EU Examines Microsoft for Alleged Anti-Competitive Practices Involving Office and Teams

On Thursday, the European Union announced that it has initiated an antitrust probe against Microsoft. The investigation focuses on the alleged unfair advantage that Microsoft gains by including its Teams messaging and videoconferencing app with its Office productivity software.

The European Commission, the main competition watchdog for the 27-nation bloc, said it would conduct its in-depth investigation “as a matter of priority”.

The investigation stems from a 2020 announcement by Slack Technologies, maker of popular workplace communication software.

Slack, owned by enterprise software maker Salesforce, claimed that Microsoft abused its dominant market position to eliminate competition – in violation of EU law – by illegally bundling Teams with the Office suite, which includes Word, Excel and Outlook.

“Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become essential for many companies in Europe. That’s why we need to ensure that the market for these products remains competitive,” said EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

“For this reason, we are investigating whether tying Microsoft’s productivity packages to Teams may be against EU competition rules,” he added.

Microsoft said in a statement that it respects “the European Commission’s work on this matter.” It added that it “continues to work with the Commission and remains committed to finding solutions that address its concerns”.

Just last week, German video conferencing company alfaview added its own complaint to Microsoft Teams, claiming that bundling gives the US tech giant an unmatched competitive advantage “that cannot be justified by performance and that competitors such as alfaview cannot match.”

According to the commission, the initiation of an investigation does not determine the outcome in any way.

Europe has been a pioneer in monitoring large tech companies because they have become too dominant a concern. As Brussels has scrutinized Microsoft’s recent deals, however, the company has won.

The EU approved Microsoft’s plan to buy video game maker Activision Blizzard for $69 billion after the company offered to automatically license popular Activision games such as “Call of Duty” to cloud gaming platforms.

Microsoft has also received EU approval to buy the video game company Zenimax and the speech recognition company Nuance.