Microsoft will stop bundling video conferencing app Teams to office software suite Office 365 and cloud software offering Microsoft 365. The company hopes to avoid a possible EU fine for unfair competition.
This news release can be read from this week on the news blog from microsoft.
The European Commission launched an investigation in late July of this year after complaints from messaging app Slack (now part of Salesforce) about market manipulation. According to that company, this occurred because Microsoft links its conferencing software to its office software offering by default. The question now is whether Microsoft's offering of Teams in its business software suite puts that software ahead of competitors' video conferencing software.
Microsoft claims to be ‘proactively’ taking this step after the investigation was launched and says it is also cooperating with information requests. Microsoft is said to have previously proposed solutions to comply with competition rules, but they were not honored.
With that proposal, Europe stumbled over Microsoft's failure to build in a price differential between the Office package with Teams and a version without Teams. That's coming now. Teams will be offered at a lower price to key Microsoft customers. Those get a reduced rate of 24 euros per year. New enterprise customers can use Teams separately for five euros a month or sixty euros a year.
Starting Oct. 1, Teams will be decoupled from Microsoft 365 and the Office 365 business offerings across Europe.
Teams
Teams, added for free to Office 365 in 2017, replaced Skype for Business at the time. It gained tremendous popularity in the mandatory work-from-home period during the corona pandemic.
It is notable that those communication tools as part of the full offering are only now being discussed. Microsoft has included such applications in its business suites for more than a decade, such as Office Communicator in 2007 that later evaluated into Microsoft Teams via Lync and Skype for Business.
Microsoft, by the way, is familiar with Europe's competition rules. It had to pay 2.2 billion euros in fines last decade for violations of European competition rules. Although the context was different. Back then, the European Commission cracked down on the bundling of the Internet Explorer browser with the Windows operating system.
