Column by Yuri Litvinenko about blocking software from Microsoft for Russians

For two years after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, Microsoft and users of its enterprise products in Russia followed the unspoken rules of the game. The American company does not disable access to already purchased software, and Russian clients purchase license renewals through vendors. It was one of the vendors, Softline, that unexpectedly announced a change in the rules of the game last week. True, since then it remains unclear what they will be like.

The announcement of Microsoft’s decision to stop access to some cloud services in the Russian Federation was accompanied by a link to the twelfth package of EU sanctions: according to it, from March 20, companies must stop access to enterprise management systems of their Russian counterparties. Both formally and by the letter of the law, only specialized software from Microsoft falls under this description. The original Softline message actually mentioned such unfamiliar products as Dynamics CRM and Power BI.

But then new threatening aspects began to appear in the situation. Based on the following statements, Microsoft should block the entire Microsoft 365 cloud office suite, free services, and security updates. By March 21, companies trying to understand their future are forced to rely only on this information – along with Softline’s assumption that the blocking will be postponed until the end of the month.

But if users froze in confusion, then Microsoft’s Russian competitors, in the third year of the military conflict, had already mastered situational marketing very well. At least two developers of services positioned as an analogue of the corporate messenger Microsoft Teams have already offered users to switch to them on preferential (of course, not forever) terms. Teams was mentioned in one of the “extended lists” of blocked solutions and is not formally related to enterprise management systems. “Heavy artillery” in the form of, for example, 1C was not noticed in the activities – indeed, the disabling of CRM and ERP products is obvious, and there is no one else to go to for them.

But the entrepreneurial spirit of second-tier domestic developers (which has already given rise to memes on social networks) can play a cruel joke on them. Aggressive situational marketing creates the image of products “in reserve” – sometimes useful, but secondary and generally temporary. Businesses that continue to rely on Microsoft solutions have more compelling reasons for this than just habit – for example, a discrepancy between the needs and capabilities of Russian software. So customers are unlikely to start headlong “switching to Russian”: the uncertainty in the market, to which they have become accustomed since 2022, says that for every blocking there will be their own ways to bypass it.