Microsoft has declared its decision to globally sell its chat and video application Teams independently from its Office suite, marking a significant move in response to antitrust scrutiny. The tech giant’s action comes half a year after the separation of the two products in Europe, aiming to mitigate potential antitrust penalties from the European Union.
Since a complaint lodged by Salesforce-owned Slack in 2020, the European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s bundling of Office and Teams. Introduced to Office 365 in 2017, Teams swiftly replaced Skype for Business, gaining popularity especially during the pandemic due to its video conferencing capabilities.
Critics argue that packaging these products together grants Microsoft an unfair market advantage. Consequently, the company commenced selling them separately in the EU and Switzerland on August 31 last year.
A Microsoft spokesperson stated, “To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally.”
Microsoft announced the introduction of new commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites devoid of Teams outside the European Economic Area and Switzerland, alongside a standalone Teams offering for Enterprise customers in these regions.
Commencing April 1, customers can opt to continue with their current licensing agreement, renew, update, or transition to the new offerings. For new commercial customers, Office prices excluding Teams vary from $7.75 to $54.75, while Teams Standalone is priced at $5.25.
However, Microsoft’s unbundling efforts may not suffice to prevent EU antitrust charges, with rivals criticizing fee levels and compatibility issues of their messaging services with Office Web Applications in their respective services. Microsoft faces potential fines of up to 10% of its global annual turnover if found guilty of antitrust violations, having accrued 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in EU antitrust fines over the past decade for bundling multiple products.
