The European Commission (EC) has opened a formal investigation to assess whether Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular suites for businesses, Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

Essentially, the EC is concerned that Microsoft’s bundle of its Office suite with Teams will remove market competition for other communication tools.

The complaint was first raised by Slack in 2020, another communication tool – which suffered a major global outage today – which alleged that Microsoft illegally tied Teams to its dominant productivity suites.

Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free as a replacement for Skype for Business. Like other communication tools for work and business, Teams saw a rise in popularity amid the global pandemic which caused many workers to stay at home.

The continued popularity of remote work has increased the necessity of functional cloud-based communication platforms for businesses.

“Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become indispensable for many businesses in Europe,” Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy, said. “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. This is why we are investigating whether Microsoft’s tying of its productivity suites with Teams may be in breach of EU competition rules.”

As Microsoft includes Teams in its well-entrenched cloud-based productivity suites for business customers, the EC is concerned that the company may be abusing and defending its market position in productivity software by restricting competition for communication and collaboration products.

Often, what leads to unfair market advantage of major companies are one of two things: interoperability blocks, in which products by different companies are not compatible and cannot be used together, or through pricing, where large companies use their market dominance to make their products less expensive than alternatives.

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Interestingly, according to Slack’s official website, it’s communication tools are compatible with many of Microsoft’s Office suite, including its Outlook email, calendar, and OneDrive.

The main concern of the EC is that “Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings.”

By offering it as a free add-on, and not disclosing the real price of Teams, the EC is concerned this may crush competition from other communication tools.

Microsoft has said it is willing to cooperate with the Commission – it’s been fined in the past for similar antitrust laws, such as a major fine in 2009 for forcing Windows users to user Internet Explorer.