Microsoft Unbundles Teams From Office Worldwide

Following its decision to unbundle Teams in Europe last year, Microsoft has decided to unbundle Teams from its Office products worldwide as of April 1. This move will allow companies to use alternative chat and video apps.

In response to a 2020 complaint raised by Salesforce, who owns competing software Slack, the European Commission opened an investigation into whether Microsoft has breached EU competition rules. Microsoft proactively unbundled Teams in Europe last year. Microsoft proposed these new commercial packages to avoid any fines or sanctions.

The European Commission is set to complete its inquiry later this year and Microsoft could face fines of up to 10% of its global annual turnover if the investigation concludes that its practices are anticompetitive.

The tech company has therefore decided to extend the unbundling worldwide. In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said, “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.”

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 added Teams to Office 365 at no additional charge in 2017. With Covid and the rise of hybrid working environments, the need for video and chat software has grown significantly and the competitive landscape has changed. Due to Office’s dominant position in the marketplace, bundling Teams in Office 365 could reduce competition in this space.

As the original investigation stated, “the [EU] Commission is concerned that Microsoft may grant Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice on whether or not to include access to that product when they subscribe to their productivity suites and may have limited the interoperability between its productivity suites and competing offerings.”

The new prices for Office without Teams vary depending on package and location but will range between $7.75 to $54.75. Microsoft’s new Teams Standalone offering for enterprise customers is available for $5.25.

Since the introduction of the new commercial packages in Europe, estimates show that Microsoft has maintained its high adoption rates for Teams, likely due to its tight integration with the rest of the Office services and workflows.