Microsoft will soon allow the currently uninstallable Microsoft Teams chat feature to be removed from Windows 11 PCs, after Microsoft received complaints from several companies that Teams was too pervasive. appears to be reacting to concerns about a possible antitrust investigation from the European Commission.

We've all been plagued by bloatware, and for a company like Microsoft, which has a near monopoly on PC gamers' operating systems, making it impossible to uninstall apps from the OS is a clever tactic to get people to use lesser known products.

As Windows Latest explains, it is currently possible to uninstall Teams Chat from the Windows 11 taskbar in the settings menu, but not completely. You can press the little toggle, but it just sits there taking up space on your PC. In fact, you can't find Microsoft Teams Chat under Windows 11's installed apps, so you have no idea how much of your precious storage space it is taking up, but it is still there in the taskbar's personalization menu and its presence alone is taunting you.

Soon, however, it appears that you will be able to not only turn it off in the settings, but remove it from the system entirely: the Windows 11 Preview build distributed in May included a reference to the "RemoveChat" feature, which completely erases the software from the system including a reference to its existence.

Teams chat is bundled with a bunch of frankly necessary Microsoft products, making other telcos a little angry at Microsoft's slick competitiveness.

In 2020, Slack and several other companies made it clear to the European Union that Microsoft forcing Teams on Windows users was a bit unfair to their business.

What is Slack going to do, come up with a competing OS to get their apps noticed?

A spokesperson for the European Commission told Reuters at the time that "we have received several complaints about Microsoft, including Slack, regarding Microsoft's conduct in relation to its Teams product. He declined to comment further because of the ongoing situation, but it now appears that Microsoft is trying to recover from the threat of a looming antitrust investigation from the European Union.

Microsoft 365 and Office 365 for Business are also likely to stop bundling software. Hopefully, this announcement will give companies like Slack (my personal haven) more opportunities when it comes to business communications.