Microsoft to Split Office Suite and Teams Amid Escalating Antitrust Probe

Microsoft Corporation is splitting up Office and Team as antitrust scrutiny grows. The tech giant will remove Microsoft Teams from its Office Suite in an attempt to address the probes.

According to Quartz, Microsoft confirmed on Monday, April 1, that it will start selling its Team separately from its Office Suite products and this is not just for customers in the United States but around the world. Before this, the video-conferencing and chat platform was being offered as a free add-on for customers who buy Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

Removal of Teams from Office Suite

Now, Microsoft will no longer offer Teams as part of its Office products, and this comes after its rival, Slack, a cloud-based team communication platform, filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union regulators in 2020. The latter is complaining about Microsoft’s bundle offer of Teams with its Office suite.

At the time of initial filing, Slack said that the US-based tech giant has been using its dominant position with Office to push its customers to use Teams instead of other similar apps. It added that Microsoft was also concealing the real cost of Teams through its bundling scheme.

As a result of the complaint, the EU regulators formally launched an investigation on the issue. A month after the probe started, Microsoft said it would remove its Teams from the Microsoft Office bundle. The separation of the bundle will be implemented in the EU area, which includes Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, and 27 other states.

“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,” the company’s spokesman said in a statement. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”

Rivals to Benefit from the Microsoft Unbundling

Meanwhile, CNBC reported that Microsoft’s decision to separate Teams and Office will benefit some competitors in the video-conferencing and chat field, such as Zoom and Salesforce. The removal of Teams as a free add-on to Office 365 and Microsoft 365 means that customers will have to pay extra to get the service. Thus, customers may just shift to other apps with the same function to save or pay less.

Photo by: עמית גירון/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)