Slack is actually free to use (last I checked), if you don't care about the chat history.
Most "help" is just webpages or ebooks today. All Microsoft did with "HTML Help" was essentially a very early version of EPUB.
I think these are very strange things to complain about.
(Of course, they still would have lost on the other claims involving more egregious behavior.)
The AntiVirus claims set Windows virus/malware safety back by like a decade. Needing to install Security Essentials into XP/Vista instead of it just being out-of-the-box probably cost a lot more dollars to Windows users than if the court had agreed that such security concerns were the domain of the operating system.
The PDF claims that Office shouldn't be allowed to directly export to PDF because that was the domain of paid add-ins also seem silly from 2020.
Counterfactual are hard, but if you see browsers as a sort of "replacement OS as desktop application" then you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!
Web "apps" seem to only increase cross-platform interests, rather than serve to "smooth deficiencies" in a single platform.
> you can see why more competition among OSes would result in the browser being LESS important, not more!
We've seen exactly the opposite in practice: a ton of web "app" innovation occurred when there were a variety mobile "smartphone" OSes with reasonably modern browsers whereas development has shifted much further back to OS-specific apps as mobile devices have calcified into the iOS/Android duopoly.
We also know that from a technical perspective Teams actually was a "cheaper product" because it was built on the backs of other existing parts of Office 365. It shares a ton of backend with SharePoint and it swallowed up Skype for Business/Lync. Both key products of the "bundle" before Microsoft decided on a need to compete with Slack.
You can expand the definition of "(enterprise) Productivity Apps" ad infinitum.
1. Slack from a very early point in their pivot away from games branded themselves as an Enterprise Productivity app and made comparisons to Enterprise Email tools.
2. Microsoft's inclusion of Skype for Business/Lync (and to another extent Outlook, especially given Slack's own email-competitive marketing) for years prior to Slack/Teams implies that Chat/Communications has a long history of being considered an Enterprise Productivity App.
Perhaps, but in the case of Teams you don't even have to stretch.
There's room for independent apps in the face of a bundled solution. By focusing on one thing you can do it better and cheaper than the packaged solution. And indeed Slack, at least to many, was worth the extra money.