Microsoft to separate Teams and Office globally amid antitrust scrutiny
Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday, 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.
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Professional Certificate in Product ManagementVisitIIM KozhikodeIIMK Advanced Data Science For ManagersVisitIIM LucknowIIML Executive Programme in FinTech, Banking & Applied Risk ManagementVisit Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing.
Rivals, however, said packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Aug. 31 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
