Back in 1994 the United States filed a civil antitrust complaint against Microsoft for their practice of entering long term contracts with PC manufacturers in which the PC manufacturer would pay Microsoft a fee to license their OS based on the number of systems they sold, regardless of whether or not that system actually came with Windows. This of course made it more expensive to engage Microsoft's competitors such as IBM's OS/2.

PC manufacturers that didn't enter into these deals would have significantly higher licensing costs which put them at a disadvantage to other PC manufacturers, this of course rapidly distorted the market and stunted the spread of alternatives.

Microsoft's cloud tactics of today are so similar that I'm actually surprised that they'd try something like this again.