Microsoft will apparently separate the Teams video conferencing and messaging software from its in-house Office package and will charge different prices if Teams is to be included as an option. This is intended to prevent an antitrust investigation by the European Commission. These plans are a response to complaints from competitor Slack, which considers the integration of teams into Microsoft 365 services to be inadmissible.
However, Slack’s complaint is not the only one. “We have received several complaints from Microsoft, including from Slack, regarding Microsoft’s behavior in relation to its Team product,” said a spokesman for the European Commission sea Reuters. “As you know, the evaluation is still ongoing, so we cannot comment further on it.”
Various offers against a fine of millions
In the future, buyers of Microsoft’s Office should be able to decide whether teams should be included, it is said. Then the prices would be adjusted accordingly. 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.
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 will be 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.
(fds)
