Prominent European Union companies led by Nextcloud, a file hosting company, have lodged a complaint with the EU and anti-trust authorities against Microsoft.
The complaint claims that Microsoft is misusing its dominant position in the OS market by expanding operations into unrelated cloud services.
One such example is the integration of Microsoft 365 with OneDrive and Microsoft Teams. However, due to its monopoly in the OS market, other SaaS providers are left completely helpless and unable to offer their services.
As a result, other providers have seen a decline in demand for their service. Compared to the previous consumer share of 26%, they only command an accumulated 16% now.
Coalition for a level playing field
Since the battle lines have been drawn, EU companies have maintained the following stance against Microsoft:
- Microsoft should not be permitted to abuse its dominant position in the OS market by pre-installing solutions with the software. Instead, there should be a level playing field for all the service providers to have a chance at capturing a decent market share
- Since Microsoft is the leading operating system, they should support interoperability and open standards to allow third-party services. Enforcing this would enable the European consumer to choose between different services based on their merit, promoting fair competition
As a consequence of EU complaints, Microsoft is under the radar, with Slack becoming the latest complainant.
That said, operating system integration is standard, and it is no surprise that Microsoft is offering consumers a 360 solution when they install the Microsoft OS.
Only time will tell whether these complaints will restrict Microsoft from offering additional services with their system or if they come out on top.
20 hours ago
