Power

Slack: Break up the Microsoft Teams bundle and let us interoperate

In an antitrust complaint filed Wednesday with the European Union, Slack argued that Microsoft is unfairly bundling Microsoft Teams with Office 365 and demanded that other enterprise software companies should be granted greater access to its APIs.

Slack: Break up the Microsoft Teams bundle and let us interoperate

Slack wants the European Commission to separate Teams from the Office 365 bundle and require Microsoft to charge a price for Teams.

Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Microsoft's refusal to let other enterprise software products and services integrate with Microsoft Teams, a very common practice in modern enterprise software, is a key part of Slack's European Union antitrust complaint against Microsoft, its lawyers said Wednesday.

Slack claimed that Microsoft is "abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law" in a press release outlining the complaint, pointing to the huge market share Microsoft enjoys for its Office 365 productivity suite in Europe. "Slack threatens Microsoft's hold on business email, the cornerstone of Office, which means Slack threatens Microsoft's lock on enterprise software," said Jonathan Prince, vice president of communications and policy at Slack.

Usage of Microsoft Teams has skyrocketed over the last six months, thanks in large part to the abrupt shift to working from home brought on by the pandemic. Slack has also grown during this period, but as of April, Microsoft said 75 million people are using Teams every day, while Slack counted 13 million "daily concurrent users" as recently as March.

Slack wants the European Commission to separate Teams from the Office 365 bundle and require Microsoft to charge a price for Teams, said David Schellhase, general counsel, during a press conference. It also plans to highlight what it called Microsoft's refusal to allow third-party software to interoperate with Teams, he said.

Slack, Box, Dropbox, Google and countless other enterprise software companies have made integration between their products a top priority, arguing that users want the freedom to integrate with different tools while still choosing the "best of breed" products that make the most sense for their businesses. But Microsoft has not agreed to provide the same level of API access to Teams that is otherwise common in the market, Schellhase said.

"Their public APIs are just enough to create a minimum product, but it's not enough to create the experience our joint customers want," Schellhase said.

For a significant chunk of users, Microsoft Teams is a forced migration from Skype for Business, a video calling and chat app that was still widely used until recently. Microsoft decided in 2017 to focus exclusively on Teams as its main communication and collaboration product, announcing plans to retire the online version of Skype for Business by the middle of 2021 and requiring all new Office 365 users to adopt Teams as of last September.

But Slack's lawyers argued that Microsoft is abusing its position in the office productivity market in bundling Teams for free alongside paid subscriptions to Office 365, an argument reminiscent of the U.S. antitrust case filed against Microsoft more than two decades ago. They also said, without providing the specific numbers they said were shared with the European Commission, that Microsoft's market power in other key areas of enterprise software — such as Microsoft Exchange for email and Microsoft Active Directory for employee identity management — incentivizes existing customers to choose newer products like Teams, especially if it's free.

"When you're looking at the impact of competition, of the tying behavior between Teams and Office and the related applications embedded in Office 365 and Microsoft 365, one must, as the European Commission surely will, take in account the wide picture of the market power of Microsoft in the enterprise software market," said Trevor Soames, a European intellectual property attorney representing Slack. "The whole thing is interconnected."

For its part, Microsoft said in a statement:

"We created Teams to combine the ability to collaborate with the ability to connect via video, because that's what people want. With Covid-19, the market has embraced Teams in record numbers while Slack suffered from its absence of video-conferencing. We're committed to offering customers not only the best of new innovation, but a wide variety of choice in how they purchase and use the product. We look forward to providing additional information to the European Commission and answering any questions they may have."
Regardless of the merits of Slack's case, it's odd that Microsoft's official statement overlooks the fact that Slack does offer videoconferencing in its main product. Few would argue that service is Slack's best feature: Even Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Protocol earlier this year that Slack itself uses Zoom for internal videoconferencing, and Slack recently signed a deal with AWS to replace that internal video technology with AWS' Chime, but it's still there.
Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins