- AWS, Microsoft and Google testify in the British CMA survey
- Microsoft’s terms and license fees seem to be a problem
- Google denies domination, says it’s a challenger
Since the United Kingdom Competition & Markets Authority has been investigating the health of the British cloud market, the hyperscalers in question have fought against each other by subjecting small excavations in the official documentation intended to act in their defense.
This time, AWS slaps Microsoft for its unfavorable license conditions, which prevent customers from being able to use other cloud storage suppliers without excessive costs.
“Maybe 50% of these workloads currently operating on Azure would evolve elsewhere if it was economically doable,” AWS told CMA.
AWS criticizes Microsoft’s license terms and high costs
Microsoft 2019 changes have increased costs relating to the execution of Windows Server on a non -Azure Cloud (like AWS, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud), which represents up to four times more expensive for customers.
These fees not only affect customers either. “AWS said that it had to compensate for the additional costs imposed by Microsoft’s license restrictions, including the cost of licenses that must be bought and the additional monetary impact of unwilling features”, the summary of the ACM audience continues, but “it cannot compensate for all these costs.”
Google also agreed with AWS comments in a summary of the separate audience, providing an example where a customer chose Azure only for license / commercial reasons despite a real preference for Google Cloud.
However, Google may not be entirely on the side of Amazon. The company has described itself as a “cloud challenger supplier and a third far from the two market leaders, AWS and Microsoft”. However, Google fears that Microsoft will dominate the British cloud market as five years “if nothing changes[s]. “”
Defending its position, Microsoft argued that exit costs are not a major concern for customers, adding that even after deleting the costs under the EU data law, the change has remained low.
The result of the survey is the assumption of anyone, but market domination is clear.
When OFCOM submitted its complaint for the first time to the CMA in October 2023, it noted in a report that Microsoft and Amazon represented 70 to 80% of the UK’s cloud market in 2022, estimated at 7 to 7.5 billion pounds sterling. Google, in third place, represented only 5 to 10%.
