Story by Ian Krietzberg
Fast Facts
- Microsoft announced Monday that it will sell Teams separately from Microsoft Office globally.
- The move comes six months after the company did the same thing in Europe amid an antitrust investigation.
Microsoft on Monday said that starting April 1 it will sell Teams, its chat and video communications app, separately from Microsoft Office to customers worldwide, according to Reuters.
The move comes six months after Microsoft (MSFT) unbundled Teams from Office in the European Union. That split came several months into an antitrust investigation of the products by the European Commission.
The commission opened its investigation into Microsoft’s bundling of Teams and Office last year, following a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned (CRM) Slack that the bundle was illegal.
Related: Microsoft CEO hedges OpenAI bet, launches new AI organization
The Commission said its specific point of concern involves a potential “distribution advantage” given to Teams by virtue of being bundled with the widely used Office platform — “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.”
A Microsoft spokesperson told 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.
“Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”
In place of the bundle, Microsoft is selling a series of Office suites without Teams, in addition to stand-alone Teams subscriptions.
The Office suites (sans Teams) will now range in price from $7.75 to $54.75 for new commercial customers, depending on region. The standalone Teams offering will cost $5.25.
The Commission has not yet published the result of its investigation. If it finds Microsoft in violation of antitrust regulations despite the unbundling, Microsoft might have to pay a fine of up to 10% of its global annual revenue.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft and antitrust
Microsoft has been hit with $2.4 billion in EU fines over the past decade for unfairly bundling products together, Reuters reported. The Redmond, Wash., software giant is also under investigation by the European Commission for its relationship with artificial intelligence startup OpenAI.
Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion in the company, and according to a report last week by The Information, it’s planning to finance a supercomputer for the company that could cost around $100 billion.
The company has also made somewhat similar arrangements with other AI startups including Inflection and Mistral.
