EU cloud providers subject to lock-in with Microsoft due to new strategy

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 19:05:00 Daniel Sundermann

Fair competition is essential to a healthy business ecosystem, yet tech giants seem to believe they can work around it using their market dominance and various anti-competitive activities.

3 weeks ago, Microsoft announced a new strategy shift with the aim to comply with its steady flow of legal complaints from the EU. The company has stated that it will revise its licensing deals to allow customers to use their licenses on any European cloud provider delivering services to their own data centers.

With this new strategy, EU CSPs (cloud service providers) like IONOS, OVH, Telekom, and AMX will have the ability to host and sell Office 365. Moreover, in our opinion, be subject to a complete lock-in with Microsoft. CSP’s will be ultimately tied to Microsoft products and if they eventually decide to move away from them, they would lose their valuable customers.

CSP’s will by no means have additional security because the software is not open-source and can thus not be modified, adapted, or improved.

Furthermore, CSP’s are also at a risk by offering Microsoft’s software because they will still be in competition with the hosted Microsoft 365 product itself. It’s really not a win-win at all, as Microsoft gleans all the glory, and slowly takes down the smaller cloud providers.

Microsoft can offer all the new programs and principles they want to look anew, but they don’t come close to end the unfair licensing practices and anti-competitive restricting of productivity platforms with cloud services.

More at https://nextcloud.com/blog/eu-cloud-providers-subject-to-lock-in-with-microsoft-due-to-new-strategy/

About the author


Daniel Sundermann

Daniel Sundermann

 

I'm a long-time user and enthusiast of open source software and espouse the philosophy that software code should be open (readable). So that everyone can see what happens behind the scenes while we use our electronic devices every day.