Brad Smith doesn’t spare the competition in his speech at MWC. In a clear swipe at Apple, he points out the importance of free choice in Azure.

Microsoft CEO Brad Smith had the honor of closing out the first day of MWC last night with Dell figurehead Michael Dell. During his keynote, Smith spoke about the “AI economy” and outlined policies his company aims to make the technology accessible to everyone. Smith toured Europe for two weeks and announced a billion-dollar investment in Germany and a collaboration with France’s Mistral AI on behalf of Microsoft.

The fact that a conference like MWC is the ideal opportunity to heat up competition became clear again when Smith talked about freedom of choice in the Azure cloud. “We want to give developers choice in which platforms they use. We have an app store with Azure Marketplace, but customers don’t have to use it if they don’t want to. And if customers want to move to a different cloud, it’s up to us to make that happen.”

Criticism of Apple, refutation against Google

With this statement, Smith takes aim at two of his biggest competitors. It’s nothing less than a direct swipe at Apple. The iPhone maker is under pressure to revise its App Store guidelines in Europe, but the proposed adjustments are not well received by everyone. By removing support for web apps from iOS because they no longer have to run exclusively on Webkit, Apple is showing its monopolistic side. Microsoft had previously called the adjustments a “step in the wrong direction,” and the European Union now appears to agree.

Smith also takes Google into account, although those words would make them choke on coffee. The timing couldn’t be better for Smith: Google complained to Reuters about Microsoft’s cloud monopoly on Monday morning. According to Google, Microsoft limited choice by imposing unfavorable licensing terms on smaller cloud providers that wanted to offer external applications via Azure.

Microsoft adjusted this rule last summer, emphasizing in a statement to Reuters that “at least a hundred cloud providers are already benefiting from the adjustments made.” To appease European regulators, the software giant also separated Teams from the Office bundle. Despite these concessions, Microsoft is heading toward an antitrust investigation.