TECH - Microsoft Decouples Teams from Office Globally in Response to Antitrust Concerns: Report | Benzinga
Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) reportedly decided to sell its Teams chat and video application separately from its Office suite globally.
The move, initiated six months after a similar unbundling in Europe, aims to address potential antitrust concerns.
The separation in Europe was a response to an investigation by the European Commission into Microsoft’s bundling of Office and Teams, triggered by a complaint from Slack, a competing workspace messaging app owned by Salesforce Inc (NYSE:CRM), Reuters reports.
Since its addition to Office 365 in 2017, Teams replaced Skype for Business and gained popularity, especially for its video conferencing capabilities during the pandemic.
Critics argue that Microsoft’s practice of packaging Teams with Office provided the tech giant with an unfair market advantage, per the report.
To counter these concerns, Microsoft began offering the products separately in the EU ...