Despite being tentatively on the cards for three years, the EU’s antitrust probe into Microsoft’s bundling of Teams with Office still came as something of a surprise when it was formally launched last month.
At the end of 2022, Reuters reported that Microsoft had been looking to settle with the European Commission over its antitrust concerns.
Microsoft also purported several concessions to avoid an official investigation. It offered to reform its cloud computing practices earlier this year. In April, the Financial Times reported that Microsoft would no longer automatically bundle Teams with Office. Microsoft also suggested reducing the price of its Office product without Teams. Yet in July, the European Commission considered Microsoft’s concessions inadequate, and on Thursday, July 27 2023, the European Commission’s formal probe was initiated.
How did we get here?
“When Teams first launched, Slack did that whole ‘Welcome to the new ways of working, good luck’,” Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-Founder of Empowering.Cloud told UC Today. “Very quickly, Teams did quite well, and Slack was laughing a lot less.”
“Slack complained to the EU that it was anti-competitive that Microsoft had such a lock with Office to bundle a unified communications suite and that it was an unfair advantage.”
Arbuthnot highlighted that this wasn’t Microsoft’s first dalliance with antitrust controversy. In 2008, Microsoft was accused of using its dominant market position in web browsers to bundle Internet Explorer with Windows. It settled in 2009, promising to offer customers a selection of rival browsers. However, in 2013 Microsoft was fined €561 million for failing to abide by that promise.
“This harks back to the browser bundling of old when Microsoft got big fines and told off for bundling their browsers in Windows,” Arbuthnot expanded, “which was considered anti-competitive because they obviously own the desktop and so bundled the browser. They produced a different version of Windows called a browser ballot, so you could choose which browser you preferred.”
“They let that go accidentally for a while, then got fined again. Funnily enough, the browser thing built a better browser, and everybody used (Google) Chrome. Internet Explorer lost market share regardless of that advantage, which is quite interesting.”
Arbuthnot outlined that that antitrust issue mirrors what is transpiring now.
“Slack and others have complained to the EU that it’s anti-competitive to have Teams bundled so tightly with Office,” he said. “Microsoft and the EU were talking, there was nothing official announced from either party, but there were various reports about, ‘Do we create a skew without Teams in? Do we charge an extra couple of dollars for Teams?’ They couldn’t make an agreement, and now there’s an official antitrust investigation.”
“These things move super, super slowly, and the EU will look into it and decide whether it’s unfair for Microsoft to bundle Teams with Office, and you might potentially see some kind of alternate skew where you’re like, ‘I buy M365 minus Teams, and I have to pay extra for Teams in Europe’, and that gives the opportunity for another partner to say, ‘We can do the same thing for a similar price.'”
However, will these concessions be too little, too late for Microsoft’s competitors in UC and collaboration? Has Teams’ market dominance grown close to being unsurpassable? And if so, what does that mean for market competition?
“I think it’s a little bit late now,” Arbuthnot argued. “We’re at 300 million MAU (Teams monthly active users), so stopping that momentum is going to be tough. Net, I think it’s good we have big commissions like the EU looking at this stuff, so the market is competitive. We need choices; we need competition to keep everybody at their A game.”
