Tuesday, June 25th 2024
Microsoft Faces EU Scrutiny for Alleged Abusive Bundling of Teams
The European Commission has preliminarily concluded that Microsoft breached EU antitrust rules by tying its Teams communication product to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 productivity suites. The Commission considers Microsoft dominant in the global SaaS productivity applications market and is concerned that since at least April 2019, the company has been unfairly promoting Teams by bundling it with core productivity applications.
This practice allegedly restricts competition in the communication and collaboration products market, prevents customers from choosing whether to acquire Teams, and may limit interoperability with competitors' products. The Commission fears this could hinder innovation and harm customers in the European Economic Area, potentially violating Article 102 of the TFEU, which prohibits abuse of a dominant position.
Despite Microsoft's recent changes to Teams distribution, the Commission deems these insufficient to address its concerns. The investigation, initiated following complaints made last year by Slack Technologies and alfaview GmbH, has led to a Statement of Objections being issued. This allows Microsoft to examine relevant documents and respond to the allegations.
"We are concerned that Microsoft may be giving its own communication product Teams an undue advantage over competitors, by tying it to its popular productivity suites for businesses. And preserving competition for remote communication and collaboration tools is essential as it also fosters innovation on these markets. If confirmed, Microsoft's conduct would be illegal under our competition rules. Microsoft now has the opportunity to reply to our concerns." — Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy
If found in violation, Microsoft could face fines up to 10% of its annual worldwide turnover and be required to implement remedies. The Commission notes that there is no legal deadline for completing the investigation, and its duration depends on various factors including case complexity and the company's cooperation. The Commission emphasizes that this preliminary view does not prejudge the investigation's final outcome.
Source:
European Commission
This practice allegedly restricts competition in the communication and collaboration products market, prevents customers from choosing whether to acquire Teams, and may limit interoperability with competitors' products. The Commission fears this could hinder innovation and harm customers in the European Economic Area, potentially violating Article 102 of the TFEU, which prohibits abuse of a dominant position.
"We are concerned that Microsoft may be giving its own communication product Teams an undue advantage over competitors, by tying it to its popular productivity suites for businesses. And preserving competition for remote communication and collaboration tools is essential as it also fosters innovation on these markets. If confirmed, Microsoft's conduct would be illegal under our competition rules. Microsoft now has the opportunity to reply to our concerns." — Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy
If found in violation, Microsoft could face fines up to 10% of its annual worldwide turnover and be required to implement remedies. The Commission notes that there is no legal deadline for completing the investigation, and its duration depends on various factors including case complexity and the company's cooperation. The Commission emphasizes that this preliminary view does not prejudge the investigation's final outcome.
31 Comments on Microsoft Faces EU Scrutiny for Alleged Abusive Bundling of Teams
Teams is just one problem with MS, among many and more severe ones, like data collection and privacy, monopolistic consolidation of other markets like gaming, and AI
Frankly there's no excuse for it being so bad.
Even app itself is not really stable:
- sometimes it grows up to multiple GB in RAM (maybe memory leak) and then Windows kills it, it does not restart, you do not know whether it closed until you hover on tray icon (Windows bug),
- new version do not work with some cheap cameras and MS directs you to "compatible" ones, and old (working) version work only till restart, after restart it switches to new one automatically,
- app restarts itself every few days (probably updating) and after restarting it even do not go back to previous view,
Unstable, mediocre, with multiple bugs growing in time which possible never will be fixed properly - it looks like small team of few people is working on it after work-hours.
needs to diehas no place on Windows (or MS) when much more efficient frameworks already exist.really not a fan of nodejs and electron but if it can run a visual studio code, it should run a chat app, up to the developers to improve them, if you have bad code, the language change won’t do miracles in most cases
The EU could be pulling Microsoft up on much more significant, more consumer-relevant charges related to ignoring user choice for browser, default apps, privacy violations, advertising, etc - but no, nothing about that. The huge US vs Microsoft antitrust lawsuit of 2001 is basically ready for a re-run. Microsoft have broken most of the same rules all over again but this time round they get a free pass? Why is that?!
There is no rational justification for this statement. While Microsoft has its share of criticisms, it does not prevent you from purchasing alternative software.
We missed the train during the pandemic. Hard. And Teams is still leagues better than these leaky shit apps like Zoom. Security and correct data handling is key here and MS has the weight to keep that constant investment going.
Still, I'm ALL FOR an EU initiative, state-driven noncommercial suite of internet services that comply with EU standards and keep the data on the continent. We need this. And we shouldn't be using the market. There's enough brains in our universities. Use them and make it an R&D oriented thing carried by the member states, then release it and place governance at the EU level. Now everyone's involved and invested and the user base can access a free service paid by tax money and not infested with ad-driven bullshit.Did you get a hold of the new version of Teams yet? Its... not an improvement if you ask me. Also it seems the service is losing reliability, as in, components might or might not be loaded/working, plugins can be absent (like giphy, or smilies in chat), statuses can be plain wrong or heavily delayed, there's really no end to the little issues that eventually 'fix' themselves. Its clear the cloud needs a LOT of continuous work to keep it 'reliable' for end users.
I'm like, ok. Fine if you're in enterprise environments... its not bad to have a half hour off because the systems don't work. But privately? Not in a million years do I want this nonsense.So far these self destructive actions have been EU victories, exclusively. MS lost the browser war, they lost the media player war, in part because of the EU. They are simply persistent motherfckers, but so is the EU.
In the end we're an immense piece of the world economy and culturally easy to get a foothold in for US companies. They will comply. All of them. Every time. Look at Apple.
Apple is happy to have a reason to charge more for everything.
See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_bundling#Advantages_and_disadvantages
I don't think the EU had anything to do with the "loss of media player" as it is more like people started streaming everything on YouTube. If anything, Apple had far more impact with ipod and iphone and itunes just absolutely dominating digital music market.
Microsoft has already unbundled Teams from their office suites, so what more does EU want?
In some cases, those features it's missing are the sole remaining reason that customer is still using Microsoft for their email in the first place. They literally have no idea what their paying customers are paying them for in the first place :\