The European Commission will investigate the technology company Microsoft to determine whether linking the ‘Teams’ application to the installation of the Office office suite respects or not the competition rules of the European Union. This fact was denounced by the communication software provider and competitor of the computer giant ‘Slack’ in July 2020.
The European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager has stressed the importance of maintaining competitiveness in the sector and allowing companies to decide which products they want to use to meet each of their needs, since this type of program is already an indispensable part of the business activity of many companies.
The European Commission has decided to investigate this case to prevent abuses of market position by Microsoft by preventing its users from accessing and using all the programs and software available in Europe as tools for online communication and collaboration.
An investigation will be made into whether there is an unfair advantage
In particular, community services want to investigate whether Microsoft gives a competitive distribution “advantage” to Teams by not giving customers the ability to include or not access to that product when they subscribe to Office 365 or Microsoft 365 packages.
They also want to clarify whether this practice may have limited interoperability between their suite products and other competing offerings, as this would result in anti-competitive barriers that would prevent their customers from opting for suppliers of other similar tools.
Brussels has already informed the company itself and the competition authorities of the Member States of the opening of the in-depth investigation but does not have a predetermined legal deadline to conclude the file and make a decision.
