September 30, 2025

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

1 hour 4 minutes

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 Inter

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