Let’s Talk About Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Antitrust (Premium)

Last night, we learned that Microsoft will agree to stop bundling Teams with Office to avoid an EU antitrust probe. But what does that even mean? And what do we know about the complaint that led to the EU investigation in the first place?

With regards to the recent news, we have precious little to go on: it originated via a single report in The Financial Times that is light on details, and no further sources have emerged to back the claim. The gut reaction here is to believe the news because FT is a professional news-gathering organization and not a rumor mill. But it's all a bit unclear at this point.

Here's what the report claims.

Microsoft will stop forcing customers of its popular Office software to also have its Teams video conferencing and messaging app automatically installed on their devices [and] in future, when companies buy Office, they can do it with or without Teams if they wished, but the mechanism on how to do this remains unclear.

Microsoft Teams is included with all commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And my understanding was that customers who subscribed to a Microsoft 365 commercial account would not get Teams when they downloaded and installed the Office desktop suite. But apparently, that's not true: starting in March 2019, Microsoft began installing Teams alongside the Office suite (Windows and Mac), and it also started adding Teams to those PCs that had previously installed the Office suite (on Windows only). Slack filed its complaint against Microsoft with the EU in July 2020.

The people stressed talks are still ongoing and a deal is not certain.

OK, so a deal is not imminent either.

It remains unclear if the tech giant’s offer regarding Teams will be enough to appease concerns of regulators. Slack, which has since been acquired by Salesforce, has asked EU officials to force Microsoft to sell Teams separately from its Office software.

So let's go back and look at the original complaint. What is it that Slack was complaining about? And would this remedy in any way meet its needs?

Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers.

And … yikes. We're already running into some language issues here.

Forgetting for a moment that Microsoft has recently started rebranding most of its Office products and services as Microsoft 365, Slack here is very specifically describing the Office desktop suite and not the broader Microsoft 365/Office 365 offerings. The real abuse here is coming from Microsoft licensing Microsoft 365 in various incarnations to businesses, each of which includes Teams, where the subscriptions that include Office suite access also now include Teams and, as alleged, "force installing" it on existing enrolled PCs.

Does Microsoft block the removal of Teams? I see no evidence of that. This Microsoft 365 support docum...