Microsoft Teams Rival Seeks Improvements to Tech Giant's Antitrust Settlement Offer

By Edith Hancock

Slack owner Salesforce said the European Union should ask Microsoft to improve its offer to end a yearslong investigation into how it offers its Teams video platform to customers.

The call for improvements to the offer comes after the European Commission--the EU's executive arm--started asking for feedback on a set of pledges that Microsoft made last month. The tech giant is seeking to avoid a hefty fine and end a long-running probe into its packaging of Teams with its office products, launched by EU officials after Slack complained in 2020.

Slack, a key rival to Microsoft's Teams, claimed the way Microsoft sells its Teams service--which provides video calls and other kinds of office collaboration tools--with its productivity suites gives the company an unfair advantage over competitors.

Microsoft offered to make its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software cheaper when sold without Teams compared with corresponding suites sold jointly. It also said it would improve rival platforms' ability to integrate with some Microsoft products and allow European customers to extract messaging data from Teams to use in alternative platforms. The commission started seeking feedback on those commitments last May, giving interested parties one month to have their say.

"The European Commission's investigation affirmed that Microsoft's years of anticompetitive behavior harmed competition, and we recognize that no remedy can turn back the clock or fully restore that lost competition," a spokesperson for Salesforce said, adding that the company supports a binding solution that gives European users meaningful choice and that it wants to work constructively with EU regulators.

"We urge the European Commission to carefully consider the market test feedback and seek improvements to strengthen Microsoft's proposed commitments before accepting them," they said.

Microsoft said in a statement that the company would continue cooperating with the commission and was still hopeful the commitments it had proposed would ease the regulator's concerns.

The tech giant previously tried to appease the EU's antitrust watchdog by offering to sever Teams from its suites in Europe in 2023 and then extending that offer globally, but antitrust officials said earlier adjustments didn't go far enough.

Write to Edith Hancock at [e-mail]

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

06-16-25 1008ET