Microsoft has mostly managed to stay in the good books of the EU’s competition regulators since the late aughts, when it received a record $1.3 billion fine in 2008 for failing to properly comply with an earlier antitrust decision about interoperability, and settled another major antitrust investigation in 2009 by giving Windows users a choice of default browser when they fired up the operating system.
However, Microsoft’s cultural transformation into a supposedly less aggressive entity has recently been called into question. The company has started ignoring Outlook and Teams users’ browser choices by opening links in its Edge browser. It might soon face a British antitrust probe over contractual terms that arguably lock customers into its cloud (rival Amazon is also in those crosshairs). And now it’s under investigation by the EU antitrust directorate again.
This time it’s about Teams, which Microsoft includes with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 enterprise suites. Slack, the work messaging app now owned by Salesforce, complained about this bundling back in 2020, and the Commission has now opened a formal probe to see if Microsoft is breaking any laws.
“Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become indispensable for many businesses in Europe,” said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. “We must therefore ensure that the markets for these products remain competitive, and companies are free to choose the products that best meet their needs.”
Specifically, the Commission said Microsoft might be breaking EU competition rules by not giving its productivity-suite customers a choice about getting Teams when they subscribe, and “may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings.” Microsoft says it will "continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns.”
Meanwhile, Semafor reports that, under the terms of Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership, OpenAI’s customers can’t run its models on any cloud other than Microsoft’s—meaning companies using Amazon, Google, or Oracle’s clouds have to either switch to Microsoft or opt for rival A.I. models.
As the article notes, this gives those A.I. rivals an advantage over OpenAI. But it also further fills out the picture of the new-old Microsoft that’s emerging: eager to shut out the competition, and getting into trouble for it once again.
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David Meyer
