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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) said it will unbundle Teams from its Office product and make it easier for rival products to work with its software in an effort to address European competition concerns.
In July, the European Commission, or EC, said it opened a formal investigation to check if Microsoft may have breached EU competition rules by tying or bundling its chat and video app Teams to its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365. In July 2020, Slack Technologies — the workspace messaging app owned by Salesforce (CRM) — filed a complaint alleging that Microsoft illegally tied Teams to its dominant productivity suites.
“Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it,” said Nanna-Louise Linde, Microsoft’s vice-president for European government affairs, on Thursday in a blog post.
Linde added that these steps aimd to address two EU concerns, “that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites.”
Starting October 1, the company will unbundle Teams from its Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites in the European Economic Area, or EEA, and Switzerland. It will sell these offerings without Teams at a lower price (€2 less per month or €24 per year). The company will do this for its core enterprise customers, which represent most of its commercial business in the EEA and Switzerland.
For small business and frontline workers, the company will offer suites with Teams, but also a ‘without-Teams’ option at a lower price.
Secondly, Microsoft said it will offer interoperability with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 apps and services, which will allow companies like Zoom (ZM) and Salesforce (CRM) to create tailored experiences across Exchange, Outlook and Teams.
The company noted that it will create new support resources to better organize and point application developers to publicly available application programming interfaces, or APIs, and extensibility in Microsoft 365 and Office 365 apps and services which connect with Teams.
In addition, Microsoft said it will create new mechanisms to enable third-party solutions to host Office web applications.
