Could they do it? Deactivate Windows licenses, block Cloud services, access to Office 365 and whatnot?
Yes, no problem with those rented licences.
As surely as you could set $100,000 of your own money on on fire, yeah.
Yes and no.
For non-cloud stuff, the EU would quickly legitimize cracks that circumvent anything they would try.
For Cloud stuff, they can more easily turn that off, but then they would need to forfeit all their EU business and assets.
Would they legitimize cracks, though? I can’t see that happening. That would be a far reaching legal precedent.
They would immediately nationalize Microsofts Europe operations and the crack would be an official patch signed and released by Microsoft Europe.
No sick ASCII art though.
They could block Windows licenses going forward, but it wouldn’t impact all the activations already done. Windows is not a subscription.
Despite their best efforts.
Give it 3 years… “Your operating system license has expired, renew now for $150/year.”
Unfortunately for them, my relationship with Microsoft expired last year.
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Is that a promise?
- They can deactivate cloud services likely on a press of a button, for all EU IP addresses.
- If there’s a killswitch in Windows, yes. Otherwise they can still selectively put out an update that would lock up your PC and disable it from functioning, possibly even wiping any and all drives in the PC completely clean.
The likelihood of this scenario is small outside of either the USA invading Europe, or Trump giving the EU to Russia or other powers, while Trump promising MS no taxes and regulations for a given period.
Haven’t used a Microsoft product at home in years, at work though is a very different story. Everything is Microsoft and its horrible and frustrating.
They can send all of their online services like Office 365 and Copilot, as well as sales or registration of Windows very quickly. I wish they would! I’d love to see Linux and Libreoffice take over, and maybe a new European player on the market. That would be a boon for consumers worldwide.
Yes, technically they could cause massive disruptions. Not likely they will.
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They would not get paid.
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Europe would suddenly have a very good reason to spend billions of euro on funding competitors.
To expand on point 2, Europe is already home to two major competitors to Windows (one headquartered within the EU) as well as competitors in other fields, so they would also have an easier time (as a bloc) than many other places, who don’t have local competitors I nearly as good a position.
What are the competitors?
LibreOffice, OpenOffice compete with the office suite. Google docs is American but is a big competition with the online variant of office.
Linux and to some extent BSD compete with windows. Munich, Germany had a project to switch away from windows in favor of Linux. Or got cancelled after some other guy got elected, I don’t know the details.
There are a dozen cloud storage competitors. But that is something Microsoft is not dominating the market at anyway.
The government won’t care about gaming but the public opinion would turn against the xbox and windows, which would cause Sony and Nintendo to celebrate.
Well Munich swiched back to Windows and a M$ dependence opened there short after, looks like deals where made.
But good news anyway Schleswig-Holstein, the state near Hamburg, decided to switch completely to Linux.
The two I was specifically thinking about are SuSE and Canonical. There’s also Collabora and Nextcloud in the productivity systems space and plenty of others.
Windows is only a small part of the Ms online exosystem
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Fingers crossed.
I can’t imagine a better result.
They could, but so could any other cloud provider. The main difference is that with a European based provider there is hopefully not a likely scenario where they would do this.
Sure, but they like money, so not happening.
Microsoft has the ability to do this if they really wanted to. It would completely destroy their business if they did, though, so they won’t. I mean, who would keep using Microsoft products if the company was willing to just take it away from you at a moment’s notice?
The US government cannot do it so easily. They’d have to order Microsoft to do so. Microsoft would resist and take it to court. The US Court system makes a LOT of really fucked up rulings, but the one thing they do reliably is side with big business. I’m inclined to think that in this hypothetical showdown, the courts would side with Microsoft.
I mean… If you take the leaks by Snowden (iirc?) seriously, there’s a good possibility the CIA or other intelligence agencies have backdoors in everything.
Not like loads of militaries care.
They either use Linux (probably not BSD (or maybe they do?!) or outdated af Windows NT/XP/embedded 7/Server versions.
I’d honestly not expect them to at least use Windows 10 IoT or an embedded modern version.I mean our banks still used Windows 7 or Server 2012 for their ATMs.
And they are network connected lolI’m sure that if a government has information that’s so sensitive they’ll store it on servers that run some sort of proprietary OS, or maybe not digitally at all.
Isn’t it even part of US law? And why big organization request their data to be hosted in their country?.
I thought this was far more than just Snowden
