I love hearing about one of the big companies getting sued, I don’t know why. Microsoft is now being sued by ValueLicensing for a big sum of £270 million due to the company allegedly damaging the second-hand software market.
ValueLicensing is a second-hand software reseller. Their business model consists of buying pre-owned software licenses from businesses that no longer need them or because they are switching to a cloud service or worse. ValueLicensing is a certified provider of such licenses.
The problem started when Microsoft started offering discounts for their new cloud services in exchange our their old licenses. You can imagine how this would affect companies like ValueLicensing. The company has called out Microsoft for its anti-competitive behavior and restrictions. The company claimed that they have lost hundreds of millions of pounds in revenue due to this.
Jonathan Horley, managing director at ValueLicensing told in an interview that “Microsoft’s illegal behavior has impacted almost every organization that provides desktop software for its workforce in the UK and the EEA”. Thus the company has sued Microsoft for £270m, the amount they say they have lost because of Microsoft’s strategy. The filing was done with the High Court in London.
The company has called for Microsoft’s clauses to be found illegal and enforceable, for NDAs to be removed from the contracts and for Microsoft to end their illegal conduct. Horley further added that “ValueLicensing is not the only victim. In purchasing software, public and private-sector organizations presently have little option but to move to subscriptions offered by Microsoft, because there are so few preowned perpetual licenses available now, as a result of Microsoft’s campaign to almost entirely drain the market.”
The only reply from Microsoft to all this was that they cannot comment on ongoing legal cases.
