Secure communication expert Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Element, made the following comment in response to an EU complaint made by Slack accusing Microsoft Teams of anticompetitive practices  :

“Microsoft is certainly leveraging Office’s ubiquity to promote Teams at the expense of other competitors, much as they once leveraged Windows’ ubiquity to promote Internet Explorer. However, with both Teams and Slack, users are locked into a single vendor who they are obliged to trust with all their data – which is in its own right anti-competitive. A better world would be one where users could pick their own chat provider and still talk with one another, without vendor lock in, through open APIs and open standards

The best way for Microsoft to refute accusations of anti-competitiveness would be to adopt open standards such Matrix, showing they are not trying to lock users in, but fostering competition by letting users pick their preferred chat service while retaining full digital sovereignty over their data.”