Azure customers with deep roots in Microsoft infrastructure often feel like anyone who’s tried to quit caffeine—trapped by familiar dependencies, aware there are alternatives, but facing a brutal headache at the mere thought of change. As the cloud wars rage on across the UK and beyond, a fresh report for regulators lays bare just how hard it is for big organizations to break away from Microsoft’s orbit—even if they want to, and even when other cloud giants like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud are practically begging them to give it a try.
A few years ago, sitting comfortably with your on-premises Windows servers and SQL stacks, the idea of moving some virtual machines to another cloud sounded reasonable. But in 2019, Microsoft, never one to leave a captive audience unmonetized, introduced a licensing change so sharp it made IT managers drop their coffee mugs.
No longer could you grab your trusty, existing Microsoft licenses and stick them on the hardware of your favorite cloud provider. Under the new rules, if your cloud of choice was Amazon, Google, or Alibaba—providers Microsoft rather pointedly classified as "listed"—you’d need to buy a totally separate set of licenses to run Windows Server or SQL Server in their public clouds.
The result? If you want to run Microsoft software on anything other than Microsoft’s own Azure, you’ll pay up to four times as much for the privilege. Suddenly, the cost calculus of staying on Redmond’s good side got unbearably spicy for IT budgets everywhere.
As Google told the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the reality is that traditional enterprise customers don’t operate from a clean slate. Decades of accumulated Microsoft heft—be it Windows Server, SQL Server, or custom doohickeys—can’t be magicked away for a quick container deployment. Google even trotted out anonymized examples: moving decades of Windows-centric applications to Linux might take several years per customer, involve serious engineering overhead, and simply isn’t on the menu for organizations without world-class software development bench strength.
AWS doesn’t disagree. Their two cents: yes, some workloads can, with enough time and financial painkillers, be reworked for Linux, but it’s rare because “it is costly to the customer and takes many years.” For a slew of business-critical Windows-only applications, shifting to Linux is about as practical as converting a battleship into a luxury yacht—expensive, slow, and fraught with unknowns.
At stake? Billions in cloud spending. Google estimates that 70–80 percent of Azure’s revenue is tied up with customers using Windows Server and SQL Server. These are not hobbyists running Minecraft for friends; these are the blood vessels in the heart of corporate IT. AWS, peering through their own binoculars, tells the CMA that if Microsoft evened out the licensing dollar-difference, half of all Windows-heavy shops would likely move their cloudy workloads somewhere, anywhere else.
But as things stand, to quote the talking heads at Google: it is “not competitive for IaaS workloads for traditional enterprises with a material Windows footprint.” It’s not a slight inconvenience. It’s a dead end.
Their argument? If the software is priced too low, it wouldn’t make business sense, but if it’s too high, big clouds could start encouraging customers to jump off the Microsoft stack in favor of something open and (theoretically) cheaper. That’s the tightrope Microsoft claims to walk: don’t squeeze so hard that everyone leaves, but don’t leave money on the table either.
It’s a delicate balance—one that, by sheer coincidence, seems to tilt in Azure’s favor far more often than not. The resulting ecosystem, say competitors, is one where legacy Microsoft shops are shuffled into Azure as a matter of financial survival, not enthusiastic choice.
Remedies are being discussed. The final decision? That drops on July 4—a date with, one imagines, an appropriately explosive set of expectations.
Among the other competition-constricting obstacles on the CMA’s whiteboard: “egress fees” (the fines customers pay to move data off a cloud, the internet’s answer to hotel minibar prices) and technical barriers to switching providers at all. The CMA, however, hasn’t found a problem here—at least not for the big clouds with their cost-busting discount schemes. For smaller outfits, it’s a different story; they say these market features skew things even further in favor of the dominant players.
Waging this battle are the underdogs of the cloud: the service providers whose biggest competitive advantage is literally offering a way out of the Azure/Widows lock-in. Their market pitch boils down to “we’re not Microsoft—honestly, give us a chance!” But with current pricing, they say, the deck is stacked, the dice are loaded, and the croupier is humming the Windows startup sound.
When the only fast path to the cloud is via Azure, you’re not making a choice; you’re following a route defined by the guy selling the only tickets to the show.
Consider a typical legacy-heavy enterprise. Their Windows server estate powers finance, HR, manufacturing, and—because it was cheap at the time—dozens of homegrown apps written by people who’d retire if you told them you’d even considered rewriting their codebase.
The migration challenge isn’t just about moving virtual machines. It’s about untangling a plate of spaghetti code and interdependencies, all of which must be surgically extracted from an on-prem world and gently—very gently—refactored to run on something open source.
Just to get a quote: Google and AWS both report that, for organizations who have tried to port major workloads to Linux, the process is “measured in years,” comes at “significant expense,” and, for most, simply isn’t viable given a lack of software engineers with time to spare.
That’s the real reason most companies don’t “just switch to Linux.” It isn’t technical ignorance—it’s resource arithmetic.
The market impact is profound. As Amazon and Google tell it, their clouds—often more innovative or less tightly coupled to a single OS—can’t compete for legacy Microsoft workloads. That’s not just a loss for customers who might prefer alternate clouds. It’s a market dysfunction, breeding lower innovation, higher costs, and a perverse incentive never to modernize at all.
It’s not just about money. It’s about power, about the freedom to choose the right cloud for your needs rather than being railroaded into one provider’s world simply because your paperwork is stamped “Windows.”
Some see the licensing squeeze as the wakeup call they needed. The pain of staying might now be outstripping the pain of going. But for most, recoding decades of IT in C# and .NET into something cloud-native doesn’t happen because they want to save on a few licensing headaches—it happens because the long-term strategic benefits finally become clear.
For those willing (or desperate enough) to attempt an escape, this can mean multi-year projects, expensive consulting arrangements, and Herculean efforts to keep the business running while the migration proceeds. Most, however, won’t get there. The market, as AWS and Google see it, will stay locked for most Windows-dependent businesses until regulatory pressures alter the economic equation.
Providers like AWS and Google Cloud have spent billions building high-performance, cost-effective, developer-friendly cloud platforms. But as long as Microsoft writes the rules on which licenses follow where, they’ll always be playing a rigged game when it comes to legacy enterprise workloads.
It’s not that the modernization story is impossible, just that the people who wrote the original applications are often gone, the documentation’s incomplete, and the cost is intolerable. Even those with the will to change often lack the way.
At stake are the next decades of IT strategy. Will the world get a truly competitive, multi-cloud future? Or will the rules and pricing constructed by yesterday’s market leaders define tomorrow’s choice?
Whatever the remedy, the pressure is undeniable. Customers are watching. Competitors are organizing. And every CIO stuck with a sprawling Windows estate is hoping—perhaps foolishly—for relief from a treadmill where the faster you run, the harder it is to break free.
So, to the IT strategists, the system admins, and the slightly frazzled CIOs nursing their coffee in meeting rooms—if the idea of re-architecting your entire world for Linux is making you sweat, you’re certainly not alone.
For now, the devil’s choice remains: pay up to keep the world you know or prepare for a painful, protracted journey into the ecosystem of the future. Whether regulation, innovation, or sheer force of will changes that calculus remains to be seen. But everyone, it seems, is watching—except, perhaps, the people still searching for where the Windows server keeps the coffee.
Source: theregister.com Google and AWS: Linux too hard, so customers move to Azure
Microsoft’s Cloud Monopoly Moves: The Rules of the Game Change
A few years ago, sitting comfortably with your on-premises Windows servers and SQL stacks, the idea of moving some virtual machines to another cloud sounded reasonable. But in 2019, Microsoft, never one to leave a captive audience unmonetized, introduced a licensing change so sharp it made IT managers drop their coffee mugs.No longer could you grab your trusty, existing Microsoft licenses and stick them on the hardware of your favorite cloud provider. Under the new rules, if your cloud of choice was Amazon, Google, or Alibaba—providers Microsoft rather pointedly classified as "listed"—you’d need to buy a totally separate set of licenses to run Windows Server or SQL Server in their public clouds.
The result? If you want to run Microsoft software on anything other than Microsoft’s own Azure, you’ll pay up to four times as much for the privilege. Suddenly, the cost calculus of staying on Redmond’s good side got unbearably spicy for IT budgets everywhere.
Why Not Just Switch to Linux? The Crippling Cost of Rewriting Reality
Faced with this wallet-thumping premium, it’s tempting to imagine there’s a clean escape: rebel, rewrite everything for Linux, and wave goodbye to Windows licensing drama forever. However, for any enterprise with a multi-year history—and honestly, who doesn’t have a few IT skeletons in the closet?—this is less a simple migration, more an Indiana Jones obstacle course with added paperwork.As Google told the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the reality is that traditional enterprise customers don’t operate from a clean slate. Decades of accumulated Microsoft heft—be it Windows Server, SQL Server, or custom doohickeys—can’t be magicked away for a quick container deployment. Google even trotted out anonymized examples: moving decades of Windows-centric applications to Linux might take several years per customer, involve serious engineering overhead, and simply isn’t on the menu for organizations without world-class software development bench strength.
AWS doesn’t disagree. Their two cents: yes, some workloads can, with enough time and financial painkillers, be reworked for Linux, but it’s rare because “it is costly to the customer and takes many years.” For a slew of business-critical Windows-only applications, shifting to Linux is about as practical as converting a battleship into a luxury yacht—expensive, slow, and fraught with unknowns.
Locked In by Design: The Devil’s Choice
So here’s the choice Redmond’s rivals say they’re forced to offer: migrate your entire digital life to Azure, or brace yourself for quarter-on-quarter escalation in licensing outlays. According to Google’s submission to the CMA, these shenanigans aren’t just market quirks—they’re obstacles that “deny effective competitive choice or innovative alternatives” to organizations trying to escape on-prem purgatory.At stake? Billions in cloud spending. Google estimates that 70–80 percent of Azure’s revenue is tied up with customers using Windows Server and SQL Server. These are not hobbyists running Minecraft for friends; these are the blood vessels in the heart of corporate IT. AWS, peering through their own binoculars, tells the CMA that if Microsoft evened out the licensing dollar-difference, half of all Windows-heavy shops would likely move their cloudy workloads somewhere, anywhere else.
But as things stand, to quote the talking heads at Google: it is “not competitive for IaaS workloads for traditional enterprises with a material Windows footprint.” It’s not a slight inconvenience. It’s a dead end.
Microsoft’s Response: Tightrope Walking and Price Defending
Microsoft, of course, protests any implication of pricing villainy with just enough legal poise to make your corporate lawyer smile. According to their own testimony to the CMA, they’re “very careful about the pricing of [their] SPLA,” meaning their Service Provider License Agreement—the instrument at the center of all this drama.Their argument? If the software is priced too low, it wouldn’t make business sense, but if it’s too high, big clouds could start encouraging customers to jump off the Microsoft stack in favor of something open and (theoretically) cheaper. That’s the tightrope Microsoft claims to walk: don’t squeeze so hard that everyone leaves, but don’t leave money on the table either.
It’s a delicate balance—one that, by sheer coincidence, seems to tilt in Azure’s favor far more often than not. The resulting ecosystem, say competitors, is one where legacy Microsoft shops are shuffled into Azure as a matter of financial survival, not enthusiastic choice.
The CMA Steps In: Will There Be Change?
Enter the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, refereeing this increasingly tense cloud showdown. After poring over pages of impassioned cloud provider testimony, the CMA’s preliminary findings do, in fact, side-eye Microsoft’s licensing approach. The regulator openly suggests that such practices may be harming competition in the UK’s rapidly expanding cloud market.Remedies are being discussed. The final decision? That drops on July 4—a date with, one imagines, an appropriately explosive set of expectations.
Among the other competition-constricting obstacles on the CMA’s whiteboard: “egress fees” (the fines customers pay to move data off a cloud, the internet’s answer to hotel minibar prices) and technical barriers to switching providers at all. The CMA, however, hasn’t found a problem here—at least not for the big clouds with their cost-busting discount schemes. For smaller outfits, it’s a different story; they say these market features skew things even further in favor of the dominant players.
Waging this battle are the underdogs of the cloud: the service providers whose biggest competitive advantage is literally offering a way out of the Azure/Widows lock-in. Their market pitch boils down to “we’re not Microsoft—honestly, give us a chance!” But with current pricing, they say, the deck is stacked, the dice are loaded, and the croupier is humming the Windows startup sound.
Escape From Redmond: The Reality of Cloud Migration Pain
Every C-level executive knows the story: you want to be cloud-native, modern, buzzing with Kubernetes swagger. The reality, though, is that most enterprise IT portfolios are built on years of carefully accumulated Windows-based apps, many running in the dark corners of now-virtualized servers. The larger the organization, the deeper the dependencies and the longer the chain of applications that simply “require Windows.”When the only fast path to the cloud is via Azure, you’re not making a choice; you’re following a route defined by the guy selling the only tickets to the show.
Consider a typical legacy-heavy enterprise. Their Windows server estate powers finance, HR, manufacturing, and—because it was cheap at the time—dozens of homegrown apps written by people who’d retire if you told them you’d even considered rewriting their codebase.
The migration challenge isn’t just about moving virtual machines. It’s about untangling a plate of spaghetti code and interdependencies, all of which must be surgically extracted from an on-prem world and gently—very gently—refactored to run on something open source.
Just to get a quote: Google and AWS both report that, for organizations who have tried to port major workloads to Linux, the process is “measured in years,” comes at “significant expense,” and, for most, simply isn’t viable given a lack of software engineers with time to spare.
That’s the real reason most companies don’t “just switch to Linux.” It isn’t technical ignorance—it’s resource arithmetic.
The Economics of Cloud: Price Parity and Perverse Incentives
At its simplest, Microsoft’s licensing changes have embedded an unavoidable economic reality for any organization already invested in Windows or SQL Server. Don’t want to pay Redmond’s licensing premium on AWS or Google? Enjoy your forced march to Azure.The market impact is profound. As Amazon and Google tell it, their clouds—often more innovative or less tightly coupled to a single OS—can’t compete for legacy Microsoft workloads. That’s not just a loss for customers who might prefer alternate clouds. It’s a market dysfunction, breeding lower innovation, higher costs, and a perverse incentive never to modernize at all.
It’s not just about money. It’s about power, about the freedom to choose the right cloud for your needs rather than being railroaded into one provider’s world simply because your paperwork is stamped “Windows.”
Enterprise IT’s Quiet Rebellion
There’s a growing number of IT rebels out there—architects quietly piloting containers, building microservices on Linux, and, with perhaps a little glint in their eye, imagining a future less bound to Microsoft.Some see the licensing squeeze as the wakeup call they needed. The pain of staying might now be outstripping the pain of going. But for most, recoding decades of IT in C# and .NET into something cloud-native doesn’t happen because they want to save on a few licensing headaches—it happens because the long-term strategic benefits finally become clear.
For those willing (or desperate enough) to attempt an escape, this can mean multi-year projects, expensive consulting arrangements, and Herculean efforts to keep the business running while the migration proceeds. Most, however, won’t get there. The market, as AWS and Google see it, will stay locked for most Windows-dependent businesses until regulatory pressures alter the economic equation.
The Cloud Market’s Awkward Adolescence
The UK public cloud market isn’t just an arena for tech giants—it’s a microcosm of how software licensing, entrenched vendors, and legacy tech shape the IT universe.Providers like AWS and Google Cloud have spent billions building high-performance, cost-effective, developer-friendly cloud platforms. But as long as Microsoft writes the rules on which licenses follow where, they’ll always be playing a rigged game when it comes to legacy enterprise workloads.
It’s not that the modernization story is impossible, just that the people who wrote the original applications are often gone, the documentation’s incomplete, and the cost is intolerable. Even those with the will to change often lack the way.
At stake are the next decades of IT strategy. Will the world get a truly competitive, multi-cloud future? Or will the rules and pricing constructed by yesterday’s market leaders define tomorrow’s choice?
What Happens Next? Awaiting the CMA’s Verdict
All eyes are now on the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and its impending decision. Will the regulator force Microsoft to open up licensing so customers can run Windows workloads wherever they want, without economic penalty? Or will Redmond’s formidable grip on its key product lines give it carte blanche to dictate terms in the world’s most lucrative IT market?Whatever the remedy, the pressure is undeniable. Customers are watching. Competitors are organizing. And every CIO stuck with a sprawling Windows estate is hoping—perhaps foolishly—for relief from a treadmill where the faster you run, the harder it is to break free.
The Final Take: Can Big Clouds Really Cut the Cord?
If AWS and Google have their way, the cloud market’s next act will be a little less blue, a little more open, and a whole lot fairer. But as it stands, if your estate is a Microsoft masterpiece, you’ll be paying for the privilege—either in direct license fees or in years of tactical IT rehab.So, to the IT strategists, the system admins, and the slightly frazzled CIOs nursing their coffee in meeting rooms—if the idea of re-architecting your entire world for Linux is making you sweat, you’re certainly not alone.
For now, the devil’s choice remains: pay up to keep the world you know or prepare for a painful, protracted journey into the ecosystem of the future. Whether regulation, innovation, or sheer force of will changes that calculus remains to be seen. But everyone, it seems, is watching—except, perhaps, the people still searching for where the Windows server keeps the coffee.
Source: theregister.com Google and AWS: Linux too hard, so customers move to Azure
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