Microsoft faces EU anti-trust probe in Salesforce clash

European Commission said it opened the formal investigation to examine if Microsoft breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling Teams to its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages

Thu, 27 Jul, 2023 - 15:55

Stephanie Bodoni and Samuel Stolton

Microsoft faces an EU probe over concerns that it is driving out competition by unfairly bundling its Teams video conferencing app with its popular business software suite.

The European Commission said it opened the formal investigation to examine whether Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling Teams to its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 packages.

The EU’s antitrust branch said Microsoft’s actions may have given Teams an advantage over rivals by not giving customers choice over viable alternatives and the company may have also limited operability with rival software platforms.

Demand for videoconferencing boomed after the coronavirus pandemic that consigned hundreds of millions of workers to their homes. But critics say Microsoft was able to leverage its power over PC software to make Teams the easiest option for remote workers already using programs like Word and Excel.

The EU’s new probe comes three years after Salesforce messaging platform Slack made a complaint to the EU’s antitrust watchdog. The commission told journalists it will first seek to “identify if there’s a breach of antitrust” rules.

Microsoft has spent years battling antitrust regulators in the US and Europe over complaints that it unfairly tied products and blocked rivals’ access to the desktop Windows software.

But it’s not faced any formal EU market dominance scrutiny in a decade, since a 2013 fine for not complying with a pledge to offer a choice of web browsers.