A coalition of EU companies, led by file hosting company Nextcloud, has filed a complaint with the EU as well as the German anti-trust authorities, claiming Microsoft is abusing its dominant position in operating systems to expand into unrelated areas such as collaboration and cloud services.
They claim Microsoft is integrating “Microsoft 365” deeper and deeper into their wider service and software portfolio, including Windows, saying Microsoft’s “OneDrive” is privileged as a choice within Windows’ operation whenever Windows users deal with file storage. Another example is Microsoft’s “Teams” which is being pushed successfully into the market as a default part of Windows 11.
They claim that Microsoft’s combination of the dominant Windows (operating software) with the OneDrive (cloud) offering makes it nearly impossible to compete with their SaaS services. It illustrates anti-competitive practices such as “self-preferencing” on the basis of the market dominance of Windows.
The effect has been that when it comes to cloud storage, over the last years, Microsoft, Google and Amazon have grown their market shares to 66% of the total European market, with local (European) providers declining from 26% to 16%.
They claim behavior as described above is at the core of this dramatic level of growth of the global tech giants in Europe, and is very similar to what happened in the late 90s when Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows thereby destroying Netscape.
mspoweruser.com
