Microsoft’s decision to separate Teams from its Office products in Europe last year was made in response to regulatory concerns. It appears that the company will be extending this change to a global scale.
According to a recent report from Reuters, Microsoft plans to sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product worldwide due to antitrust scrutiny.
According to a representative from Microsoft, who spoke to Reuters,
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.
The unbundling allows Microsoft enterprise customers worldwide to buy Microsoft 365 subscriptions without Teams or separately purchase a standalone version of Teams.
The spokesperson also mentioned:
Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardise their purchasing across geographies.
The report announces that customers will be given the choice to maintain their current arrangement, renew their current license, update it, or switch to the newly available offers starting from April 1.
In regards to the cost, Reuters reports:
For new commercial customers, prices for Office without Teams range from $7.75 to $54.75 depending on the product while Teams Standalone will cost $5.25. The figures may vary by country and currency. The company did not disclose prices for current packaged products.
The choice was made following an investigation by the European Commission (EC), which formally examined Microsoft’s inclusion of Teams software with the Office productivity suite in the previous year for antitrust concerns.
More than three years ago, one of Teams’ competitors, Slack, filed a complaint against Microsoft with the EC regarding their bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365. Slack argued that this bundling gives Microsoft an unfair advantage in the market.
Despite the changes regarding the unbundling of Teams, Microsoft has not yet made an official public announcement about them.
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