Microsoft Accused of ‘Stealth’ Tactics in Giving Teams to NHS for Free

The UK government is to investigate whether Microsoft has gained an unfair advantage in winning National Health Service technology contracts, as a result of giving NHS bodies free use of Microsoft Teams once the pandemic struck.

According to Mail Online, UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will be looking at claims as to whether Microsoft has taken over health IT systems “by stealth”, by bundling its free offer with the other productivity software it sells.

The claim is that collaboration software specialists may have lost out on sales, as a result of the bundling.

Microsoft made Teams available to all NHS staff in March last year to aid in the early battle against Covid, while helping enable remote working during a time when many employees did not have the resources to do so. The NHS said at the time that Teams would be free for “a limited-time period”.

NHS revealed in the following May that half a million messages were being sent every day on the platform, with the average number of weekday meetings hitting 90,250.

The NHS is the biggest employer in the UK, with around 1.2m staff, and health is a major target market for Microsoft. Mail Online reports that smaller businesses are understood to have told Kwarteng’s officials that the Teams move was an “exercise in control” to avoid open competition.

Microsoft is already being investigated by UK competition regulator the Competition & Markets Authority (CMA), over its plan to acquire Nuance for $16bn. Nuance is a voice recognition software firm that is a specialist in the health market.

In July 2020, collaboration software firm Slack Technologies, a subsidiary of Salesforce, filed a competition complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission.

The complaint claimed Microsoft had “abused its market dominance” to “extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law”. Slack said Microsoft had “illegally tied” its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, “force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers”.

In October this year, the European Commission made the first move in taking up the Slack complaint, by issuing a questionnaire to rivals of the Teams app, asking them if its bundling with other products was seen as anti-competitive, and if they had lost any business through it.

Microsoft has not publicly commented on the European Commission’s move to investigate.