Microsoft has announced that its chat and video app Teams will now be sold separately from its Office product globally. This move comes six months after Microsoft unbundled the two products in Europe to avoid a possible EU antitrust fine. The European Commission began investigating Microsoft’s tying of Office and Teams following a complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack in 2020.
Teams was added to Office 365 for free in 2017, replacing Skype for Business and becoming popular during the pandemic due to its video conferencing. However, rivals have argued that packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. In response to this feedback, Microsoft started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on October 1st, 2020.
“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,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”
Microsoft has introduced a new lineup of commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites that do not include Teams in regions outside the EEA and Switzerland. Additionally, they have launched a new standalone Teams offering for Enterprise customers in those regions. Starting from April 1st, customers can either continue with their current licensing deal, renew, update, or switch to the new offers.
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. However, the figures may vary by country and currency, and the company has not disclosed prices for current packaged products.
Despite Microsoft’s move to unbundle Teams from Office, it may not be enough to stave off EU antitrust charges, which will likely be sent to the company in the coming months. Rivals have criticized the level of the fees and the ability of their messaging services to function with Office Web Applications in their services. If found guilty of antitrust breaches, Microsoft risks a fine of as much as 10% of its global annual turnover.
