Microsoft to Separate Teams and Office Globally amid Antitrust Scrutiny

Microsoft building- shutterstock
Microsoft building- shutterstock
TT

Microsoft to Separate Teams and Office Globally amid Antitrust Scrutiny

Microsoft building- shutterstock
Microsoft building- shutterstock

Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the US tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.
The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft's tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack, Reuters said.
Teams, which was added to Office 365 in 2017 for free, subsequently replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic due in part to its video conferencing.
Rivals, however, said packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage. The company started selling the two products separately in the EU and Switzerland on Aug. 31 last year.
"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 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."
Microsoft said in a blogpost that it was introducing a new lineup of commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites that do not include Teams in regions outside the EEA (European Economic Area) and Switzerland, and also a new standalone Teams offering for Enterprise customers in those regions.
Starting April 1, customers can either continue with their current licensing deal, renew, update or switch to the new offers.
For new commercial customers, prices for Office without Teams range from $7.75 to $54.75 depending on the product while Teams Standalone will cost $5.25. The figures may vary by country and currency. The company did not disclose prices for current packaged products.
Microsoft's unbundling may not be enough to stave off EU antitrust charges which will likely be sent to the company in the coming months as rivals criticize the level of the fees and the ability of their messaging services to function with Office Web Applications in their own services, sources said.
Microsoft, which has racked up 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in EU antitrust fines in the past decade for tying or bundling two or more products together, risks a fine of as much as 10% of its global annual turnover if found guilty of antitrust breaches.



Google Wins Challenge Against 1.49 Bln Euro EU Antitrust Fine 

12 May 2023, US, Mountain View: The Google logo can be seen on a building at the company's headquarters. (dpa)
12 May 2023, US, Mountain View: The Google logo can be seen on a building at the company's headquarters. (dpa)
TT

Google Wins Challenge Against 1.49 Bln Euro EU Antitrust Fine 

12 May 2023, US, Mountain View: The Google logo can be seen on a building at the company's headquarters. (dpa)
12 May 2023, US, Mountain View: The Google logo can be seen on a building at the company's headquarters. (dpa)

Alphabet unit Google won its challenge on Wednesday against a 1.49 billion euro ($1.66 billion) antitrust fine imposed five years ago for hindering rivals in online search advertising, a week after it lost a much bigger case.

The European Commission in its 2019 decision said Google had abused its dominance to prevent websites from using brokers other than its AdSense platform that provided search adverts. The practices it said were illegal took place from 2006 to 2016.

The Luxembourg-based General Court mostly agreed with the European Union competition enforcer's assessments of the case, but annulled the fine.

"The court (...) upheld most of the commission's assessments, but annulled the decision imposing a fine of almost 1.5 billion euros on Google, on the grounds in particular that it had failed to take into account all the relevant circumstances in its assessment of the duration of the contractual clauses that it had found to be unfair," the judges said.

The AdSense fine, one of a trio of fines that have cost Google a total of 8.25 billion euros, was triggered by a complaint from Microsoft in 2010.

Google has said it changed the targeted contracts in 2016 before the Commission's decision.

The company last week lost its final fight against a 2.42 billion euro fine levied for using its price comparison shopping service to gain an unfair advantage over smaller European rivals.