Microsoft allegedly wants to separate the video conferencing and messaging software teams from its in-house office package in order to prevent an antitrust investigation by the European Commission. The Financial Times reported, citing two anonymous people who knew directly about the plan. However, negotiations are still ongoing and an agreement with the EU regulators is not certain. The offer is therefore a reaction to the complaint of the competitor Slack, who considers the integration of teams into the Microsoft 365 services to be inadmissible. In the future, when purchasing Microsoft’s Office, you should be able to decide whether teams should be included, the newspaper summarizes the project.
decision not yet made
With the decoupling, Microsoft wants to prevent the first antitrust review in the EU in more than a decade, writes the Financial Times. Because the US company had not given Windows users a free choice of Internet browsers, it had to pay a fine of half a billion euros in 2013. Since then, Microsoft has tried to avoid legal battles and the Teams plan is part of that strategy. However, it is not yet clear whether the outsourcing of the messaging software is sufficient for the cartel authorities. The EU Commission did not comment on the British newspaper’s request.
Slack contacted the European Commission in the summer of 2020 and claimed that Microsoft was acting “illegally and anti-competitively” by including teams in the Office package. Millions of customers have been forced to install, the deinstallation is prevented. This would conceal the true costs. For Slack, this was a turnaround after the US provider initially made fun of teams. The corona pandemic and the massive switch to working from home were responsible for the change in opinion. Video conferencing software providers in particular benefited enormously from this – including Slack and Microsoft with teams.
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