> For most business use cases Slack is more expensive, and less featured than Microsoft 365, and it's having to work very hard to justify its existence.
I think that's exactly the complaint: that Microsoft is hiding the true cost of Teams, using anti-competitive "bundling" to make Slack seem more expensive by comparison.
Not saying I agree, but that does seem to be exactly the complaint.
Giving a discount by bundling products together is anti-competitive behavior? I don't really follow this reasoning. Bundling services together like that is extremely common in all sorts of industries.
Yes, but bundling is also extremely common in anti-trust cases[0].
The goal of bundling is usually to introduce people who like one of your products to your other presumably-equally-good products, especially if they integrate well. Right? Sounds good!
If you're incredibly successful at that, and the most popular of your products is market-dominating, then that may be leveraging your market position to squeeze out competitors.
Fair enough. But this isn't exactly humble chat app David versus ubiquitous groupware Goliath. Slack is growing fast, has had very large investment and is also trying to dominate this space by bundling as much as it can too. Their aspiration seems to want to be on the other side of this lawsuit in future.
(Incidentally it feels like that's where every business productivity tool ends up going: my file sharing service lets me edit documents, my project management tool lets me send emails, my email client lets me chat, my CRM lets me log tickets, my code repository service lets me host websites etc.)
I think that's exactly the complaint: that Microsoft is hiding the true cost of Teams, using anti-competitive "bundling" to make Slack seem more expensive by comparison.
Not saying I agree, but that does seem to be exactly the complaint.