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Google Cloud files complaint due to Microsoft's anti-competitive licensing
- grahamj 2y ago[flagged]
- justin_oaks 2y agoGoogle may use many anti-competitive practices, but that doesn't make them wrong when pointing out specific anti-competitive practices in their competitors. I'd be quite pleased for ALL the big companies to point out their competitors' anti-competitive practices. Edit: For context, the parent commenter was saying something similar to "The pot calling the kettle black"
- scarface_74 2y agoI am all for a good Google bashing session and if you search for “crack addled flea”, you will see my opinion of Google’s attention span and business strategy. But I haven’t seen Google do anything this egregious. But I’m in the cloud space.
- AStonesThrow 2y agoGoogle Takeout is a masterful ruse. "You're the owner of your data! Export whenever you want!" Perhaps my Drive files are recoverable. (Except, of course, for the linchpin Docs/Sheets/Slides.) The main issue I found with Takeout is, there's no corresponding "Import" function anywhere, to anyone, not even Google themselves! At least 3 times, I've started projects in one Google account, then had a need to move that specific stuff into another. Takeout won't do it. Lossy exports means that you're leaving significant data behind, especially in YouTube and whatnot. Anything with timestamps or historical, how would that work? I basically found myself starting from scratch, losing metadata and manually recreating things like playlists and Maps lists. Photos? Forget it!!! There's no export for settings or preferences, and certainly no import or programmatic management. You get comfortably ensconced in Workspaces, and there's no exit strategy. Compare that to when I set up a new Google Pixel: it automagically cloned itself from my Motorola, without very much warning or consent, it had all my preferences and accounts in the blink of an eye. Granted, this was beneficial and welcome, but I doubt that the process would've been smooth if I'd chosen an iPhone.
- snapcaster 2y agoBecause it's a takeout service not an account migration service?
- AStonesThrow 2y ago"Takeout" at a restaurant typically implies that the food you took is edible and digestible. WTF I do on my Android with 3GB of PKZIP JSON?
- snapcaster 2y agoidk why that would be google's concern or how anyone but you could answer. what are you asking for?
- AStonesThrow 2y agoWell, Google's concern may be a two-way path for import+export for people like me who did wish to migrate accounts. That seems the most useful and ideal situation, because Google gives you control of your data, yet they get to keep you in their system. Export functions usually anticipate the format of the importing system: "do you want this contact exported in Outlook format, Apple, Google?" "Calendar export for iCal, etc." "Image export in jpg, png, webp format?" "Save as PDF, .docx?" So it's utterly strange to be exporting stuff where there's no complementary import function, like at all. Like Google itself has no such thing. You can't import back to Photos, or YouTube, or Gmail, or Workspaces. Forget it. Upload new content or GTFO. That's just lock-in. But it's more like "malicious compliance": "here's your data! it's really yours! we let you have it! good luck now!" I see that there are some guides on how to use Photos Takeout data and merge it back into something useful, reconstruct an EXIF or whatever, but they seem quite ad hoc and that addresses only one out of many products/services. There's simply no way to recreate YouTube accounts. I've often simply built a playlist in one account, and/or I subscribed to dozens of channels, then I've got an alt account and I want to migrate all that over. There's no possible recourse but manually reconstructing all of it, click by click. Sure, not Google's concern, I suppose. They've got your data, they don't need to offer Takeout service at all. It's mystifying to me why they would, other than checking a compliance box. It would seem that if "Import" were easier they would gain more users going through there, yes? Unusable exports are painless to them, because they can be sure no customers would just set up shop on MS 365 in an hour, but lack of Import functions must be detrimental to adoption rates.
- grahamj 2y agoI think the expression implies they’re both in the wrong.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- candiddevmike 2y ago> 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.
- tw04 2y agoI assume Amazon is going to let you run their S3 stack on Microsoft or your own compute? If not, how is it any different?
- nerdjon 2y agoNot 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.
- itsdrewmiller 2y agoWindows 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.)
- nerdjon 2y agoTrue, 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.
- 2y ago
- scarface_74 2y agoI 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
- zokier 2y agoA 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
- wmf 2y agoIf Windows Server has ~50% of the overall server market and is trying to use that to support Azure it's a legitimate complaint.
- LordKeren 2y agoWhat does the 50Z unit refer to? I have not come across the term
- wmf 2y agoSorry, I'm not sure how that typo slipped in.
- zokier 2y agoThat is big if though. Afaik even in Azure MS has said that majority of servers run Linux, and on other clouds I imagine Windows' market share is significantly smaller
- wmf 2y agoAgain, I am not talking about the cloud market. The overall server market is ~5x larger than cloud.
- jaysinn_420 2y agoEnterprises 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.
- lolokwhatever 2y ago[dead]
- jeppester 2y agoIt'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.
- dmonitor 2y agoTeams 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.
- diggan 2y ago> 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.
- bearjaws 2y agoWhy 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.
- blibble 2y ago> has only finally been made DECENT almost 8 years later decent? you can't mean teams?? one instance of the client uses more memory and resources than every ircd on the planet combined
- dijit 2y ago
- kmeisthax 2y agoI'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.
- pjmlp 2y agoOn 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.
- dijit 2y agoWeird, the exact inverse of my perspective.
- nerdjon 2y agoAm 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?
- josefritzishere 2y agothe pot calling the kettle black
- multimoon 2y agoI keep picturing the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme.
- okdood64 2y agoCurious what Google Cloud is doing that's equivalent?
- dijit 2y agoHA! GOOD! (FD: I made a submission recently that was very pro GCP... I promise I'm not a shill: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41648371 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 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.
- jeffwask 2y agoSimilar 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...
- YokoZar 2y agoOut of complete curiosity, did you ever attempt to run the server software in Wine? If it happens to work well in the server use case it might be very interesting.
- dijit 2y agoYes, I tried- I was (and, am) a bit of a FOSS zealot, though a slightly more pragmatic one. We made heavy use of performance features inside Windows such as IO Completion Ports, and we probed Windows itself for information about our processes to make something similar to a prometheus exporter. Because we leaned heavily into the ecosystem, with usage of named pipes for logging and crash collection; Wine simply couldn't do those things, and of course predictable performance was extremely important. (skipped frames cost avatar lives!) Wine was not working for the gameserver, it wasn't even working for the comparatively simple backend service executables- because we had the same philosophy, sadly.
- zoobab 2y agoMicrosoft also proposed to buy the complainants behind another antitrust complaint on OneDrive bundling, led by Nextcloud. Let's file more of those complaints!
- happymellon 2y agoCan we get one for Teams?
- AtNightWeCode 2y agoI think this is the most desperate and pathetic claim for a long time. I mean, it's Google. Google is a dead company. They destroyed the only hand that feeds them. The search engine. They did this on purpose to increase the number of searches. And then I really hate what they done to Google play. As a senior Azure architect. We try to run as much as possible on Linux to avoid licenses. I don't even understand how you end up running Windows Server on GCP. Never ever heard of a corp that does this. Also, most of the new stuff from MS is platform independent.
- jakub_g 2y ago> I don't even understand how you end up running Windows Server on GCP. Never ever heard of a corp that does this. That's the whole point here. It's so expensive due to licensing terms that no one even tries.
- AtNightWeCode 2y agoNo, because nobody needs to run anything on WS. Even we people that build stuff for Azure avoids WS. The whole claim is just stupid.
- dzonga 2y agothey might raise a valid point. But I don't think enterprise companies will migrate to google cloud, given how products are frequently killed. Now compare that to AWS and Azure. Both AWS and Azure have kept a lot of zombie services running even if they save 1/1000%.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoYet another good reason to run Linux in the cloud.
- Palmik 2y agoThis complaint seems hypocritical. Microsoft doesn't have to offer their software on other clouds at all. When will I be able to get Spanner on Azure or AWS or my own hardware?
- happymellon 2y agoThey offer shrink wrapped software that says "if you install it on hardware at location A you will be charged X, but the same Intel chip at location B means it costs more". The complaint is valid.
- Palmik 2y agoSo if they would say "you can only install it on cloud A" (like a lot of cloud software, such as Spanner), it would make it better?
- happymellon 2y agoIt would make it different. I don't remember having to buy any licence to use S3, or CloudSpanner.
- leeeeeepw 2y agoIdk... Can I run bigtable or bigquery or spanner locally? Isn't this anti competitive from gcp?