Slack, the office chatting service, has filed an antitrust complaint versus Microsoft in the European Union, accusing the tech titan of anti-competitive behavior for illegally bundling its rival Teams product with its Cloud-based productivity suite.
Slack on Wednesday disclosed that Microsoft unfairly bundled its Teams instant messaging platform, which is similar to Slack, into its Office 365, a package of email and other populary used business operating system. Slack said that Microsoft forces companies to install it for millions and restricts its removal.
According to Microsoft spokesperson, the company created Teams "to combine the capability to connect via video, because that is what people want." The spokesperson also said that with the pandemic, "the market has embraced Teams in record numbers while Slack suffered from its absence of video-conferencing," Foo Yun Chee quoted the spokesperson in a Reuters report.
Slack Technologies's antitrust claim against Microsoft - days before four big tech group top executives are to testify before Congress on similar issues - is the latest drama in an industry stirred up in debates and investigations over monopolistic business practices.
In a statement, Slack general counsel David Schellhase claimed that Microsoft is "reverting to past behavior... and created a weak, copycat product and linked it to their dominant Office product, force installing it and blocking its removal," Todd Bishop, Monica Nickelsburg and Taylor Soper wrote in their Geek Wire story.
In further comments to Financial Times, Slack executives disclosed that they are asking regulators of the European Union to quickly move to make sure that Microsoft cannot continue to illegally leverage its influence from one market to another by bundling products. Microsoft said in a statement on Wednesday that the company looks forward to giving the European Commission more information and answering its questions.
Based out of San Francisco, Slack Technologies which went public last year has been rising rapidly. The group posted $202 million in revenue for its February-April quarter, advancing 50 percent from the same quarter in 2019. Slack also reported 122,000 paid subscriptions, growing 28 percent from when the time it went public in April last year.
Videoconferencing has witnessed an increase in popularity as people telecommute because of lockdowns intended to slow the spread of coronavirus. Other companies include Zoom Video Communications, Alphabet's Google, Facebook, and Cisco.
Schellhase said the legal challenge, which has been long in the making, could be followed by a similar action against Microsoft in the U.S. As Slack's complaint is specific in nature, it is unlikely that other companies would join its case.
