Politico reports that the European Union is poised to launch an antitrust case against Microsoft for abuses related to Teams. The publication cites multiple sources.
The case is based on a 2020 complaint from Slack, the primary victim of Microsoft’s enormous successes with Teams. According to that complaint, Microsoft has abused its market dominance illegally and in an anti-competitive manner by tying Teams to its “market-dominant” Office productivity suite, “force-installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.”
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Slack, by comparison, offers “an open, flexible approach that compounds the threat to Microsoft because it is a gateway to innovative, best-in-class technology that competes with the rest of Microsoft’s stack,” the complaint adds. Of course, Slack was acquired for $27.7 billion by Salesforce in 2021, undercutting those claims dramatically and in the same way that AOL’s acquisition of Netscape undercut a U.S. antitrust against Microsoft in the late 1990s.
I would also point out that Slack calling Teams “a weak, copycat product” is more than a bit of a stretch given how much more functionality that the latter provides than the former. Teams may have started out a Slack-like product in 2017, but by 2020, and certainly today, it is much more feature-rich than that.
Anyway, the EU has reviewed the Slack complaint and will apparently soon announce a statement of objections detailing how Microsoft Teams violates EU antitrust laws. “In recent weeks, [the European Commission has] sent requests to rivals and customers over what evidence it plans to use, [Politico’s sources] said. Such ‘access to file’ requests are often a prelude to sending objections after a formal investigation has been launched.”