The European Commission has launched an antitrust probe into Microsoft bundling its Teams communications app with its Office suite, on concerns the firm could be cutting out competitors.
The investigation is concerned Vole is “abusing and defending its market position.”
The commission’s antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager said: “Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become indispensable for many businesses in Europe. We must therefore ensure that the markets for these products remain competitive, and companies are free to choose the products that best meet their needs.”
A Microsoft spokesman said the tech giant would cooperate with the commission’s investigation.
“We respect the European Commission’s work on this case and take our own responsibilities very seriously,” he said.
Microsoft was “committed to finding solutions that will address the Commission’s concerns”.
Teams is a platform that allows users to communicate through messages, video calls and file sharing.
The trigger for the commission’s probe was a July 2020 complaint from Slack, a US start-up competitor to Teams which has since been bought by the company Salesforce.
Other rival communications platforms include Zoom, Google Meet and Cisco Webex.
Microsoft bundles Teams with its cloud-based Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites, which offer its popular Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Excel programmes.
The commission said that the shift to cloud-based platforms and apps has allowed more players to enter the market, and noted that such software is usually subscription-based, locking users in longterm.
It underlined that the Microsoft cloud-based suites were “well-entrenched”, and bundling Teams with them could be “restricting competition” in Europe.
“The Commission is concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings,” its statement said.
“These practices may constitute anti-competitive tying or bundling and prevent suppliers of other communication and collaboration tools from competing,” it said, adding that its probe would be carried out as “a priority”.
