Microsoft takes unbundling of Office and Teams global

In doing so, hopes to head off further antitrust action

Commercial customers will now be able to buy Teams as a standalone product

In a move that looks like an attempt to beat antitrust regulators to the punch, Microsoft has announced that the decoupling of Teams and M365 which began in the European Economic Area (EEA) last year will now be rolled out globally. This means that UK commercial customers will be able to purchase Teams as a standalone product.

Teams was added to O365 in 2017 but it really took off during the pandemic fuelled boom in remote working. However, Slack (now owned by Salesforce) complained to the EU in 2020 that that bundling gave Microsoft an unfair advantage in the marketplace for video conferencing. An EU regulatory investigation began last July and in August Microsoft announced that it would unbundle Teams from the rest of O365/M365 for the EU and Switzerland from October 2023.

In the US, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has called on the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to emulate the EU in investigating the anti-competitive repercussions of the bundling, and it was reported last September that Zoom had met with both EU and FTC regulators.

"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," a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters.

"Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardise their purchasing across geographies."

Microsoft has set out the licensing changes in a blog post here.

It is unclear how successful Microsoft will be in heading off a hefty fine from the EU, and Microsoft's latest concession comes as antitrust pressure ratchets up on Big Tech around the world. Google, Apple and Meta have all been fined by the EU over the last few months.

Microsoft is also working with CISPE which is an advocacy group for small cloud service providers in Europe (although it should be noted that Amazon is also a member) to try and settle a separate antitrust complaint about its Azure licencing practices before an official EU investigation puts the giant under further scrutiny.

Microsoft's investment in OpenAI and Mistral AI is also being examined.