The criticism came quick, and it came blunt! The drastic steps that Microsoft took to up the prices for outsourcing its software on rival cloud platforms invited some choice words from, well, the rivals.
Read up on what went down with the prices here.
The completely unintended effect of this policy change is that it has become dramatically cheaper to run Microsoft software on Azure, rather than on a competing cloud platform.
Long story short, senior executives from AWS and Google Cloud wasted no time in throwing shade at Microsoft for this price increase. Which is kind of understandable, as these changes are bad news for Google, and the opposite of good news for Amazon.
Particularly, for Amazon Workspaces, the highly popular virtual desktop solution.
This is what Google Cloud President, Robert Enslin, said on the matter:
“Shelf-ware. Complex pricing. And now vendor lock-in. Microsoft is taking its greatest hits from the ’90s to the cloud.”
Werner Vogels of AWS was also quick to chip in with his thoughts:
“Yet another bait+switch by $MSFT, eliminating license benefits to force MS use. 1st, MS took away BYOL SQL Server on RDS, now no Windows upgrades w/BYOL on#AWS. Hard to trust a co. who raises prices, eliminates benefits, + restricts freedom of choice.”
Of course, the Redmond based company is defending these changes, claiming that it is not only offering more services now, but it also has to deal with an increase in competition in this wildly dynamic new frontier of cloud computing.
These two factors, Redmond says are responsible for the price rise.
Or, you can simply term is as a bit of the old Microsoft coming out, depending on which side of the bench you are sitting on in the park. Call it an abuse of power or a necessary evil, thing is this price hike is not without risks for Microsoft.
It can drive customers away from Microsoft software, just as easily as it can net Azure new contracts.
Thoughts?
