Microsoft is in serious EU antitrust trouble for the first time in a decade and a half—and this time it’s because of its Slack rival

However, Microsoft’s cultural transformation into a supposedly less aggressive entity has recently been called into question. The company has started ignoring Outlook and Teams users’ browser choices by opening links in its Edge browser. It might soon face a British antitrust probe over contractual terms that arguably lock customers into its cloud (rival Amazon is also in those crosshairs). And now it’s under investigation by the EU antitrust directorate again.

This time it’s about Teams, which Microsoft includes with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 enterprise suites. Slack, the work messaging app now owned by Salesforce, complained about this bundling back in 2020, and the Commission has now opened a formal probe to see if Microsoft is breaking any laws.

“Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become indispensable for many businesses in Europe,” said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager. “We must therefore ensure that the markets for these products remain competitive, and companies are free to choose the products that best meet their needs.”

Specifically, the Commission said Microsoft might be breaking EU competition rules by not giving its productivity-suite customers a choice about getting Teams when they subscribe, and “may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings.” Microsoft says it will “continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns.”

Meanwhile, Semafor reports that, under the terms of Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership, OpenAI’s customers can’t run its models on any cloud other than Microsoft’s—meaning companies using Amazon, Google, or Oracle’s clouds have to either switch to Microsoft or opt for rival A.I. models.

As the article notes, this gives those A.I. rivals an advantage over OpenAI. But it also further fills out the picture of the new-old Microsoft that’s emerging: eager to shut out the competition, and getting into trouble for it once again.

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David Meyer

NEWSWORTHY

Waymo backs away from self-driving trucks. Alphabet’s Waymo has decided to focus on the ride-hailing potential of its under-development autonomous Driver system, and will consequently “push back the timeline” on its self-driving-truck efforts. It’s going to keep working with Daimler on that strand, but The Verge reports that layoffs are involved and the future of Waymo’s trucking program is now in doubt.

Stable Diffusion update. Stability AI has released what it calls the “most advanced” version of its image-generating service Stable Diffusion, claiming it offers better colors, contrast, shadows, and lighting—and apparently pretty good text generation too. As TechCrunch notes, there are still outstanding ethical issues around the possibility of generating deepfakes (though Stability says it is trying to combat problematic prompts) and around the copyrighted material on which the A.I. was trained.

Samsung’s chip choice. Samsung lost a stonking $7 billion in the first half of this year, thanks to a downturn in the chip market. It says the worst is over, but, as Reuters reports, the recovery in demand is mostly down to high-end memory chips that are desperately needed for A.I., so other lines will see continuing production cuts. Analysts reckon a broader chip recovery will only materialize next year.

SIGNIFICANT FIGURES

3.03 billion

—The number of monthly active Facebook users, according to Meta’s latest quarterly results. That’s a 3% year-on-year rise on the blue app. Facebook’s daily active user count grew 5% over the same period, hitting an average of 2.06 billion last month. Mark Zuckerberg’s original social network may not be fashionable, but it’s clearly not dying.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Elon Musk’s unpredictable mood swings made his ‘fanatical inner circle’ too afraid to tell him the truth, says ex-Twitter exec who went viral for sleeping on the floor, by Chloe Taylor

Elon Musk swipes coveted @x handle from Twitter user for his rebrand, offering only some merch as compensation for the lucrative account name, by Christiaan Hetzner

Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI just became charter members of what may be the first true A.I. lobby. Up next: Lawmakers write the rules, by Paolo Confino

Mark Zuckerberg says Threads launch proves the power of a lean team in his ‘Year of Efficiency’, by Kylie Robison

Alphabet grew revenue faster than spending for the first time since 2021. Can the internet giant pull it off again?, by Stephen Pastis

FTX trial prosecutor wants San Bankman-Fried jailed for witness tampering and trying to influence jurors, by Associated Press

BEFORE YOU GO

Big mapping move. Desperate to break Google and Apple’s duopoly in the mapping space, the Overture Maps Foundation has released its first worldwide dataset to help developers make rival navigation and local search services. The dataset includes data on almost 60 million places around the world.

What’s the Overture Maps Foundation? It’s hosted by the Linux Foundation, but it was founded last December by Amazon Web Services, Meta, Microsoft, and TomTom, on the basis that no single organization can manage all the costs and complexity of building and maintaining a useful worldwide mapping service. “Anyone who works in mapping knows that the initial data is just the beginning; the ongoing challenge lies in maintaining the data amidst constant changes to meet user expectations,” said Overture Maps Foundation chief Marc Prioleau. “Overture plans to build a broad collaboration that can build and maintain an up-to-date, comprehensive database of [places of interest].” 

The dataset can be found here, so if you fancy building a location-based application without paying or relying on Google or Apple, now’s your chance.