Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling
“In Disney movies, if you wish really, really hard for what you want, it happens. In British courts, not so much. Prince Redmondia really, really wanted to stop the evil barons from reselling on-prem Office and Windows licenses, and made a fairy tale argument in court to make it so. Our hero did not get its wish, not then, and not now with the UK Court of Appeals.”
I just had to post this, as my very favourite saying was the conclusion of the linked article: be careful what you wish for.
That, and of course that Microsoft is so big and dominant, that it has killed off much of the competition that has tried to compete with it, if it did not buy them out.
Compatibility is touched on as a reason for people sticking to Microsoft, but I can also add the “network effect” for any very large dominant platform like Meta. In both cases, what users need is common interoperable standards, so that they can have freedom of choice.
We need open standards (and not like Facebook embracing open standards, only to then shut that off and lock users in once they had got the network effect in place).
As I've repeated so often before, imagine where e-mail would be if there was no open standard! You'd have to open a Gmail account to mail anyone with a Gmail account, then open a Microsoft account to mail anyone using Microsoft mail. That is utterly ridiculous.
It is time that social media and documents had proper open standards, and providers compete on the user experience they provide for their product. How does any decent competition for say Facebook, get to compete when all users are locked inside of Facebook? They can't leave Facebook as their friends and family are there. That is the network effect in a closed system.
So I don't apologise for my criticism of dominant walled garden enterprises.
See
Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling
Time for the Clone Wars remake
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openstandards
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