I know that HN is generally not sympathetic towards Microsoft, but there are other ways to look at this story too, assuming that the basic facts are correct.<p>Microsoft royally messed up on security of their govt customers. The CISA report from earlier this year is damning. The hack into their own identity systems would have gone undetected but for sharp-eyed sysadmins at the State Department, who happened to have the right license entitlement for logging that let them spot this.<p>Microsoft then, faced with what could have been a calamitous do-not-use order from Uncle Sam, had no choice but to offer up a lot of their security entitlements to their fed customers for free, to try and stop any defections.<p>You could interpret this as an attempt to achieve lockin, and perhaps in the long run that might happen, but I dont know that it was the prima facie reason.
“We don’t believe our offer raised antitrust concerns, and we constructed it specifically to avoid any such issues,” a company spokesperson said. “We talked informally with a White House staffer about this.”<p>I don't know whether the appropriate reaction would be to remain composed, to cry, or to laugh
> which, as a part of the offer, were provided free of charge for a limited time<p>A trojan horse if I ever saw one. Getting $150m worth of consultancy to harden whatever MS products were already there would be one thing. But getting it in the form of time trials is the ultimate "let me build the tallest, most impermeable wall around your castle and then charge you to not fill that with water".