Microsoft: Teams will no longer be included with Office suite worldwide

Recently, Microsoft announced that it will sell the chat and video conferencing app Teams separately from its Office suite globally. The announcement came six months after the Redmond tech giant unbundled the two products in Europe to prevent the EU antitrust fine.

Microsoft Teams was added to Office 365 in 2017, replacing Skype for Business. Because of its video conferencing feature, it became popular during the pandemic.

However, with its growing popularity, its competitors were not happy, as it was available with the Office suite for free, which gave Microsoft an unfair advantage over them.

The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft because Teams came bundled with Office and the new OS Windows. This irked Slack, the Salesforce-owned messaging app the most, and they complained and urged the regulator to force Microsoft to remove Teams.

Therefore, Microsoft took this step and the company spokesperson said:

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.

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

So, from now on, the new lineup of commercial Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites will not include Teams in regions outside the European Economic Area and Switzerland. Also, a new standalone Microsoft Teams app will be available to Enterprise customers.

From April 1, customers can opt to stay with the current licensing deal or update, renew, or get the new offers instead.

As for prices, the new commercial customers can get Office without Teams at $7.75 to $54.75, which depends on the product you choose, and a standalone Teams app will be available at $5.25. The price for the Microsoft Teams app may vary by currency.

Now, we all have to wait and see whether this step of unbundling could save Microsoft from getting fined. Also, we don’t know how other companies will react to the low price of the standalone Teams app.

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