New York (AFP)

The American start-up Slack lodged a complaint for unfair competition before the European Commission on Wednesday against the computer giant Microsoft, accusing it of forcing the hands of users of its popular Office suite by forcing them the Teams tool.

The company, which markets its own internal messaging service, believes that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by combining Teams with its other software Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook.

In doing so, Microsoft "forces millions of customers to install (Teams), blocks its removal and hides the real cost to businesses" using Office, said Slack in a statement.

The start-up represents a "threat to Microsoft's hold on professional e-mails (with Outlook, Editor's note)" and by extension, "Microsoft's stranglehold on business software," commented an official from Slack in the press release.

"We are convinced of the merits of our product, but we cannot ignore illegal behavior that denies customers access to the tools and solutions they want," he added.

Slack would like the European Union to force Microsoft to sell Teams as a separate product and not as part of its Office suite.

"We created Teams to combine the ability to collaborate with the ability to be connected by video because that's what people want," responded a spokesperson for Microsoft.

“With Covid-19, the market has taken Teams to record levels while Slack has suffered from its lack of video conferencing. We are committed to providing customers with not only the best of the latest innovations, but also a wide variety of choices in the way they buy the product and use it, ”he added.

Microsoft has said it will provide further information to the European Commission and stand ready to answer any questions.

The institution has received Slack's complaint and will examine it according to its usual procedures, a Commission spokesperson told AFP.

It is up to her to then decide whether or not to officially open an investigation.

US tech giants are increasingly facing accusations of practices deemed anti-competitive on both sides of the Atlantic.

Brussels thus imposed its biggest fine on Google in 2018, of 4.34 billion euros, for having abused the dominant position of Android, its operating system for smartphones, in order to establish the supremacy of its service. online research.

Microsoft, for its part, was fined in Europe in 2013 a fine of 561 million euros for having imposed its Internet Explorer browser for 14 months on users of its Windows 7 operating system.

The US agency responsible for consumer protection and competition, the FTC, for its part asked tech giants Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft in February to provide information on their acquisitions of the last ten. years.

© 2020 AFP