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Microsoft Hooked the Government on Its Products With Freebies. Could Elon Musk’s Starlink Be Doing the Same?
The tech billionaire and Trump adviser “donated” Starlink service to the White House. The move resembles a previous maneuver by Microsoft, which used “free” trials to lock in costly upgrades across the federal government.
Microsoft began offering the federal government “free” cybersecurity upgrades and consulting services in 2021, after President Joe Biden pressed tech companies to help bolster the nation’s cyber defenses. The company knew the proverbial catch was that, once the free trial period ended, federal customers who had accepted the offer and installed the upgrades would effectively be locked into keeping them because switching to a competitor at that point would be costly and cumbersome. During our Microsoft investigation, salespeople told me that within the company the explicit “end game” was converting government users to paid upgraded subscriptions after the free trial and ultimately gaining market share for Azure, its cloud platform.
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