Microsoft will now let customers worldwide buy Office without Teams, following EU antitrust concerns

By Brian Fung, CNN

Washington (CNN) — Microsoft will no longer sell its Teams collaboration software as a bundled product with its Office 365 suite anywhere in the world, the company said Monday, in the face of antitrust concerns.

The decision to separate Teams from Office globally extends a previous announcement last year affecting only the European Union. And it comes after rivals such as Salesforce’s Slack complained in 2020 that Microsoft’s practices were a form of anticompetitive self-dealing.

Slack’s complaint led to a European Commission antitrust investigation of Microsoft that is still ongoing.

Monday’s announcement appears aimed at allaying some of those concerns, allowing customers worldwide to buy Microsoft’s Office software without Teams included and the ability to buy Teams as a standalone product for business customers.

In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said the move would “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 spokesperson said. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”

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