegedly making its Office 365 products incompatible with rival clouds, they added.
Tactics being examined include substantially increasing subscription fees for those that leave, charging steep exit fees and allegedly making its Office 365 products incompatible with rival clouds, they added.
Increasing fees everywhere (Score:1)
Or increasing per core / server license fees to push business server customers to the cloud. Or increasing desktop licensing fees to push desktop users to the cloud. Or anything else they can think of to drive people away forever or into a walled garden of ads. If more developers would use MariaDB as a back end, life would be much easier. But no, only certified with Microsoft SQL server - no other databases need apply.
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This isn't directly an antitrust issue, just a slimy business practice since MS doesn't have to offer any desktop software. Since MS is still the de-facto business platform standard, there are not a lot of viable desktop alternatives, however, so it's on the fuzzy borderline of antitrust.
Let's just get together and form an HTTP-friendly state-ful GUI standard [slashdot.org] so we can run ever more software on Linux and tell MS to finally shove Windows u
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PL/SQL is terrible and ORA SQL has way to many Oracle-isms. I would say hard no to any green field development on that for those reasons alone.
I will say this for it, those terrible error messages are good in a sense, unlike other database engines you can (generally speaking) rely on the error messages not leaking data. So you can show them people a lot more freely.
BillG backed the wrong horse (Score:3)
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Re: Tired (Score:2)
You're going to get your wish soon.
Mine is that you learn something from it, but I wouldn't bet on that happening.
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How stupid can you be? I mean seriously, to make a claim as dumb as this you have to understand _nothing_ at all.
Yeah this isn't going to survive (Score:2)
I really wish people understood what they were voting for. We're not even going to do mass deportations. You really think large businesses and the billionaire head of state are going to give up all that cheap labor? Would you?
Re: Yeah this isn't going to survive (Score:1)
This will soon go away (Score:2)
A short time after January 6.
MICROS~1 the company that made boolean tristate (Score:2)
Only allegedly
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“In Windows, many system settings
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"Allegedly" for certainty values of 100%.
Has MS crawled into Trump's or Musk's rectum? (Score:2)
If not, good luck to them. If so, they have nothing to fear. Corruption works that way.