Slack files a competition complaint against Microsoft in the EU

Slack says he has filed an anti-competitive complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission. “The complaint details Microsoft’s illegal and anticompetitive practice of abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in violation of European Union competition law,” Slack said in a statement. Slack alleges that Microsoft has “illegally tied” its Microsoft Teams product to Office and is “forcing it to install it by the millions, blocking its removal and hiding the true cost to business customers.”

“Microsoft is reverting to past behavior,” says David Schellhase, Slack’s general counsel. “They created a weak, copycat product and linked it to their dominant Office product, forced to install it, and blocked its removal, a carbon copy of their illegal behavior during the ‘browser wars’. Slack is asking the European Commission to take action quick to ensure that Microsoft cannot continue to illegally harness its power from one market to another by bundling or linking products. “

Slack has persistently asserted that Microsoft Teams is not a true competitor, in large part because it is more focused on video calls and meetings. Clearly, that’s not true, and Slack and Microsoft have been caught up in a battle for the future of workplace communications for months.

Microsoft claimed that Slack does not have the “breadth and depth” to reinvent work, and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has previously said that Microsoft is “insanely concerned with killing us.”

The competition between the two companies first started nearly four years ago when Slack paid for a full-page newspaper ad to “welcome” Microsoft Teams as a competitor. Microsoft surpassed the use of Slack a year ago and has recently reached a large number of users thanks to the demand related to the pandemic. Microsoft revealed that it had 75 million daily active users of Microsoft Teams in April, and the company may well update that figure during its earnings call later today.

Slack previously revealed that it has 12 million daily active users in October, but the company has not publicly updated this number since then. Slack broke user records in March when more companies turned to remote work.

The European Commission will now evaluate Slack’s complaint to determine if it meets the grounds for a formal investigation. Microsoft has not faced a formal antitrust investigation in Europe since 2008, when the company was finally forced to offer a browser voting option after combining Internet Explorer with Windows. Subsequently, Microsoft was fined $ 730 million for failing to include the browser voting screen in Windows 7 SP1.