- A complaint has been lodged with the European Commission by a coalition of software companies to put Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior to an end.
- The coalition indicates that the move is a subtle way of phasing them out from the market, which hinders health competition among the companies.
- Microsoft is using its reach and popularity amongst the consumers to push this agenda further.
A complaint has been filed by a coalition of cloud and software companies, with the European Commission against Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior. They bundled up Teams and OneDrive cloud amongst other services with both Windows 11 and Windows 10.
The Coalition had to even out the playing field by including a couple of European based companies, such as open source hosted by cloud storage vendor Nextcloud.
“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the [web] browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating,” said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud.
Shortcomings
The coalition raised the argument that Microsoft was acting in bad faith and trying to phase them out. As such, they requested the European Commision to even out the playing field.
The move will help deter Microsoft from using its position in the operating system sector to kill all its competitors.
The coalition comprises a couple of prominent open source and non-profit companies, for instance, the Free Software Foundation Europe, European Digital SME Alliance and the Document Foundation.
Furthemore, the coalition categorically indicates that the move by Microsoft is not only affecting the consumers and businesses, but also killing healthy competition among the companies.
Microsoft’s wholesome approach
“Microsoft is integrating [Microsoft] 365 deeper and deeper in their service and software portfolio, including Windows. OneDrive 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 [Software-as-a-Service] services,”states the coalition.
As such, the coalition also indicates that while Google, Amazon and Microsoft have managed to grow their market share to 66% while their competitors have further lost their reach in the EU from 26% to 16%.
What is your take on Microsoft’s move? Do you support it? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section.
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