Microsoft has failed to win permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court in the long-running legal spat with ValueLicensing after the Court of Appeal refused its application.

The US megacorp was challenging a November 2025 ruling in ValueLicensing’s favour that VL may resell pre-owned software licenses. That judgement was unambiguous, but Microsoft said at the time that it would seek permission to appeal.

That request was rejected last week in blunt terms. No reasons were given for the refusal, just the words “It is ordered that the application is refused.”

It isn’t quite the end of the road. Microsoft could apply to the Supreme Court itself, but it would need to file within 28 days and show a compelling reason why the Court of Appeal was wrong to refuse its appeal.

Things are looking dicey for Microsoft in the case that started in 2021 when ValueLicensing sued Microsoft for £270 million over claims that the Windows maker choked off the supply of surplus Office licenses. Microsoft denied any wrongdoing and Instead attempted to reframe the case as a copyright dispute. The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal rejected Microsoft’s arguments and a subsequent appeal.

A recently published Consent Order adds to the pressure. It demands documents from past and present Microsoft bosses, including a potentially explosive internal deck titled “Second-Hand Software Presentation” (SHS).

The contents of the file are unknown, but the Consent Order refers to it as a “Known Adverse Document.” It dates back to 2013, a few years after Office 365 was launched. The order also asks why Microsoft waited until the end of 2025 to disclose the document’s existence, a few years after Office 365 launched.

To add a little more spice, Alexander Wolfson is listed as an intervener on the appeal refusal. He is the proposed class representative in a separate claim filed on behalf of millions of UK customers seeking between £1.3 billion to £3.5 billion in compensation from Microsoft over its conduct regarding pre-owned licenses.

ValueLicensing and Microsoft declined to comment on the latest development.

Appeals aside, the next stage will be a Witness Statement from Microsoft explaining who knew what and when, followed by further disclosure.

The UK’s competition watchdog wants to designate Microsoft with strategic market status (SMS) in business software, allowing the regulator it to intervene to level the playing field, and says it is considering other areas for investigation.

Regulators around the world are watching to see what the UK decides in this case, with bodies such as the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Commission mulling similar actions.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is opening a consultation on whether to tag the Redmond software giant with strategic market status in respect of its portfolio of business software applications.

This follows an investigation the regulator started back in May into Microsoft’s software portfolio including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams, plus its security, server and operating systems. The watchdog is also probing whether Microsoft enjoys a position of “substantial and entrenched market power” through the suite of software that could be seen as stifling competition and harming buyer choice.

It lays out its proposed decision in a document and is inviting comments that must be submitted by November 13. The CMA will make its final decision by February 13, 2027.

A Norwegian startup faces a $17,600 Claude bill and two vendors pointing at each other, after running Anthropic models through Microsoft Foundry while $21,168 in Azure sponsorship credits expired untouched.

Vegalabs AS said it received $25,060 in cloud credits through Microsoft for Startups and deployed Claude in Foundry in August. The company expected its analysis workloads to draw against the credit balance.

Microsoft’s sponsorship rules exclude that scenario. Anthropic models purchased through Azure Marketplace fall outside the credits, and an account with a card on file gets charged for them.

Microsoft attempted to collect $16,500 from the card Vegalabs had on file, and the invoiced total later reached $17,600 before tax. The sponsorship portal kept showing available credits while Marketplace charges accumulated alongside them.

Microsoft’s deployment documentation states the terms: credit-only sponsored subscriptions don’t work for these models, and an account with a card attached gets charged. Vegalabs deleted the deployment within an hour of spotting the charges. The card issuer declined the payment over suspected fraud, and the remaining $21,168 in sponsorship credits expired Sept. 8.

Vegalabs said it never read the credit exclusions and never configured a budget alert. The company disputes neither the usage nor the documented rule. Its complaint targets the deployment interface, which it says presented a sponsored subscription and a Marketplace purchase as one continuous billing picture.

The refund request then ran into a wall.

Vegalabs sent it to Microsoft support first. The reply said Marketplace transactions process through a billing pipeline tied to the third-party publisher, and that Azure Support cannot waive, refund, or adjust those charges. If Anthropic approves the request, the reply said, Anthropic can initiate the refund authorisation through Microsoft.

Anthropic support said Microsoft did not require its authorisation to process a refund and sent Vegalabs back to Microsoft.

Four of the seven support replies Vegalabs received were AI-generated, including both from Anthropic. Those Anthropic replies described the account as an “Azure Student Sponsorship,” a program name that does not apply to the company.

Reporters asked Microsoft on Oct. 6 for comment and received an acknowledgement plus a request to be told what Anthropic had to say. Microsoft offered nothing further. Anthropic did not respond.

The billing pattern has a trail. A similar case in March involved third-party model charges that sponsorship credits did not cover.

One of the main motivations for quitting Microsoft 365 and adopting Google Workspace is spite, an emotion that sadly doesn’t produce a return on investment.

The source of that disappointing news is Domenico Scriva, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, who told the firm’s IT Symposium event in Australia that moving between the suites is also unlikely to save buyers much money.

He pointed out that Google Workspace licenses are cheaper than the E5 bundle that is Microsoft’s most popular M365 license, but that Google’s suite doesn’t cover telephony, security, business intelligence, or an OS license.

By the time users add all those bits to Google Workspace, he thinks they will pay $2 a month more than the cost of Microsoft’s suite – even after considering the fact that Google bundles its Gemini AI with Workspaces but Microsoft charges extra for Copilot.

Scriva said Google’s suite can be more cost effective when paired with an Apple Mac or Chromebook. Mac users get lower costs because their machines last longer than PCs, while Chromebook owners save on hardware purchase price but need to replace their machines more often.

Those numbers don’t consider the complexity of migrating between the suites, and the cost of moving. Scriva said dependencies built into either ecosystem are a likely source of migration complication, and the need for user training is another element that those who contemplate migrations sometimes neglect.

The analyst said he’s seen some M365 users trying to use the threat of migration as a negotiating tactic when renewing their Microsoft deals. He said that won’t work if you leave it too late, because Microsoft knows it’s not possible to make the move quickly.

He therefore advised starting work on a migration almost as soon as you sign a three-year M365 deal, because it takes at least two years to get it done.

If you do decide to move, he recommended having a specific outcome in mind, rather than just swapping one suite for another.

Productivity suites have scarcely changed in 30 years, he said, so it’s currently hard to see an outcome that makes a move worthwhile.

Happily, Scriva thinks AI may soon change that. He thinks we’re in a new wave of development of productivity suites in which AI assists with content creation. An imminent third wave, he predicted, will properly shake up the market by removing the need to use individual apps like word processors or presentation graphics packages, which he thinks will be replaced by some kind of AI interface that allows users to express what they want to do and then sit back and watch as their suite has a crack at the job.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has appeared to cast his ballot in the country’s State Duma elections using a Dell computer displaying what appears to be the familiar “Activate Windows” watermark, drawing attention to the use of foreign technology during an official Kremlin event.

The footage shows Putin completing an online ballot while sitting in front of a computer screen. As he selects his candidate, he remarks, “You can’t go wrong.” Images from the video appear to show the Windows activation watermark in the lower-right portion of the display, although the footage does not independently establish why the operating system was not activated.

The vote was for deputies to Russia’s ninth State Duma, with Putin once again choosing to vote remotely. Russian state media outlet TASS also reported that residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, along with the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, would participate in the legislative elections for the first time.

The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was cancelled.

Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the “Second-Hand Software” (SHS) Presentation.

ValueLicensing and Microsoft agreed to vacate the case management conference ahead of its scheduled date on September 14, 2026. The result is the Consent Order, which, unsurprisingly, focuses on locating and asking for the disclosure of Microsoft documents that may bear on the reseller’s allegation that the company offered incentives for customers to shift to subscription services in return for not selling their pre-owned licenses.

The confidentiality designation applied to several documents in the case has also been lifted.

In addition, there are many references to a June 2013 document that Microsoft disclosed on December 22, 2025, entitled “Second-Hand Software Presentation” (SHS Presentation).

June 2013 was a busy time for Microsoft: it had launched the Office 365 subscription service two years previously, but there was a question over what to do about those customers with perpetual licenses that Microsoft wanted to move into the brave new world of “an always-up-to-date cloud service, at a predictable monthly subscription.”

While the content of the SHS Presentation has yet to be made public, the Consent Order treats it as a “Known Adverse Document,” meaning it is unlikely to be good news for Microsoft. Furthermore, the consent order requires Microsoft to explain by October 31 why it had not disclosed it earlier. This case was filed in 2021 and yet it took until the end of 2025 for Microsoft to produce the presentation.

Microsoft was also asked to conduct extensive, unredacted disclosure searches across its corporate mailboxes and SharePoint accounts of high-level executives for search terms including “antitrust,” “used licenses,” “second hand”, and “Value Licensing,” between July 3, 2012 and June 1, 2020. It has until November 30 to produce any documents found during the search.

Execs whose mailboxes and document repositories must be searched include Richard Chin, currently a Corporate VP at Microsoft responsible for the company’s monetisation approach and who was a General Manager between 2012 and 2020 working on pricing, licensing, and the business models in the Cloud and AI world. Kevin Turner, who was Chief Operating Officer at Microsoft from 2005 to 2016, is also on the list.

As for confidentiality, the consent order stated, “No blanket or default designation of such documents as ‘Restricted’ or ‘Confidential’ shall be applied.” Instead, it’ll be on a document-by-document basis and “limited to the precise words, figures or passages said to be sensitive; and be supported by specific reasons rather than general assertions.”

“Defendants shall disclose by no later than 4pm on 30 November 2026 any further documents they have identified relating to the same or similar matters addressed in the SHS Presentation.”

Microsoft will also keep ValueLicensing apprised of its progress every 21 days.

ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley said, “ValueLicensing have been working to get appropriate disclosure for some years and this Order is the result of that work and more recently disclosed documents.

“This is a further stage enabling a better understanding of how Microsoft dealt with the second-hand software market which brings a liability trial one stage closer.”

The case has had several twists over the years, not least Microsoft’s “Hail Mary” attempt to make it about copyright rather than the allegation that it deliberately stifled the sale of secondhand software licenses. This latest turn might eventually give an intriguing insight into how the US biz dealt with the market while encouraging customers to embrace subscriptions.

Microsoft will phase out the current licensing structure for Azure VMware Solution (AVS). This will eliminate one option for organisations to use VMware in the cloud without licensing VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) themselves. Existing customers have until August 2027 to transition.

Under the current version of AVS, the necessary licenses for vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX, and other components are included in the service Microsoft provides. That model is being phased out. Starting October 31, 2026, Microsoft will no longer sell new AVS environments that include these VMware licenses.

Going forward, customers must have their own VCF license from Broadcom, reports The Register. They can then use it within AVS via the “Bring Your Own License” model, also known as AVS VCF BYOL. Existing users of the current setup must transition by August 30, 2027, at the latest. After that, their existing environments will no longer run the same way.