Slack vs Microsoft Teams: Excuse me, Slack, your complaint is a joke

I started flashbacks after seeing a news report that Slack filed a competitive motion against Microsoft in the European Union. When I read the company’s press release announcing the application, these strong memories of over 20 years ago became especially clear.

Slack did not provide a full copy of the letter to the EU, but I read a blog post that complained of it. And when I read it again, both my reactions were “is it a joke?”

If you were going to US-Microsoft, a groundbreaking antitrust litigation that split the company into nearly two at the end of the 20th century, you probably felt a similar surge in memory.

See these claims:

Microsoft illegally tied its Teams product to the market-dominant Office productivity suite, forcibly installed it for millions, blocked its removal, and concealed the true cost to corporate customers.

Of course, illegal tying was one of the major complaints between the US and Microsoft. The U.S. Department of Justice and the state attorney general who filed the lawsuit alleged that Microsoft illegally linked its Internet Explorer browser to a major Windows product. (It’s worth noting that this tie was just one of the few anti-competitive actions alleged in the lawsuit.)

The part about blocking the ability to remove a team is also a callback to one of the court’s most infamous evidence. Microsoft claimed that removing Internet Explorer from Windows would corrupt the operating system. To prove that, they provided a version of Windows 95 that didn’t include the “broken” browser 95 because its only function was an error message.

We’ll go into each of these claims in more detail in a minute, but first let’s focus on this weird Slack story that clearly calls for antitrust litigation in the 1990s.

Microsoft is back in the past. They created a vulnerable copycat product, associated it with a major Office product, forced it to install, and blocked its removal. This is a carbon copy of their illegal activity during the “Browser War”. Slack urges the European Commission to take prompt action to prevent Microsoft from bundling or tying products together to keep its power from one market to another unlawfully.

The concept that Teams is intentionally a “copycat” of Slack is interesting. It sounds real on its surface. After all, Slack was launched in 2013 and Microsoft didn’t announce a team until 2016. But there are pitfalls. The team didn’t jump into existence from thin air. This is rather a replacement for Skype for Business (announced in 2014) and a change in the name of Lync (2010), which took over Office Communicator, a client of the Office Communication Server product dating back to 2005.

It is a continuous line of all enterprise communications products in the Office family offering voice calls, text chats, and live meetings with links to OneOffice, Outlook, and other Office apps. The team adopted the same functionality and placed it in a more modern cross-platform interface. We’ve also integrated SharePoint, OneDrive, and Outlook features, and moved everything from on-premises servers to the cloud.

Given that the fifteen-year history is uninterrupted, it’s pretty hard to claim that Microsoft has adopted an unrelated product (team) and associated it with Office 365. And, as Judge Thomas Penfield-Jackson stated in the 2000 ruling, the “critical requirement… the discovery of responsibility for technical cohesion” is that a product is considered an “individual product.” The team is clearly well integrated with the rest of Office 365 and isn’t bound by the way Internet Explorer was in Windows 95.

Of course, this case has not been tried in federal court, and the unity precedent is probably the reason.

For the rest of Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior in the 1990s, well, we’re living in a really different time.

I am not a lawyer, so I will not write a legal summary here. But as someone who has been researching this subject for decades, I can argue firmly that the comparison of Slack’s and Microsoft’s behavior during the browser war is flying in the face of current facts.

Microsoft, like Windows in the 1990s, has no monopoly in 2020. The illegal tying charges were probably the weakest part of the Justice Department’s litigation, which was more focused on what the judges called “monopoly deal arrangements.”

In 1995, when Netscape’s browser swept the world, Microsoft made an indisputable monopoly on how to access the Internet. With no mobile devices, Apple’s Mac business was poor (the company was planning to rehire Steve Jobs in December 1996).

See: Slack Debuts Slack Connect to Improve Business-to-Business Collaboration | Slack Deploys New Tools, Administrator Certification Program | New in Microsoft Teams: Teams-Skype Interoperability and Pop-out Chat Window | Who Wins the Epic Battle of Online Conference Hegemony?

As part of its Windows monopoly, Microsoft has made life disastrous for Netscape. It also prohibits OEMs from placing icons for third-party software (such as Netscape Navigator) on their Windows desktops, reducing transactions with PC manufacturers, software vendors, content providers, and Internet service providers, and making Internet Explorer the default browser. I tried to lock it. From Netscape.

Still, as the judge pointed out, the anti-competitive behavior failed:

Microsoft’s multiple contracts with distributors did not ultimately rob Netscape of its ability to access all PC users around the world to provide the opportunity to install Navigator. The navigator can be downloaded from the internet. Available through countless retail channels. It can (and has) been mailed directly to an unlimited number of households. Although no evidence of how exactly this was achieved, for example, in 1998 alone, Netscape was able to distribute 160 million copies of the navigator, and in 1996, from 15 million to 30 million installed bases. Contributed to the increase. December 1998.

Four centuries later, it’s hard to argue that Microsoft can leverage Skills in 2020 to damage Slack by “depriving customers of access to the tools and solutions they need.”

First of all, Microsoft has strong competition in the PC market from Apple. In fact, when you visit the official New Slack Experience for Desktop help page, the screenshots are all for Mac. Slack does not publish detailed customer base statistics, but it’s not surprising to find that 50% of desktop traffic comes from the Mac.

In addition, mobile devices have Slack and Microsoft has no control over the platform.

Are you running Windows 10? If you need Slack, go to the Microsoft Store as before and install the official Slack app. (It’s free.)

If your team doesn’t like this big[アンインストール]Click the button. I can do it.

In short, Slack has many ways to get your product into the hands of your customers and prospects. Much more than Netscape 25 years ago. The fact that Teams is installed with Microsoft 365 as one of several programs doesn’t prevent customers from using Slack, and the presence of Word makes Windows PC owners use Google Docs. It’s just blocking.

Finally, the accusation that Microsoft uses some kind of evil magic to install Teams, thereby “blocking its removal” is funny. For Windows 10 PC,[設定]Where it should be[アンインストール]There is a button. I used this button to successfully remove the app from my Windows 10 virtual machine. On your Mac, you can remove Teams packages by dragging them to the Trash just like any other app.

Slack relies on the fact that the EU has been active in antitrust claims in recent years. But the fact that European competition authorities have decided in favor of other credible antitrust claims does not mean that they approve of laughing claims. Most Microsoft corporate customers who started using Teams to enable telecommuting strategies during a pandemic do so because they are working for them, not being forced.

In other words, Microsoft’s behavior is not anti-competitive. Maybe it’s just a bit too competitive.

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