> Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade). The thought proce

> Basically, MSFT is just catching up to the fact I very much doubt they are just catching up. This was planned for years (if not a decade). The thought process being, as everyone virtualizes their compute to the cloud, any cloud, make it easy for them to stay on their existing Windows license. Well, they couldn't prevent it anyway. So in fact, they actively encouraged it. This way you don't lose that customer forever (as they transition to Linux or other, but generally Linux). The customer is happy, the move is endorsed by MS, they only have to deal with the one transition and they can decide freely on cloud provider, which feels like freedom. Part of the plan being, hope the customer moves their Windows workload to Azure, with an expectation that it would be least-effort. Now that the bulk of the shift (to cloud) has occurred, differentiate the licensing. IMHO this is a trumped up complaint about change. Microsoft did in part bring this uproar upon themselves by making the scheme complicated, but at least part of that was unavoidable (given that they want to make moar monies). Please note: > Multi-tenant hosts are not affected. which is likely most uses. It's only dedicated hosting (and only for "listed providers") that are affected. And Azure is included. The apparent escape valve of Azure Hybrid Benefit isn't much of one ... you have to pay for the AHB and you have to have software assurance. The same as on the other providers. This is how they will (rightly) escape any claims of anti-competitive behavior. In a nutshell, for customers that care enough to want a dedicated (vs multi-tenant) host, which BTW Azure hasn't ever had before, that's the kind of customer that cares enough to closely mind their licenses. MSFT is now going to insist on collecting the annual software assurance fee from those customers. This is probably motivated by the ease of spinning up new cloud instances, vs new on-premise hardware. With cloud, it's oh so easy to exceed your paid-for license usage. At least if they force the software assurance fees, they collect a larger fraction of fees. TFA is a low information rant, and even declares itself as such: > The longer version is complex, nuanced, and exceeds my attention span