Technology's biggest UC platform vendors have spent years building ecosystems that users find difficult to leave. Microsoft, for instance, has built a whole suite of offerings from Sharepoint to Outlook to make its Teams experience fuller from a full ecosystem buy-in.
Beyond the benefits of staying, are the difficulties in leaving. Interoperability and data transfers between UC platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack have historically been challenging for enterprises, and involved a multi-step process that was fraught with risk of error.
However, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are now asking vendors to make that easier. In the US, this was highlighted by the DOJ's case against Apple’s iMessage's treatment of non-Apple users as a deliberate strategy to reinforce platform loyalty, and in the drafting of the now failed ACCESS Act, which proposed interoperability and data portability for tech giants.
For the EU, the Digital Markets Act was signed into law, and it marks the most significant intervention yet, designating major technology "gatekeepers" and requiring them to open their platforms to competitors for interoperability with rival services and greater data portability. It is a reasonable policy ambition. But between a regulatory mandate and genuine openness lies a significant gap, one shaped less by technical limitations than by the financial realities of how these platforms are built and valued.
This is not a story about bad actors. It is a story about two legitimate but competing forces: a regulatory framework designed to restore contestability to markets that have become structurally concentrated, and a commercial model that has rewarded ecosystem lock-in and retention.
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Why Openness Is a Complicated Ask
The EU's Digital Markets Act, which came into force in 2022 and designated six major gatekeepers - Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta, and Microsoft - by September 2023. The Act represents the most assertive attempt yet to resolve that tensionby demanding the companies comply with specific "do's" and "don'ts", with key obligations include allowing third-party interoperability,
The scale of the market helps explain why the law came into effect. Microsoft Teams alone has surpassed 300 million monthly active users. When a platform reaches that kind of critical mass, it has regulators wondering how many are there fully by choice rather than convience of staying.
To understand the complexity of the interoperability debate, it helps to understand what integration is actually worth to a platform vendor. For subscription-based technology businesses, the financial model is highly sensitive to churn. Research from Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. For vendors, reducing churn is therefore, not just a commercial priority; it is the primary driver of enterprise valuation.
By building Teams into its E3 and E5 enterprise licences, Microsoft has created a platform that is deeply embedded in day-to-day workflows. From a pure business perspective, the strategy is coherent: tighter integration means higher switching costs, which means more durable revenue.
Looking at other UC companies, you can see something similar. Cisco's position reflects a similar logic, though through a different mechanism. Enterprise customers who have invested significantly in Webex-compatible boardroom hardware face a real capital cost if they migrate away from the platform. Although compatible with other UC platforms, some of its most important features like native AI tools work best within the Webex ecosystem.
When seeing the cost of not capturing your customers by more than one mechanism, the strategy makes sense. Zoom saw its Net Dollar Retention drop to around 98% post-pandemic as standalone video users moved on relatively easily as there were no deeper connections to the service beyond video calling. This dynamic directly saw the acceleration of its push into Zoom Phone and Zoom Contact Center.
These are rational business decisions. They also happen to be precisely what the DMA is designed to address.
However, Dave Michels, Lead Analyst at TalkingPointz.com, argues that the gap between regulatory intent and commercial outcome is wider than it appears, noting:
"Don't confuse compliance with surrender,"
"The big platform providers aren't ignoring the DMA; they are gaslighting it. Regulators will see 'interoperability' on paper, but it's nearly impossible to achieve in practice. The providers have added toll booths to their garden walls."
