Exterior view of the Microsoft Times Square building in New York City on January 29, 2023.
Kena Betancur | Corbis News | Getty Images
Microsoft will sell its Teams chat and video app separately from its Office product globally, the US tech giant said on Monday, six months after separating the two products in Europe in a bid to avoid a possible EU antitrust fine.
The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s merger of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint filed by competing workspace messaging app Slack, owned by Salesforce.
Teams, which was added to Office 365 for free in 2017, later replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic, in part due to its video conferencing.
Rivals, however, say that packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on August 31 last year.
“To provide clarity to our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to separate Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
“This also responds to feedback from the European Commission by providing multinationals with more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”
Microsoft said in a blog post that it was introducing a new range of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 commercial suites that do not include Teams in regions outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland, and also a new standalone Teams offering for Enterprise customers in those regions. regions.
Starting April 1, customers will be able to continue with their current license agreement, renew it, upgrade it, or upgrade to the new offerings.
For new commercial customers, pricing for Office without Teams ranges from $7.75 to $54.75 depending on the product, while Teams Standalone will cost $5.25. Figures may vary by country and currency. The company did not disclose prices for current packaged products.
Microsoft’s separation may not be enough to avoid the EU antitrust charges that are likely to be leveled at the company in the coming months as rivals criticize the level of tariffs and the ability of their messaging services to work with Office web applications in their own services. the sources said.
Microsoft, which has collected €2.2 billion ($2.4 billion) in EU antitrust fines over the past decade for bundling or bundling two or more products together, faces a fine of up to 10% of its annual global revenue if found guilty of antitrust. violations.