Microsoft, which had been fined €1.6 billion by EU competition regulators, will revise its licensing terms and allow cloud service providers to better compete in response to complaints, its president Brad Smith said today.
The company was taking the first step but not the last to address the concerns, Smith told a conference organised by think tank Bruegel in Brussels."It really starts by giving more options to European cloud providers. So if there's a company that has a data centre but wants to run solutions in its cloud PBX data centre, we're creating more options for them to do so with our software, because that's what they've been asking for," he said.
Smith said the changes include allowing cloud service providers to offer Windows as a complete deskstop operating system, providing longer-term price protection and revising licensing terms. The company found itself on the EU competition enforcer's radar again after German software provider NextCloud, France's OVHcloud and two other companies filed complaints about Microsoft's cloud practices.