Imho it's a very, very weak complaint.
Most businesses are buying that suite for Word/Excel. Teams comes along with it for free from their perspective. That can definitely be anti-competitive.
I agree that Slack's case is pretty weak here. It's hard to see the harm to the consumer when Microsoft's bundle is cheaper than Slack's lowest paid plan.
There is nothing stopping businesses from using Slack.
There is something stopping businesses from using Slack - the fact that Microsoft gives them Teams for free.
To be honest I doubt this will be a successful case. Companies get away with this all the time. I think the Windows/IE case is the only instance I've ever heard of something coming from it.
Teams is not actually free for people who don't want the rest of Office.
That being said, I don't this should be illegal.
Office web apps also have free tiers, although I don't know if there are business licensing restrictions.
I personally don't think it's anti-competitive but I at least see the argument that can be made.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi...
NB I don't know how credible these reports are but I'm not sure that Office 365 "dominates the market" to the same extent as Windows used to.
However people take what is free for granted and don’t consider it a part of the market. For instance, many hold that iOS is a monopoly despite being a minority of the market because you pay Apple for it, where as Android is just free and Google does not get your money for its use.
The numbers given in the article specifically are users not paying customers. As quoted:
> Google's G Suite boss Javier Soltero... did not say how many of those 2 billion users were paid
Additionally it indicates that Office may have more paying users:
> Google said roughly one year ago that 5 million businesses are now paying for G Suite, which pales in comparison to Microsoft Office 365's 200 million monthly active users of its version for businesses.
Likewise, there is no free tier of Office/Microsoft 365, but there are free services that are considered part of this suite. How many of the 200 million monthly active users are customers? How many users were paid? If a person uses the free tier of OneDrive, OneNote, or Skype they are not considered a customer even though they are an active user.
When you compare, you do like for like. The comparison is GSuite to Office 365, and many independent studies have said Google has a larger market share.
Using the online versions allows them to have everybody at the same level all the time, which might mean easier support.
I for one prefer the online versions. They work fairly well in Firefox on Linux. Outlook online is way nicer to use than the installed one. Much, much snappier...
This is what I meant. It’s very clear that Microsoft sees the future as cloud-first, and their traditional installers are still there only for defensive purposes. I bet they’d love to drop them, if they could be 100% sure that this wouldn’t mean losing customers (the ones with old browsers, unwilling to retrain, unwilling to use Sharepoint rather than network folders, etc) and that it wouldn’t weaken their entrenchment (those billions of offline .docx and .xslx are a massive moat that is very hard to abandon for good).
So for an Office365 bundle with x products, you pay the same price whether you use all x products or fewer. The fewer you use, the better for Microsoft and they don't take a hit on revenue.
As with most Microsoft licensing & naming things it is surprisingly complex!
And weird. Like they don't want your money weird.
We have Office 365 for small businesses (or whatever it is called these days). A co-worker needed Visio for something. Nope. Visio is for businesses with Office 365 Enterprise subscription only.
Long story short, ended up with him having to buy a personal copy with the company credit card.