Microsoft to Sell Teams Separately from Office Globally

 

Tech giant Microsoft has announced that it will sell its popular chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product suite globally. The move comes after the company began unbundling the two products in Europe last October amid an antitrust investigation by the European Commission.

Rival app Slack, which was acquired by Salesforce, had complained to regulators in 2020 that Microsoft was illegally tying Teams to its dominant Office 365 suite. Critics argued this gave Microsoft an unfair advantage over Slack and other collaboration platforms.

Teams has grown tremendously since being added to Office 365 in 2017, helped in large part by its video conferencing capabilities which made it a vital tool for remote working during the pandemic. However, bundling it with Office raised antitrust concerns around Microsoft using its dominance in productivity software to influence the messaging market.

In a statement, Microsoft said it was now taking the "steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally."

The move aims to provide more clarity for customers and address regulatory scrutiny over Microsoft's practice of packaging new products together with its trillion-dollar Office franchise. It remains to be seen if the global unbundling will satisfy regulators investigating Microsoft's compliance with fair competition rules.