Microsoft Teams and Office are reportedly parting ways as regulators close in

Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office are reportedly parting ways, choosing separate lives that should make their rivals and European regulators happy.

a New report from Reuters It states that Microsoft has decided to sell Teams separately from its Office suite of products globally. The company has been offering Teams as a free add-on to customers who purchase Office 365 and Microsoft 365 for years. Teams has seen explosive growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the number of users rising from 20 million users in November 2019 to 44 million in March 2020 and 75 million one month later, according to Application business. As of last year, Teams had over 300 million users.

The problems started to get worse in 2020, when Slack, a major competitor to Teams, Filed an antitrust complaint regarding the Teams and Office bundle with EU regulators, arguing that Microsoft was using its dominant position with Office to force its customers to use Teams and hide its true cost. Last year, European regulatory bodies announced this I opened an official investigation Microsoft bundles Teams with Office 365 and Microsoft 365.

“The Commission is concerned that Microsoft may be abusing and defending its market position in the field of productivity software by restricting competition in the European Economic Area (EEA) for communication and collaboration products,” the European Commission said in a statement. July 2023 Press Release. “In particular, the Commission is concerned that Microsoft may have given Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice of whether or not to include access to this product when subscribing to their productivity suites and may have limited interoperability between its productivity suites and Competing offers.

One month after announcing the investigation, Microsoft said it would do so Teams and Office are no longer offered In the European Economic Area, which includes Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland, Switzerland and the 27 European Union countries. However, the company continues to offer the package to customers in other countries around the world, even today.

In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft confirmed that it had made the decision to separate Teams from its Office suite of products based on comments from the European Commission.

“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are expanding the steps we took last year to separate Teams from M365 and O365 in the EEA and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. According to Reuters. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies with more flexibility when they wish to consolidate their procurement processes across geographies.”

Reuters reports that starting April 1, customers will be able to choose whether they want to keep their existing Teams+ Microsoft 365 or Office 65 bundle or upgrade or switch to Microsoft’s new offerings that separate the products. For new customers, a standalone monthly subscription to Teams will cost $5.25 per month, while Office without Teams will cost between $7.75 and $54.75 depending on the product.

Gizmodo reached out to Microsoft for comment on the Reuters report on Monday morning but did not immediately receive a response.