As before, Microsoft's strategic approach is making enemies.
What you need to know:
☞ A coalition of companies has been established to encourage the European Union to monitor Microsoft and prevent it from packaging programs such as Teams and OneDrive with Windows.
☞ The alliance stated that such bundling by Microsoft would create an unfair playing field.
☞ This is not the first time Microsoft has encountered this problem.
An alliance of 30 enterprises has been established to firmly oppose the danger that technology giants pose to EU companies and shoppers. Although Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all been complained by the alliance, it turned the most direct spearhead to Microsoft.
These companies that joined the alliance repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction with Microsoft's behavior. This is the league’s opening statement on the matter:
“Microsoft is integrating 365 deeper and deeper in their service and software portfolio, including Windows. One Drive is pushed wherever users deal with file storage and Teams is a default part of Windows 11. This makes it nearly impossible to compete with their SaaS services. In the wider context, you see that over the last years, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have grown their market share to 66% of the total European market, with local providers contracting from 26% to 16%. Behavior like this is at the core of this growth of the tech giants and has to be stopped.”
Regarding the alliance's request, they stated that there is no need for a "goalkeeper", which defines it as a service that bundles or pre-installs Microsoft services or related efforts on Windows to "promote" the originally level playing field. For example, Slack believes that the combination of Teams and Office makes it more difficult for Slack to have a reasonable opportunity to attract customers like Microsoft.