Antitrust clouds continue to gather over Microsoft's European business A trade association of mostly European cloud providers and Amazon Web Services has filed an application to "actively participate" in a probe by Germany's competition watchdog to examine the dominance of Microsoft. The Bunderskartellamt – Federal Cartel Office – announced in March it was considering whether Microsoft posed a …
If the playing field was level, you would be right.
But in case you hadn't noticed, this article was not about products from other companies not being competitive, but about MS's ability to make it more expensive to try to compete, thus reducing their ability to try.
When it comes to Slack, it's about MS being able to give away a product to remove a whole market segment that other companies inhabit. And when their competitor's products are no longer viable, and Teams has become ubiquitous, MS can ramp up the price, either of Teams itself, or more likely the subscription for MS Office 365, or whatever it's called nowadays.
This is why it's being examined by the competition watchdogs.
The issue is that Microsoft cannot compete technically with the likes of AWS and GCP, so they have to try coerce customers in to Azure using dodgy licensing practices that leverage their dominance in the Office productivity space. It is the legality of driving Azure adoption through restrictive Office 365 licensing terms that I suspect will be scrutinised by the regulators.
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