This is What Matters in the EU Antitrust Case Against Microsoft Teams (Premium)

The EU antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with Office raises numerous issues worth discussing. Granted, I wrote an editorial on this topic back in April, but that was triggered by reports about the negotiations between Microsoft and the European Commission (EC) and largely covered the original Slack complaint that led us to this point. But now that the EC is moving forward---indicating that those negotiations broke down---we can perhaps understand how its research and discussions with both sides resulted in a formal investigation.

So, let’s identify the issues that matter most in an investigation that may very well end with antitrust charges against Microsoft. (And please do (re)read my previous editorial if you’re not familiar with the original, three-year-old Slack complaint, if needed.)

In its antitrust investigation announcement, the EC says that it will “assess whether Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365.” This already answers one niggling question we had about the informal investigation that preceded this, as there was some confusion about whether the concern was literally Office, the standalone productivity suite, or Microsoft 365/Office 365, the subscription service.

I had argued that it was probably both, and that the use of the term “Office” was meant broadly given the evolution of how its distributed to customers. But the EC never mentions Office as a standalone product, while it does specifically call out Microsoft 365 and Office 365. In retrospect, this makes some sense: Slack targets a business audience just as do the commercial versions of Microsoft 365/Office 365. It would not be concerned about standalone versions of Office, as no businesses of any size would ever purchase such a thing.

The EC defines Teams as “a cloud-based communication and collaboration tool. It offers functionalities such as messaging, calling, video meetings, file sharing and brings together Microsoft's and third-party workplace tools and other applications.” Oddly, the EC does not define Slack, and the term Slack only appears once in the announcement, and then only to acknowledge that it was this company that filed the complaint that led to the investigation.

So I will turn to Wikipedia, our arbiter of all knowledge, for a definition. Slack, I am told, is “an instant messaging program … it has also been adopted as a community platform. Users can communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called workspaces … In addition to these online communication features, Slack can integrate with other software.”

And here I see an obvious concern: the EC’s definition of Teams underplays how much functionality this offering provides, and it makes Slack and Teams seem more co...