The legal news could well darken a little more in Europe for Microsoft. The American giant is being sued by OVHcloud for its practices in the cloud market. Nextcloud and nearly 30 other European companies are attacking its OneDrive cloud storage offer.
The integration of Teams in Office is not immune to criticism either. Slack has initiated a procedure with the European authorities, who have been investigating since 2021. Alfaview brings new elements to the file.
A disastrous Teams/Office 365 bundle for the competition
The German publisher of a videoconferencing solution for professionals has filed a complaint with the Commission. It is therefore the second to target the bundle combining Teams and Microsoft’s Office cloud suite.
According to the German company with 500 employees, the tied sale of Teams and Office 365 constitutes a unique and above all unjustified competitive advantage for performance reasons. This advantage would thus constitute a detriment to competition.
Teams was initially launched as an alternative to Skype for Business. The videoconferencing and collaborative application added for free to Office 365 in 2017 has since become an essential tool.
“Linking Teams to the other applications in the Microsoft 365 suite creates a multipolar distribution advantage for the American group,” denounces the general manager and founder of Alfaview, Niko Fostiropoulos.
Insufficient Microsoft concessions
For Slack, Microsoft has “illegally tied its Teams product to its market-dominant Office Productivity suite, forcing its installation for millions of people, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost from business customers.”
The Redmond firm, aware of the risk of sanctions, is offering concessions in the face of growing pressure, such as marketing a less expensive version of Office without integrating Teams.
“We continue to cooperate with the Commission in its investigation and are open to pragmatic solutions that address its concerns and serve the interests of customers,” Microsoft said.
However, these concessions do not satisfy the competition. Alfaview is asking the EU’s antitrust authority to open a formal investigation, saying the remedies offered by its US rival to the Commission are insufficient.
For its anti-competitive practices in Europe, the American publisher has already been fined a cumulative amount of more than 2 billion euros.