Europe opens formal investigation into Microsoft over Teams bundling

The European Commission has started a formal investigation into Microsoft for bundling Teams with Office 365 and Microsoft 365. The antitrust investigation has been a long time coming and is taking place after Slack filed a complaint.

The Commission wants to participate in the investigation to see whether Microsoft has violated European competition rules by bundling communications app Teams as standard in Office 365 and later in Microsoft 365. The Commission is concerned that Microsoft is abusing its market position by thwarting competition. Customers of the cloud service would not have the choice of having Teams bundled with their software. This would give Microsoft ‘a distribution advantage’, the Commission says.

The investigation was started following a complaint that Slack, now part of Salesforce, filed in 2020. Slack states that Microsoft sees that app as a competitor and is therefore trying to counteract it by bundling Teams with the market-dominant Office.

It is not unexpected that the investigation will take place. There were many rumors earlier that this was the case. Microsoft has previously made concessions to the European Commission, including by making it easier to remove Teams from Windows, but those concessions did not go far enough for the EC.