Slack filed an anti-trust complaint on Microsoft Teams

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Slack has filed an anti-trust complaint on Microsoft Teams in European Union saying that Microsoft is illegally incorporating its Teams service with its Office 365 suite and hiding the real cost of the Teams service from the enterprise customers, Slack wants Microsoft to sell their Teams service separately revealing the true price to the customers instead of bundling it with Office 36 and absorbing the price.

Slack and Microsoft's Teams are major competitors in the market, both are used by several companies to let their employees communicate with each other at one place, a spokesperson of the Commission’s competition division confirmed the complaint and said that "We confirm that we received a complaint by Slack against Microsoft. We will assess it under our standard procedures."

Slack has given a statement to the Financial Times, in the statement Slack has said that "Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers."

They continued to say that this anti-trust complaint is to ensure that "Microsoft cannot continue to illegally leverage its power from one market to another by bundling or tying products." Slack's VP of communications and policy commented on the complaint in a press statement.

Also Read: Microsoft upgrades and adds new features to Teams on its third birthday

"This is much bigger than Slack versus Microsoft — this is a proxy for two very different philosophies for the future of digital ecosystems, gateways versus gatekeepers. Slack offers an open, flexible approach that compounds the threat to Microsoft because it is a gateway to innovative, best-in-class technology that competes with the rest of Microsoft’s stack and gives customers the freedom to build solutions that meet their needs," said Jonathan Prince.

Microsoft has provided a comment on the complaint to Tech Crunch, they said that "We created Teams to combine the ability to collaborate with the ability to connect via video, because that’s what people want. With COVID-19, the market has embraced Teams in record numbers while Slack suffered from its absence of video-conferencing. We’re committed to offering customers not only the best of new innovation, but a wide variety of choice in how they purchase and use the product."

Via, Tech Crunch.