Microsoft to split Teams and Office worldwide amid antitrust review.

Microsoft has announced it will globally sell its chat and video app, Teams, separately from its Office product. This move comes six months after unbundling the two in Europe to avoid potential EU antitrust penalties.

The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s integration of Office and Teams since a complaint by Slack, a competing workspace messaging app owned by Salesforce, in 2020. Teams, originally integrated into Office 365 in 2017 at no extra cost, gained popularity during the pandemic, particularly for its video conferencing capabilities. Critics argue that bundling the products gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. Consequently, the company began selling them separately in the EU and Switzerland in August last year.

A Microsoft spokesperson stated, “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.” This aims to address feedback from the European Commission and provide multinational companies with more flexibility in standardizing their purchases across different regions.

Microsoft is introducing new commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites globally that exclude Teams, along with a standalone Teams offering for Enterprise customers outside the European Economic Area and Switzerland. These changes will take effect from April 1, allowing customers to continue with their existing licensing deals or transition to the new offerings.

For new commercial customers, Office without Teams will be priced between $7.75 and $54.75, depending on the product, while Teams Standalone will cost $5.25. However, prices may vary by country and currency. Microsoft’s decision to unbundle may not fully resolve EU antitrust concerns, as rivals argue over fees and the interoperability of their messaging services with Office Web Applications.

Having accumulated €2.2 billion ($2.4 billion) in EU antitrust fines over the past decade for bundling products, Microsoft faces potential fines of up to 10% of its global annual turnover if found guilty of antitrust breaches.