Домой United States USA — IT Slack files EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft, cites anti-competitive Teams bundling

Slack files EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft, cites anti-competitive Teams bundling

273
0
ПОДЕЛИТЬСЯ

The team chat software maker argues that Microsoft is forcing millions of customers to install Teams – and hopes to kill Slack in the process.
Slack has filed a complaint with the European Commission that accuses Microsoft of unfairly bundling its Teams collaboration app with its Office 365 suite. That move, Slack argues, allows Microsoft to abuse its market dominance to “extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law. “Microsoft has 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,” Slack said. Microsoft launched Teams three years ago, making the group collaboration application available to Office 365 subscribers. Teams has 75 million daily active users, Microsoft said this week, an increase of 31 million in the past month. Slack’s app arrived in 2015 and has 12 million users, according to its most recent stats from October 2019. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has criticized Microsoft’s behavior on numerous occasions in the past, including claims its rival has inflated user figures. Although Butterfield has said Microsoft is not a direct competitor, he told The Verge in May that Microsoft is “perhaps unhealthily preoccupied with killing us, and Teams is the vehicle to do that.

Continue reading...