Amid antitrust clampdown, Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally

Microsoft will separately sell its chat and video app Teams from its Office product globally. This comes six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine. The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack. Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business.

Teams became popular during the pandemic as a video conferencing tool.

After rivals said packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage, the American tech giant started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Oct. 1 last year.
 

"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," a Microsoft spokesperson said.

"Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardise their purchasing across geographies."
 

Microsoft said in a blogpost that it was introducing a new lineup of commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites that do not include Teams in regions outside the EEA (European Economic Area) and Switzerland, and also a new standalone Teams offering for Enterprise customers in those regions.

Starting April 1, customers can either continue with their current licensing deal, renew, update or switch to the new offers.