Google VP Calls Out Microsoft's Cloud Software Licensing 'Tax'

Google is very publicly adding to the chorus of complaints about Microsoft's alleged restrictive cloud software licensing policies, claiming that unless the European Union formally tackles it, the industry and customers will suffer lasting damage. From a report: Amit Zavery, vice president, general manager, and head of platform at Google Cloud, says antitrust regulators are 'starting to understand the situation' and are asking questions. 'Any enterprise company will be impacted negatively if things are not resolved properly,' he told The Register. 'I think there should be appetite [from the regulators] and I think there should be movement in that area to really put some kind of checks and balances on Microsoft's policies.' One bone of contention for Google, the third-largest public cloud provider globally and in Europe, is that it simply costs more to run Microsoft software on third-party providers' clouds. This is due to extra licensing costs levied by Microsoft when you run its applications on non-Microsoft clouds, we're told. 'Microsoft publicly touts that if you run their software on Azure versus other vendors like AWS and GCP, it's five times cheaper or it's more expensive to run on us 5x basically because of the tax customers have to pay to Microsoft,' Zavery told us.

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