When I saw the news reports that Slack had filed a competition complaint against Microsoft in the European Union, I started having flashbacks. Those powerful memories from more than two decades ago became especially vivid when I read the company’s press release announcing the presentation.
Slack did not provide a copy of his full letter to the EU, but I read the blog post making his complaint. And then I read it again, and my reaction both times was “Are you kidding me?”
If you were for United States v. Microsoft Corp., the historic antitrust case that nearly split the company in two in the late 20th century, likely felt the same flood of memories.
Just look at these accusations:
Microsoft has illegally linked its Teams product to its market-leading Office productivity suite, forces millions to install it, blocks its removal, and hides the real cost to business customers.
Illegal tying, of course, was one of the main complaints in United States v. Microsoft. The U.S. Department of Justice and the state attorney general who filed the case argued that Microsoft had illegally linked its Internet Explorer browser to its dominant Windows product. (It is worth noting that this link was only one of several alleged anti-competitive behaviors in the lawsuit.)
And the part about blocking the ability to remove teams is also a callback to one of the most notorious testimonials in that trial. Microsoft argued that removing Internet Explorer from Windows would break the operating system. To test it, they delivered a browser-less version of Windows 95 that was “so broken that its only feature was an error message.” And Microsoft executive Jim Allchin gave cruel testimony that did not help Microsoft’s case.
More on those allegations in a minute, but first let’s focus on this stunning Slack, which explicitly mentions antitrust action from the 1990s era:
Microsoft is reverting to past behavior. 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 swift action to ensure that Microsoft cannot continue to illegally harness its power from one market to another by bundling or linking products.
The notion that Teams is a “copycat product” that deliberately simulates Slack is, well, interesting. It sounds true on its surface. After all, Slack launched in 2013, and Microsoft didn’t announce teams until 2016. But there is a catch. The teams did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it was a replacement for Skype for Business (announced in 2014), which was a name change for Lync (2010), which succeeded Office Communicator, the Office Communication Server product client dating back to 2005.
That’s a continuous line of business communication products, all from the Office family, that offered voice calls, text chat, and live meetings, with links to OneNote, Outlook, and other Office applications. The teams took those same features and put them into a more modern cross-platform interface. It was also combined with SharePoint, OneDrive, and Outlook features and, most importantly, moved everything from on-premises servers to the cloud.
Given that uninterrupted 15-year history, it’s pretty hard to argue that Microsoft took an unrelated product (equipment) and linked it to Office 365. And as Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson pointed out in his 2000 trial, the “crucial requirement … for a binding technology liability finding “is that the products are considered” separate products “. Teams is clearly well integrated with the rest of Office 365, not screwed in the way Internet Explorer was for Windows 95.
This case is not being tried in the federal courts of the United States, of course, and that linkage precedent is probably the reason.
As for the rest of Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior invocations in the 1990s, well, we really live in different times.
I am not a lawyer and therefore will not attempt to write a legal summary here. But as someone who has studied this topic for decades, I can make a strong argument that Slack’s comparisons to Microsoft’s behavior during the browser war are facing current events.
Microsoft does not have a monopoly in 2020 as it did in Windows in the 1990s. The illegal linking charge was arguably the weakest part of the Justice Department case, which focused more on what the judge called “negotiating arrangements exclusive. ”
In 1995, when Netscape’s browser was taking the world by storm, Microsoft had an indisputable monopoly on means of accessing the Internet. There were no mobile devices, and Apple’s Mac business was anemic (the company would rehire Steve Jobs in December 1996).
See Also: Slack Introduces Slack Connect to Improve Collaboration Between Businesses | Slack Launches New Tools, Administrator Certification Program | New to Microsoft Teams: Teams-Skype interoperability plus chat pop-ups | Who will win the epic battle for hegemony of online meetings?
As part of that monopoly on Windows, Microsoft made life miserable for Netscape. They banned original equipment manufacturers from putting icons for third-party software (like Netscape Navigator) on the Windows desktop, and also closed deals with PC manufacturers, software providers, content providers, and Internet service providers to make the Internet Explorer the default browser and lock out of Netscape.
And yet, as the judge noted, that anti-competitive behavior failed:
Microsoft’s multiple agreements with resellers did not deprive Netscape of the ability to access all PC users worldwide to offer the opportunity to install Navigator. The browser can be downloaded from the Internet. It is available through countless retail channels. It can (and has been) shipped directly to an unlimited number of homes. The evidence does not show exactly how it managed to do so, but only in 1998, for example, Netscape was able to distribute 160 million copies of Navigator, which contributed to an increase in its installed base from 15 million in 1996 to 33 million in December 1998.
A quarter century later, it’s hard to argue that Microsoft can use its 2020 market power to harm Slack for “behavior that deprives customers of access to the tools and solutions they want.”
For starters, Microsoft has strong competition in the Apple PC market. In fact, if you go to the official help pages for “the new Slack experience for desktop”, all the screenshots are from Mac. Slack doesn’t reveal detailed statistics for its customer base, but I wouldn’t be surprised to know that 50 % of your desktop traffic comes from Macs.
And then there is Slack on mobile devices, where Microsoft has no control over the platform.
Are you running Windows 10? If you want Slack, go to the Microsoft store, as I just did, and install the official Slack app. (It’s free.)
If you don’t like computers, feel free to click this great Uninstall button. Works.
In short, Slack has many, many ways to put your product in the hands of customers and prospects. Much more than Netscape 25 years ago. The fact that Teams is installed as one of several programs along with Microsoft 365 does not prevent its customers from using Slack, nor does the presence of Word prevent the owner of a Windows PC from using Google Docs.
Finally, the charge that Microsoft uses some kind of evil magic to install Teams, “blocking its removal”, is ridiculous. On Windows 10 PCs, there is an Uninstall button exactly where you would expect to find it in Settings. I just used that button to successfully remove the application from a virtual machine with Windows 10. On a Mac, you can drag the Teams package to the trash to remove it, just like with any other application.
Slack is confident that the EU has been aggressive with antitrust complaints in recent years. But the fact that European competition authorities have ruled in favor of other credible antitrust claims does not mean that they will approve a laughable claim, which is what this is. Most Microsoft business customers who started using Teams to enable work-at-home strategies during the pandemic do so not because they are forced to, but because it works for them.
In other words, Microsoft’s behavior is not anti-competitive. Maybe it’s just a little too competitive.
