Slack accuses Microsoft of illegally crushing competition

Microsoft is undeniably one of the Big Tech elite, given its size, wealth and stock market value. But the software giant has stood apart from Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple in one important respect: Microsoft, once the bully of the tech world, has escaped antitrust scrutiny so far.

Now Slack Technologies, whose popular chat and collaboration software has become embedded in the daily routines of millions of workers at thousands of companies, is hoping to change that.

Slack said Wednesday that it had filed a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission, accusing the tech giant of using its market power to try to crush the upstart rival.

Slack claims that Microsoft has illegally tied its collaboration software, Microsoft Teams, to its dominant suite of productivity programs, Microsoft

Office, which includes Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. That bundling tactic, Slack contends, is part of a pattern of anti-competitive behavior by Microsoft.

“Slack threatens Microsoft’s hold on business email, the cornerstone of Office, which means Slack threatens Microsoft’s lock on enterprise software,” Jonathan Prince, vice president of communications and policy at Slack, said in a statement.

Slack’s complaint is just a first step. The European Commission must decide if a formal investigation is warranted. In recent years, European regulators have more aggressively pursued antitrust actions against large tech companies than American officials.

But the complaint threatens Microsoft’s recent ability to largely avoid regulatory scrutiny. Federal and state regulators in the United States are investigating whether the other tech giants have broken antitrust laws. On Monday, the chief executives of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook will testify before Congress, which is also looking into them.

Under European rules, the Slack complaint is not made public. But in a news conference, David Schellhase, Slack’s general counsel, said the company sought an order to remove Teams from Office, make it a stand-alone product and charge a “fair price.”

In a statement, Microsoft said, “We created Teams to combine the ability to collaborate with the ability to connect via video,” noting that Slack lacks video conferencing.

Microsoft, the statement added, is “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.” And the company said that it looked forward to “providing additional information to the European Commission and answering any questions they may have.”