The EU investigation comes as Salesforce attempts to justify its $27.7 billion acquisition of Slack in 2021, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of market research firm Deep Analysis. The concerns about Microsoft’s practices stem from competing vendors such as Salesforce and Slack rather than enterprise businesses using the products, given that Microsoft is in a dominant market position, he said.

“Filling gaps or serving parallel services to Microsoft’s desktop and productivity apps has generated an industry,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “Still, over time, Microsoft fills those gaps and adds services, effectively freezing out the competition.”