Reports suggest that Microsoft may decouple Teams from Office 365 to get ahead of an official EU antitrust investigation.
Microsoft first made the shrewd move to bundle Microsoft Teams with Office 365 all the way back in 2017.
However, it likely aided the meteoric, post-pandemic growth of the UCaaS platform - with Teams recently reaching 300MN active monthly users.
As a result, its competitors could only fight to play second fiddle, battling to become the Samsung to Microsoft’s Apple.
Moreover, the move caused many other vendors to change tact and build solutions that improve the Teams experience – even many of its UC rivals.
Lots of CCaaS providers have also done this, releasing contact center platforms that fit inside the native Teams UI instead of developing standalone solutions.
In addition, providers of analytics, collaboration, and many more technologies now compete on who can offer the most alluring Teams experience.
As such, Teams has become the first true platform solution to touch the CX space.
Yet, the EU’s investigation appears to have upset the apple cart, with some speculating that this could challenge the status quo.
Perhaps. Nevertheless, Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, fears it’s too little too late.
"Too Little, Too Late" - Zeus Kerravala
"The problem with this is that it's not enough," noted Kerravala in a LinkedIn post. "Microsoft is talking about doing this AFTER it has reached a monopoly-like share.
If they really feel Teams is the best product, then unbundle products and provide a migration path to move the data that's in Teams, particularly chat, out of the platform into a competing product. Frankly, this should be a requirement for all the vendors, including Webex, Zoom, RingCentral, and others.
"Only by making it easy to switch platforms will we find out who has the best product."
Indeed, as Kerravala somewhat suggests, Teams has almost become the de facto choice, and it will likely take much more than this probe to change that in the short term.
Although, Microsoft has previously lost its leadership status after such an investigation.
Think back to the late noughties when EU courts deemed its Windows-Internet Explorer bundle anti-competitive. And look at Internet Explorer now… (oh wait, it has been retired ).