EU Commission: Slack vs Microsoft
Last Wednesday (22 July 2020) Slack filed an EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft in what is the most recent development in a string of incidents since Microsoft tried to acquire and then pulled out of purchasing Slack in back in 2015. This is most certainly a well trodden path whereby the upstart comes up against big tech such as Microsoft.
The allegation, Teams a Microsoft product comes prepackaged in the Office suite which is already heavily market dominant — a tactic that Slack argues is uncompetitive. The case against Slack is fairly simple to comprehend — most people working with the Office suite would agree that a modern collaboration tool has become a necessity over the last couple of years — addressing a key shift in the way people want to work and collaborate. It is therefore hard to imagine being able to collaborate without tools such as Slack and Teams. The demand (especially this year) is there, so where does fair supply come from?
This bears striking resemblance to the case against Microsoft with Internet Explorer, the allegation there being the product was bundled with Windows, hard to uninstall and therefore restricted consumer choice. I speak for all of us when i say that we were all happy when the ruling came out against Microsoft, which essentially paved the way for greater consumer choice with the likes of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox — which have ultimately given us much orders of magnitude better products and even acted as the catalyst to spur development by Microsoft to play catch up with Edge and to can IE entirely.
This begs two questions:
- If there is any chance for tech startups to grow much beyond the point whereby they land on the horizon of big tech’s radar? Is is right (in a legal sense and in terms of whats best for the consumer) for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft to abuse their position as market leaders to acquire or decimate competition seemingly at will, or is there just enough competition between them all to allow for optimal consumer choice? And;
- Is Slacks ambition admirable or have they all but admitted defeat by doing so?
