The US Federal Trade Commission has started investigating Microsoft (again) for possible unfair business practices as well as several other issues. Some are related to the July incident involving Crowdstrike, which helped show that Microsoft has a dominance in the PC and IT industry, running many enterprises, from manufacturing to transportation to news and everything in between.
With Microsoft’s cloud offerings having multiple services bundled with their licensing (E5 can get you a lot of services), from basic AI to security to Office 365 (email, Word, Excel, etc.), Teams, Sharepoint, the list goes on. Some say that having so many things in a single offering could be unfair for competition as well as a single point of failure.
The initial news story comes from Bloomberg, and Microsoft and the FTC have declined to comment (as usual with legal things, not out of the ordinary). In the past, Microsoft has faced scrutiny from bundling their web browser with their operating system, monopoly, among others.
In a November 2023 report, the FTC highlighted concerns that the concentrated nature of the cloud market means that “outages, or other issues that degrade the service of a cloud provider, could have a cascading impact on the economy or specific sectors.”
The CrowdStrike crash that affected millions of devices operating on Microsoft Windows systems earlier this year was itself a testament to the widespread use of the company’s products and how it directly affects the global economy.
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