Microsoft is now selling Teams, its online meetings service, as a separate product from its Office suite, after being scrutinized by competition regulators.
The technology group split Teams and Office in Europe six months ago to try and avoid an EU fine. Now it will do the same thing worldwide.
Teams, which Office 365 added in 2017 for free, replaced Skype for Business. It grew in popularity with rivals like Zoom, largely due to its video conferencing features, during the pandemic. The software also offers other collaboration features, such as file sharing and workplace chat.
Since a complaint filed by Slack in 2020, a workspace messaging app owned by Salesforce, the commission has been looking into Microsoft’s marketing of Office with Teams. Microsoft’s rivals have claimed that Microsoft has an unfair advantage by packaging Teams with Office, the software collection which includes Word Excel and Powerpoint.
In October of last year, the company began selling the two products individually in the European Union. It said in a press release: “To provide clarity to our customers, we will extend the steps we took lastyear to debundle Teams [Office] from the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland to all customers worldwide.
This also responds to feedback from the European Commission, by giving multinational companies more flexibility in standardising their purchases across geographies.
Commentators in the software industry said that the move was an apparent attempt to appease competition regulators as the scrutiny on the large technology companies has increased. The US Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Apple last month over the company’s tight control over the iOS operating system. Questions were raised about whether users could easily switch from Safari browser.
In light of the EU probe, Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, requested that the US Federal Trade Commission investigate Microsoft’s bundling Office software with Microsoft.
This issue is reminiscent of criticism Microsoft received during the late 1990s when it was accused of using its dominance over the Windows platform to control which software was installed on PCs, and to suppress competition from rival browsers.
Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom and centre, requested that the US Federal Trade Commission investigate Microsoft’s bundling Office software
After Microsoft was sued by the Justice Department in 1998, it eventually conceded and allowed rival internet browsers to gain popularity.
Analysts said that Microsoft’s separation from Office of Teams may not have the same dramatic effect. Rishi Jaluria of RBC Capital Markets said: “Enterprise software is a different beast, and Teams has been so integrated into workflows that this doesn’t have the same impact.”
Sensor Tower, an independent research company, found that the use of Teams was relatively stable even after the EU separated Office from Teams.
Microsoft shares closed at $421.44, down by $3.13 or 0.74 percent, while Zoom shares fell $1.50, or 1.5%, to $63.78.