But will they leave Microsoft (or, at least, be less inclined to rely on Microsoft in the future where competitors exsit) because of Microsoft terminating a relationship on which their access to a technology at the core of an enterprise service that enterprise customers rely on is based?

Microsoft supported products: Azure - six years, .Net & Active Directory - thirteen years, SQL Server - seventeen years, Visual Studio - nineteen years, and Excel - twenty nine years.

No, I only expect Microsoft to support their software for exactly as long as they promised to when releasing said software.

They can't just cheat themselves out of support contracts like that.

Sure it is; Microsoft is very heavily invested in a SaaS model now. Of course, some of it is SaaS that is locally installed or at least has a substantial locally installed component, but it's still a SaaS model as opposed to a physical media with attached no-interaction perpetual license model.

No, I think you misread or I wasn't clear. Microsoft (and other companies) support service contracts exist purely because of inadequacies in the software. Microsoft wins twice because they sell the software and sell/certify the service organizations.

> Technically, yes. But has that ever happened? If you open source your 5 million line code base, you still have the expertise, not some outsider.

Yes. Why do you think your employees will stay with your company forever?

All a competitor has to do is put out a job req "looking for expert in foo, will pay top $$$" and hire away your expert staff. This does happen and it often happens because purchasing organizations prefer to "separate interests" between vendors and service companies hoping that it forces vendors to build better software that require fewer services. This creates a market for service competitors, and if they're willing to make smaller margins, can pay your people, the people you have in your company doing service work more.

For example, how many people who don't work for Red Hat offer Red Hat support services?

> The valid business strategy is nobody will trust you if you aren't open source these days.

I don't really disagree. Which is why you need to have a strategy that lets you check the "is open source" box with a buyer, while still protecting your business advantage.

Not necessarily. Remember that Windows is an Azure product now. They want employees in the cloud paying for Office 365 anyway.

This is very true, and hugely problematic. As a consultant I have to use Teams with 3 separate clients right now, which means signing in to 3 different Teams tenants - Microsoft SSO does not like that at all.

I have a personal hatred for MS because of their long history of building shit like this, but I hoped that working for a different cloud provider would keep me away from that ecosystem - it was legitimately a positive benefit I perceived about this job when thinking about the move. Alas, the cancer of MS software gets everywhere by virtue of being effectively free for anyone using Office.

The cool thing about B2B, as opposed to consumer offerings, is that the contracts on those are usually multi-year. Just because the client enterprise suddenly receives less revenue from customers, it doesn't mean that they would be able to stop paying MSFT until the contract term is over. Unless this current lockdown situation lasts multiple years, it shouldn't affect things significantly.

Can you explain why this is the case?

As a U.S. based user dealing with Government work o365 GCC High seems basically required. :/

I loathe Teams, but MSFT makes it hard to choose something else when it's included in all o365 tiers.

That might be so for big companies. Most smaller shops more likely just accept the (still extremely detailed) T&C's outright. That certainly structures the relationship, but I doubt there's much balancing involved.

I'm thinking of e.g. the medical lab next door, the girlfriend's gynecologist, most smaller businesses really, of which there are a ton which deal with relatively sensitive customer data.

The inertia of current large enterprises using Oracle sure, if the cost to move from Oracle is very large then they'll accept the risk if they even consider it.

Not so sure that applies to new customers though, they won't hemorrhage customers but they could see a slow gradual decline as the odd large enterprise folds, moves to something else etc.

I think if Microsoft continues down the path it appears to have really committed to the potential for .NET (Core) to go toe to toe on Java on none-microsoft platforms is there.

I certainly think that is the intention (along with making Azure a more attractive platform).

You think any agreement with Microsoft doesn’t have outs?

Yikes well I work for a large corporation that uses tons of Microsoft software, and we use their dispatch team constantly. Granted, we are probably one of their largest customers. It's great to have such a resource. But the fact that we need it doesn't speak well for Microsoft -- I would prefer if we didn't need such a dispatch team on a constant basis.

Generally no, but I expect many are quickly realizing it.

Microsoft in particular has been very open about trying to sell things like Office 365 and Azure to Enterprises. They aren't afraid to be blunt and say "Hey, you can get rid of your staff if you go with this".

It's an odd relationship.

In my experience, many in corporate IT are perfectly happy to be simple facilitators - shoppers basically.

I believe the perception is "It won't be me", that being increasingly beholden to a vendor might prevent the creation of new positions or filling vacancies but will never eliminate their own positions.

The entire industry of internal IT support has hard times ahead. Anecdotally, I see XaaS being adopted surprisingly quickly. A few big VARs I've talked to have noticed this and have been realigning themselves to sell managed services instead of stopping at planning and implementation as they have in the past.

Microsoft, at least used to, aggressively enforce non-competes. I worked on an enterprise product at Microsoft in the 2000s and left to go work at Google, but I could not work on Drive/Docs etc

it's a strange strategic tie up - i mean, it's strategic in terms of cloud business and enterprise products, but many companies buy microsoft enterprise products and services, and you don't see MS purchase equity shares of said companies.

Microsoft isn't an investment holding company - i would argue that microsoft shareholders would prefer that microsoft return capital back to shareholders, if they cannot find a suitable investment, rather than purchase equity holdings in a company that does not produce business synergy.

Oh I'd assume they could pull that never if they chose to, at least in certain situations.

Just take the OpenAI / Microsoft deal as an example. If a $10B investment into a company comes with strings attached, say with board seats and an exclusivity deal to use Azure products, they just blocked out any other hosting service that could compete. If that is legally questionable but they can invest most of the capital as credits for Azure products, they've effectively done the same thing without it clearly being coercion.

For a new OS, Microsoft this spent decades building an ecosystem and marketshare in the enterprise space. MS could pretty easily make sure none of their services work on the new OS. They wouldn't be fully blocking the new OS out but it would make it an extremely difficult challenge.

> Acting what way? It is like asking if you are okay if somebody can afford something, you can't.

My understanding is that part of the OpenAI investment was in Azure credits. That may technically be legal, but it blocks any competition in the space and defers paying taxes on the value of those credits.

If MS simply made the investment and OpenAI chose to use Azure of their own accord, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. If MS strong arms OpenAI into using Azure through a combination of strings to the funding and/or board seats, I strongly disagree with that.

Of course they did. All smart businesses would. Do you think they would also help you to move your mails out of Office 365, to a competitor maybe? That'd be noteworthy.

Well, maybe there's more to a complex organization like a bank or hospital than software licensing. Maybe their service contracts had these exact contingencies but they've run into other problems that nobody could have predicted when XP was new, like:

* That there would be a Great Recession that would wipe out a lot of firms, including banks, hospitals and medical device manufacturers.

* That there would be a massive new piece of legislation that would tax medical devices heavily, thus changing the way that market works.

* That the same piece of legislation would encourage hospitals to merge into each other through various incentives that were intended to limit the cost of healthcare.

* That Microsoft would decide to break backward compatibility sharply compared to what they did before. Don't laugh at this one; they were business for nearly 30 years when XP came out and never broke backwards compatibility as much as they did in the past 10.