EU launches antitrust investigation into Microsoft Office bundled with Teams

According to Reuters, the European Commission is following up on a complaint from Slake Technologies and is beginning to ask Microsoft’s competitors whether the bundling of Microsoft Teams and Office will bring greater influence to Microsoft, focusing on the period from 2016 to 2021. .

Office, Microsoft

The European Commission has sent a questionnaire to Microsoft’s competitors. In the questionnaire, the European Commission asked Microsoft’s competitors whether bundling products would allow companies to obtain some data, thereby further enhancing their market power and making it more difficult for competitors to compete with them. The European Commission also asked about barriers to entry into the office application market, customer switching costs, and the importance of user data protection.

This move indicates that the EU may launch an antitrust investigation against Microsoft Teams. Microsoft launched Microsoft Teams in early 2017, hoping to compete with Slake Technologies and other companies in the fast-growing office collaboration market. In the past ten years, Microsoft has been fined 2.2 billion euros (approximately US$2.6 billion) by the European Union for so-called “tying” and other practices.

Microsoft Teams is a communication and collaboration software, it integrates chat, video conferencing, file storage, Office365 and other functions. Microsoft Teams is a competitor to services such as Slack. Microsoft disclosed the Microsoft Teams product at an event in New York and released the product globally on March 14, 2017.