Microsoft may face formal EU complaint over Teams app despite unbundling efforts - report
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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) efforts to unbundle Teams from its Office product to allay the European Commission, or EC, antitrust concerns seem to have fallen flat as the EU regulator is preparing a statement of objections to send to the company, which could come in the next few months, Bloomberg News reported citing people with knowledge of the matter.
On Aug. 31, Microsoft said that starting Oct. 1 it would unbundle Teams from its Office product and make it easier for rival products to work with its software in an effort to address European competition concerns.
The tech giant's proposal to sell Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites without Teams at a lower price, among other efforts, was not enough to satisfy the regulator's concerns, according to the report.
In July, the EC said that it had opened a formal investigation to check if Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling its chat and video app Teams to its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365. Slack Technologies â the workspace messaging app owned by Salesforce (CRM) â had filed a complaint in July 2020 alleging that Microsoft illegally tied Teams to its dominant productivity suites.
Microsoft declined to comment on the EU's next steps, according to the report.
Earlier in September, Zoom Video Communications (ZM) reportedly discussed Microsoft's bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 with regulators globally, just days after its CEO suggested that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission should look into the issue.
The tech giant faces at least two other complaints filed to EU regulators. They include one by a European cloud group with Amazon.com's (AMZN) AWS among its members which accuses Microsoft of using unfair licensing practices to lure EU customers to its cloud infrastructure. Another is a complaint submitted by German company NextCloud in 2021 which is about Microsoft bundling its OneDrive cloud system with Windows, the report added.
The Redmond, Wash.-based company is also facing a probe from EU's digital antitrust regulators, who are evaluating if Bing, Edge and Advertising services should come under the scope of the bloc's Digital Markets Act.

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