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Microsoft is selling its chat and video application Teams separately.
On the 1st, Microsoft announced it would sell Microsoft Teams separately worldwide, six months after separating the two products in Europe to avoid the European Union’s (EU) antitrust fines.
According to a Microsoft post, it will introduce new commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites, which do not include Teams in regions outside the EEA (European Economic Area) and Switzerland. It will also provide a new standalone Teams option for enterprise customers in these regions.
Furthermore, starting April 1st, customers can maintain, renew, update, or switch to new proposals from their current license deals.
For new commercial customers, the price of Office without Teams varies from $7.75 to $54.75 depending on the product, and the standalone Teams price is $5.25.
These figures may vary depending on the country and currency, and the company is not currently disclosing the price of the package products.
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The EU has been investigating the connection between Microsoft’s Office and Teams since 2020, when Slack, a competing workspace messaging app owned by Salesforce, complained.
Teams, added for free to Office 365 in 2017, replaced Skype for Business as video conferencing gained popularity during the pandemic.
However, competitors claimed that packaging the products together gave Microsoft an advantage, and the company began selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on October 1st last year.
A Microsoft spokesperson said, “To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the action to separate Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers worldwide.”
They added, “We can respond to feedback from the EU Commission by providing more flexibility when multinational companies want to standardize purchases across multiple regions.”
On the other hand, Microsoft, which got a penalty of 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in EU antitrust fines for bundling more than two products over the past decade, is at risk of being fined up to 10% of its global annual sales if found guilty of antitrust violations.
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