An Amazon Web Services executive took a swipe at Microsoft licensing, dubbing it anti-competitive.
AWS’ senior vice president of sales and marketing Matt Garman, wrote on LinkedIn that Microsoft’s “recent licensing rhetoric” is “a troubling admission of the same anti-competitive tactics that many companies have been raising with them for years, but went unheeded until they were put before the European Commission.”
“MSFT’s answer is not to do what’s right for customers and fix their policy so all customers can run MSFT’s software on the cloud provider they choose; but rather, under the pretext of supporting European technology needs, MSFT proposes to select cloud providers about whom it is less competitively concerned and allow MSFT software to run only on those providers”, Garman ranted.
He added: “This is not fairness in licensing and is not what customers want. We continue to hear from customers around the world that MSFT’s discriminatory licensing practices are costing them millions of dollars and the freedom to work with whom they wish.”
The comments may have raised an eyebrow or three because Amazon is not noted for its own embracing of competition or allowing its customers to run its software on rivals clouds.
Although Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella didn’t mention AWS by name, he appeared to justify using Microsoft products together in the name of saving on cost during his own Inspire keynote.
“Across our offerings, we offer the best value at every stage of the cloud migration,” he said. “To just share two examples, it’s up to 80 percent less expensive to run Windows Server VMs (virtual machines) on Azure and SQL Server VMs on Azure than it is with our main competitor.”
