In October this year, Microsoft began to provide free upgrade services for the official version of Windows 11 to eligible Windows 10 personal computers.
According to the latest report, the European Union Enterprise Alliance led by the file-hosting company Nextcloud filed a lawsuit against the EU and German antitrust agencies, claiming that Microsoft has abused its dominant position in the operating system field and expanded into unrelated areas such as collaboration and cloud services.
Moreover, this corporate alliance stated that Microsoft is deeply integrating Microsoft 365 into its service and software portfolio, including Windows, and said that whenever Windows users deal with file storage, OneDrive can be used as a part of Windows operations.
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Another example is the Teams software, which was successfully introduced to the market as the default application of Windows 11. They claim that Microsoft’s combination of the dominant Windows operating system and OneDrive cloud products is almost impossible to compete with their SaaS services. This illustrates anti-competitive behaviors such as “self-preference” based on the dominance of the Windows market.
In the field of cloud storage, the market share of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon has grown to 66% of the entire European market in the past few years, while the share of local (European) providers has fallen from 26% to 16%.
The corporate alliance pointed out that the above behavior is the core of the rapid growth of global technology giants in Europe, which is very similar to the situation in which Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer and Windows in the late 1990s to destroy Netscape.
