It was, rather, a replacement for Skype for Business (announced in 2014), which was a renaming of Lync (2010), which had succeeded Office Communicator, the client for the Office Communication Server product that went all the way back to 2005. Teams didn't spring into existence from thin air. After all, Slack launched in 2013, and Microsoft didn't announce Teams until 2016. The notion that Teams is a 'copycat product' deliberately aping Slack is, well, interesting. They created a weak, copycat product and tied it to their dominant Office product, force installing it and blocking its removal, a carbon copy of their illegal behavior during the 'browser wars.' Slack is asking the European Commission to take swift action to ensure Microsoft cannot continue to illegally leverage its power from one market to another by bundling or tying products. More on those charges in a minute, but first let's focus on this doozy from Slack, which explicitly calls out the 1990s-era antitrust action: To prove it, they delivered a browser-free version of Windows 95 that was 'so broken its only feature was an error message.' And Microsoft executive Jim Allchin delivered cringeworthy testimony that didn't help Microsoft's case. Microsoft argued that removing Internet Explorer from Windows would break the operating system. (It's worth noting that this tying was only one of several anti-competitive behaviors alleged in the suit.)Īnd the part about blocking the ability to remove Teams is also a callback to one of the most notorious bits of testimony in that trial. Department of Justice and the state attorneys general who brought the case argued that Microsoft had illegally tied its Internet Explorer browser to its dominant Windows product.

Illegal tying, of course, was one of the core complaints in United States v. Microsoft has illegally tied its Teams product into its market-dominant Office productivity suite, force installing it for millions, blocking its removal, and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. Microsoft Corp., the landmark antitrust case that nearly split the company in two back at the end of the 20th Century, you probably felt that same rush of memories. We've gathered details about 10 leading services, all capable of providing high-quality video with collaboration tools. 41 impressive questions to ask in a job interviewīest video conferencing software for business

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