Microsoft offers the Teams software in connection with its Office products.
(Photo: IMAGO/Lobeca)
Brussels, Dusseldorf The EU Commission is preparing antitrust proceedings against Microsoft. The reason for this is that the American group combines its video communication software teams with its popular office package and thus possibly creates an unfair market advantage.
Officially, neither the Commission nor Microsoft wanted to comment on the investigation. But they were confirmed to the Handelsblatt in Brussels. The Financial Times first reported on the case.
The market power of American IT companies has occupied the Commission for decades. Investigations are already underway against Apple, Google and the Facebook provider Meta for alleged anti-competitive practices. Microsoft also has experience with the European antitrust authorities.
Ten years ago, the Commission fined the company over half a billion dollars for tying its Internet Explorer Internet browser to its Windows operating system.
In the current case, Brussels is responding to a complaint from Slack, also from the USA. The technology provider – part of Salesforce since 2021 – is developing a collaboration platform for the office that is intended to make digital collaboration with chats, audio and video conferences easier for companies. This puts Slack in direct competition with Microsoft Teams.
Teams and Slack grew significantly during the pandemic
During the corona crisis, both services increased their user numbers significantly. However, Microsoft benefited much more from working from home. Since many companies were already paying for Office, they preferred to introduce Teams. The program was soon considered “the fastest growing product” in the company’s history. Today, the group positions it as a platform for digital collaboration.
Two years ago, Slack complained to the EU Commission that Microsoft was abusing its own market power by bundling teams with the Office package. The group has thus “forced millions of installations, blocked the distance and concealed the true costs from its business customers,” it said in a statement.
In the meantime, talks were going on between Microsoft and the Commission. According to the “Financial Times”, the group offered to do without the automatic installation of teams as part of the Office package. According to a report by the Reuters news agency, an end to free marketing was also under discussion. But it was not possible to find an amicable solution.
In Brussels, however, there are other complaints. The Cispe association, in which Amazon is the largest competitor, complains that Microsoft is using its dominance in productivity software “to direct European customers to its own Azure cloud infrastructure”. Microsoft contradicts the representation.
The German open source specialist Nextcloud, on the other hand, considers the close integration of the OneDrive storage service into the Windows operating system to be anti-competitive – this has a market share of almost 70 percent in the PC market. In this process, the EU Commission recently started a so-called market test and sent out questionnaires to market participants.
The pressure is also growing in Germany. Since March, the Federal Cartel Office has been examining whether Microsoft has “outstanding cross-market importance for competition”. If the authority – as with Alphabet and Meta – comes to this conclusion, it can more easily prohibit practices that endanger competition.
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