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UK Antitrust Regulator Is Officially Investigating Microsoft Office (engadget.com) 58

Posted by BeauHD from the under-investigation dept.
The UK's Competition and Markets Authority is opening a formal investigation into whether Microsoft's bundling of Windows, Office, Teams, Copilot, and related products harms competition. Engadget reports: "Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft's position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organizations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices," CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell said in a statement published by Reuters.

She also stressed the importance of the investigation by noting that hundreds of thousands of UK residents use business software and Microsoft products. The organization will take a look into the company's cloud licensing practices. The CMA has stated that the inquiry will conclude by February. At that point, Microsoft could get slapped with a strategic market label.

Microsoft says it's "committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market." A strategic market designation doesn't automatically assume wrongdoing, but will give the CMA more leeway when conducting further interventions.

UK Antitrust Regulator Is Officially Investigating Microsoft Office More | Reply

UK Antitrust Regulator Is Officially Investigating Microsoft Office

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  • Teams harms civilisation..... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vomitgod ( 6659552 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:02PM (#66143969)

    by simply existing.

    • by simply existing.

      I mean... at least it's not Slack or Zoom. The competitors had a chance to do better and didn't.

      • Yeah this. I use teams all the time and I'm not happy about it but it mostly works and it has a lot of features. Meanwhile zoom is highly likely to not work. Last time I tried to use it, both video and audio tested good, then NEITHER worked and I could only chat during the "call".

        • Can't argue with that. I have trouble sometimes with Teams, but due to a quirky mic on one of the laptops I use. Zoom is far less reliable and seems far more vulnerable to attack.

          As for Slack, I haven't used it very much, but Teams feels better and less messy.

        • Oh look, some fuck with Zoom stock stopped off to moderate here.

      • Re:Teams harms civilization..... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by blahbooboo ( 839709 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:32PM (#66144011)

        by simply existing.

        I mean... at least it's not Slack or Zoom. The competitors had a chance to do better and didn't.

        In 2022/2021Teams rapidly became popular with businesses once MS bundled it for free with 365 subscriptions despite users hating it. At the time it was a horrible application that was buggy, low quality conferencing, and had multiple versions that didn't interoperate (i.e Teams business and Teams personal different apps).

        I remember quite clearly business users all complaining ("Ugh, Teams sucks") but they had no choice once their IT department got deals for Office with teams and then dumped their Zoom, WebEx, etc services despite them both being a lot better..

        • To be fair, the WebEx GUI is a disease. WebEx used to be better than Teams, but now it's the other way around.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mtmra70 ( 964928 )

            Webex, little "e". And how is it worse? Webex UI hasnt changed much in the past 5 years. Meanwhile, MS Teams has gotten far worse with lots of wasted space.

        • At the time it was a horrible application that was buggy, low quality conferencing, and had multiple versions that didn't interoperate (i.e Teams business and Teams personal different apps).

          I disagree. ... It is still a horrible application that is buggy, low qualit.....

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Teun ( 17872 )
          Over the past years I've mainly used Zoom for video calls and was happy with it.
          These days the company is more and more 'forcing' Teams for these calls (I work via the Brave browser on Linux).
          The problem with Teams is I can't get the video on a separate window or screen, Zoom is by itself separate.
          WebEx works for video but is hardly ever used.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I honestly can't understand how Teams can be so very, very shitty. Microsoft must use it internally, and most of the staff must hate it as much as we all do. Yet nobody at Microsoft is able to fix it. In fact, it keeps getting worse.

          • Your experience does not at all resemble mine. I use it all the time without any issues or annoyances.
        • Zoom was a pain to manage. I had to push updates several times a week due to constant vulnerabilities, firewalls had to be adjusted, and it still didn't work right all the time. WebEx... just sucks. Everything bad about Zoom, magnified. So dang finicky.

          MS had personal/business issues with accounts, OneDrive, and Teams for a while at first. No arguing with that, it was a mess. The duplicate work and personal account issue was a nightmare. Those have been resolved for years now, and Teams is pretty

        • This right here is the typical micro$oft m.o., to abuse their position of having a couple of feet in the door and then locking businesses down with freemium offers.
          That is the only reason batshit insane trash like sharepoint even still exists, for example.
          And antitrust cannot crack down on them fast enough!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

        In context of the article though, it's also pretty clear why Teams had a leg up. Integrating the rest of entire collaboration suite around the chat tool makes it more valuable.

        Always felt that Slack missed an opportunity with integrating LibreOffice Online since it was LGPL/MPL licensed. Could have generated goodwill and made the offering more competitive.

      • Re:Teams harms civilisation..... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @09:21PM (#66144097)

        Oh seriously?

        I use both Slack and Teams day to day (we use Slack internally, client uses Teams, so we are on both as a result).

        Slack we never have any issues with, and can find information from previous conversations easily.

        Teams? Fuck teams. Fuck it and then fuck it some more. Its slow, clunky, constantly has issues, very hard to find information unless you still have the chat open somewhere, and chats are spread all over the place (chats, teams, channels...). Teams also requires you to have access to the workspaces OneDrive and SharePoint as well if you want to share files, so if you dont have access to those things then ... you are limited to text only.

        Its video call system is sorely limited, and even doing things like zooming in to the presenters shared screen is clunky and shit.

        Teams is the worst collaboration system I have ever used, so dont try making out that its better than Slack or Zoom. It is by far the worst of the three.

        • +10. Teams sucks, does not catch up to Slack at all, Slack runs around Teams in circles. Teams is a mess, I brutally have to delete all garbage chats every day, it feels like a chore. And then someone asks something, no can do, no idea what chat it was talked about in. Notifications either spams and interrupts every 5 minutes or you work past your meeting start. Pasting images is a lottery whether visible for others at all, screensharing is a +50 year age experience both visually and action delay, if it sha
          • Wait, you're complain about not being able to find information in chats you angrily deleted? That doesn't sound like a Teams problem. In fact, a lot of that sounds self-inflicted. Try adjusting your notification settings.

            I have zero problems with pasting images, video calls, or finding information. Maybe there's something else going on that needs troubleshooting? Personally, I've had far more trouble with getting Zoom to behave than Teams.

        • Its video call system is sorely limited, and even doing things like zooming in to the presenters shared screen is clunky and shit.

          It has a zooming feature? I wouldn't know because Teams is a bloated piece of crap that makes my work computer run slower than molasses flowing down hill on a cold day ... on fucking Pluto.

          Seriously 8GB of RAM and my computer can't cope Outlook and Teams as being the only running applications. I have partial success when I turn off incoming video, but god knows sharing the screen is a disaster. You can run every office application at once and not consume as many system resources as making a Teams call.

          I act

        • Really? I don't have those problems. Slow? Not for me. Clunky? How? Hard to find information? I use search and find it. If you don't want it to run files through OneDrive/Sharepoint, then connect it to Dropbox. I've never had any problems with presentation or screen sharing. And the video calls are way more reliable than Zoom's, in my experience.

          If you don't like it, you don't like it. No biggie. I just don't have the problems you describe.

        • What's the meme..?

          Slack has users, Teams has hostages.

          Yeah, Teams is the poor stepchild of Slack for sure. Slack's also got 'apps' and webhooks and other integrations, which most people use to link it to their internal systems so it becomes a central place for all your communications and information updates.

          What I would say is that Slack isn't great for actual meetings. It's fine for a "quick call", and if you're already text chatting with someone, it's better than zoom or teams because it just takes place

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by T34L ( 10503334 )

        While I don't *like* Slack, it stands out to me as distinctly less atrocious than Teams and anything else MS based. Zoom is garbage too.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbialac ( 320955 )
        I've always hated the fact that Skype was discontinued. Having a real phone number helped me out a lot in my travels.
    • Eh ... Teams works fine for meetings. And basic chats. It's chat *search* sucks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xeoron ( 639412 )
      and Zoom. Good things there are alternatives.

  • Isn't this about 25 years too late? (Score:3, Informative)

    by porkchop_d_clown ( 39923 ) <mwheinz@m[ ]om ['e.c' in gap]> on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:39PM (#66144023)
    What are they hoping to achieve at this point?

    • Re:Isn't this about 25 years too late? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Thursday May 14, 2026 @10:37PM (#66144141)

      What are they hoping to achieve at this point?

      My suspicion is that they're sending a message. Trump has been busy pissing away strategic alliances while he pisses off the rest of the world with his arrogance, presumptuousness, and American exceptionalism. Tech companies are collateral damage; except they're not really "collateral" when you consider their knee-bending, ring-kissing, and sometimes out-and-out support for Trump.

      Just as Austria recently sent up fighter jets to "escort" unauthorized American military planes out of their airspace, the rest of the world is distancing and decoupling itself from the US. Big Tech was already suffering from a lack of trust; now America's other transgressions on the world stage have rendered everything American toxic. That's especially true of companies such as Microsoft that hold the keys to the information kingdom.

      Other countries have had enough, and are actively seeking and/or building alternatives to companies and institutions which support American hegemony. Expect lots more news like this in the coming months and years.

      • Probably what you describe is part of it, for sure. However, the EU has been on a general trajectory of self-reliance for eons. Trump V1 was a bit of a motivator, and Trump V2 is an obviator.

        Microsoft has always been something of a problem for the EU though. It's interwoven into everything, and yet it's rounded disliked, if not hated. Those two points are really indicators that something in the market isn't working - if you're everywhere, you must surely be 'popular'? The thing is, it's hard to find anyone

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      They are trying to make their exit from the MS crap easier. As the UK is not EU anymore, they have to do their own pushing.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Epeeist ( 2682 )

        They are trying to make their exit from the MS crap easier. As the UK is not EU anymore, they have to do their own pushing.

        Not necessarily true, the current government is trying to align with the EU much more, to minimise the clusterfuck that is Brexit. They could couple with other countries in the EU (and Europe more widely) that are moving away from MS and other US technologies.

        Now we just need to dump Palantir and Xitter as well...

    • What are they hoping to achieve at this point?

      Teams and OneDrive didn't exist 25 years ago. Even if they decided to force unbundling RIGHT NOW it still provides an opportunity for more competition in the market.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Teams and Copilot didn't exist 25 years ago. It's the fact that they bundle a whole office stack under one subscription, which means companies end up being 100% Microsoft for cloud storage, messaging, email, AI, office and so on is the issue.

      Just Windows and MS Office being incompatible with anything else apparently didn't meet the threshold.

  • Wait, I've Seen This One! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday May 14, 2026 @07:42PM (#66144027) Homepage Journal

    This is the one where they investigate Office on Antitrust grounds and wind up settling for not bundling Edge.

    I've seen it in reruns....

    • I hope so! Except I want them to unbundle Outlook so my company will finally drop this steaming pile.

  • The proper $$$ gets into the right hands.

  • Testimony from a disgruntled former Office Assistant [wikipedia.org] -- who noticed they were opening an investigation, and offered to help.

  • Bundling copilot hurt CONSUMERS who were slammed into paying more for useless shit they didn't ask for. And before you say "oh just opt out" please believe that I tried and they took the fucking copilot opt-out option away for my office license.
  • They bundle everything together in Teams 365 Copilot Office Windows Edge that cannot be unbundled. It includes a toaster and a toothbrush too.
  • After 5 years of study, 43 committees and 100,000 pages of reports, our conclusion is this. MS Office is crap.

  • This is a 40 year old story. Nothing has been done to curtail or lessen Microsoft's racketeering, buying politicians, putting competitors out of business, since they bought the Washington stare legislature to push their scorched earth tactics until now. So UK want's cheaper licenses for word, I guess. Same old, same old.

  • This isn't about Office. This is about Office 365 and Azure, and how a license is bundled when you use Azure but unbundled if you wanted to use 365 and, for example, AWS.

    It's a shame because I wish they would, but the gov.uk link explicitly talks about "CMA’s cloud market investigation – Microsoft’s use of software licensing reducing competition in cloud".

    This won't be what people are hoping for here - actual Office. This is purely about licensing costs with regards to cloud deployments.

  • in the lawsuit in, what, '95, when they were *convicted* of restraint of trade againt WordPerfect?

  • Of course those apps are bundled to put competition at a disadvantage and of course Microsoft is a monopoly. The only question is if regulators dare to do something about it.

  • So, it used to be that the EU would sue for a valley company for a few billion every year or two to pay for the operations of the government.

    The UK is out of that loop and realizing it needs a fund raiser.

    But honestly, I think if were Microsoft, I would just consider shutting down UK operations.

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