Microsoft is undoing in Europe some of the restrictive cloud-licensing policies it first announced in 2019, which made running its software more expensive on its competitors’ clouds.
In early April, Microsoft officials said they would address some of the complaints from European cloud vendors about restrictive cloud licensing policies that resulted in customers paying more to run Microsoft software in non-Microsoft cloud environments. On May 18, Microsoft went public with its remedial plans via a blog post from Microsoft President Brad Smith. In that blog post, Microsoft outlined five “European Cloud Principles.” The real meat, though, is in the planned changes aimed at leveling the playing field for European Cloud Providers when it comes to running Microsoft on-premises software, like Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server and Office, on their own infrastructure. Microsoft introduced the outsourcing licensing restrictions in question in 2019. Customers who had been using AWS and Google Cloud as dedicated hosts for running Windows Server and clients were affected directly, but some of them didn’t realize the extent of the impact until their contracts with Microsoft were up for renewal this year. Microsoft’s changes around its bring-your-own-license terms made their contracts more expensive if they wanted to run Microsoft software on anything but Azure. As justification for its changes, Microsoft officials said rivals like AWS or Google are always free to make similar licensing and pricing moves.
