Teams, which was added to Office 365 for free in 2017, later replaced Skype for Business and became popular during the pandemic in part due to video conferencing. However, in 2020, Salesforce, which offers a rival messaging app called Slack, filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft over the merger.
Since October last year, in order to avoid finesCorporation unbundled products for EU and Swiss customersand has now decided to extend this offer to other users around the world.
How Reuters notes active customers can keep their current agreement or switch to one of the separate offers — the option will be especially useful for those who use the Office suite but prefer another communication service such as Zoom or Google Meet. Commercial users who are not yet familiar with Microsoft’s offerings can purchase Teams on their own for $5.25, while Office without Teams will cost from $7.75 to $54.75 (figures may vary by country and currency).
Over the past decade, Microsoft has received $2.4 billion in antitrust fines from the EU, and combining two or more products together can cost the company another 10% of its global annual turnover.