European Commission starts investigation into Microsoft Teams bundling | Computer Weekly

▤ Summary

Margrethe Vestager, executive vice-president in charge of competition policy at the European Commission (EC), has said it will start a formal investigation to assess whether Teams and Microsoft 365 bundling is anti-competitive. The EC said it was concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the option to exclude it as part of a subscription package to the company’s office productivity suite. Given the shift to remote working during and since the pandemic, Microsoft has established its Teams collaboration and video-conferencing software as a key component in its cloud-based productivity suite for business customers. The tying or bundling of Teams with the Microsoft Office suite may, according to the commission, be preventing suppliers of other communication and collaboration tools from competing, to the detriment of customers in the EEA. Benioff’s plan is to offer businesses a digital headquaters to enable them to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere, but this strategy risks being undermined if Microsoft Teams becomes established as the de facto standard for enterprise communications.

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