324: Clippy’s Revenge: The AI Assistant That Actually Works - Sort Of

Welcome to episode 324 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! Justin, Ryan, and Jonathan are your hosts, bringing you all the latest news and announcements in Cloud and AI. This week we have some exec changes over at Oracle, a LOT of announcements about Sonnet 4.5, and even some marketplace updates over at Azure! Let’s get started. 

Titles we almost went with this week

• Oracle’s Executive Shuffle: Promoting from Within While Chasing from Behind
• Copilot Takes the Wheel on Your Legacy Code Highway
• Queue Up for GPUs: Google’s Take-a-Number Approach to AI Computing
• License to Bill: Google’s 400% Markup Grievance
• Autopilot Engages: GKE Goes Full Self-Driving Mode
• SQL Server Finally Gets a Lake House Instead of a Server Room
• Microsoft Gives Office Apps Their Own AI Interns
• Claude and Present Danger: The AI That Codes for 30 Hours Straight
• The Claude Father Part 4.5: An Offer Your Code Can’t Refuse
• CUD You Believe It? Google Makes Discounts Actually Flexible
• ECS Goes Full IPv6: No IPv4s Given
• Breaking News: AWS Finally Lets You Hit the Emergency Stop Button
• One Marketplace to Rule Them All
• BigQuery Gets a Crystal Ball and a Chatty Friend
• Azure’s September to Remember: When Certificates and Allocators Attack
• Shall I Compare Thee to a Sonnet? 4.5 Ways Anthropic Just Leveled Up
• AWS provides a big red button

Follow Up 

01:26 The global harms of restrictive cloud licensing, one year later | Google Cloud Blog

• Google Cloud filed a formal complaint with the European Commission one year ago about Microsoft’s anti-competitive cloud licensing practices, specifically the 400% price markup Microsoft imposes on customers who move Windows Server workloads to non-Azure clouds.
• The UK Competition and Markets Authority found that restrictive licensing costs UK cloud customers £500 million annually due to lack of competition, while US government agencies overspend by $750 million yearly because of Microsoft’s licensing tactics.
• Microsoft recently disclosed that forcing software customers to use Azure is one of three pillars driving its growth and is implementing new licensing changes preventing managed service providers from hosting certain workloads on Azure competitors.
• Multiple regulators globally including South Africa and the US FTC are now investigating Microsoft’s cloud licensing practices, with the CMA finding that Azure has gained customers at 2-3x the rate of competitors since implementing restrictive terms.
• A European Centre for International Political Economy study suggests ending restrictive licensing could unlock €1.2 trillion in additional EU GDP by 2030 and generate €450 billion annually in fiscal savings and productivity gains.

03:32 Jonathan – “I’d feel happier about these complaints Google were making if they actually reciprocated the deals they make for their customers in the...

Chapters

• (00:00:00) - GCP Alumni
• (00:01:35) - Microsoft's Cloud Licensing Practices
• (00:05:22) - Microsoft introduces Office Agent in Copilot Chat
• (00:08:13) - Claude Sonet 4.5 Launches
• (00:09:33) - Claude 4.5 New Feature Announcement
• (00:15:12) - Bill Gates on ChatGPT and Bots
• (00:16:10) - Snowflake, Cloud Sonnet 4.5, and SQL Server
• (00:17:39) - Amazon EC2, ECS now supporting IPv6 Only workloads
• (00:20:23) - Amazon Machine Image Governance (New Parameter)
• (00:25:42) - Easy to Auto-Scalping (New Feature)
• (00:29:23) - Amazon EC2: Managed Serverless Instances
• (00:33:28) - AWS Outposts: Third-Party Storage Integration
• (00:36:45) - Google's Flex Start VMS for AI & GKE Autop
• (00:41:48) - Google Launches Cloud SQL, BigQuery Extensions
• (00:45:11) - BigQuery and Google Analytics: AI Data Analysis & Forecast