Microsoft offers to sell Office without Teams to placate EU regulators
Microsoft offered to unbundle its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 software suites from its Teams workplace communication app to address competition concerns from European regulators, News.Az reports citing CNBC.
The European Commission, which is the executive arm of the European Union, said Friday that Microsoft made commitments to address concerns over the tying of Teams to its widely-used productivity tools, such as Word and Outlook.
Microsoft also committed to offer Teams’ competitors increased interoperability with other Microsoft products and let customers move their data out of Teams to competing products.
“The proposed commitments are the result of constructive, good-faith discussions with the European Commission over several months,” Nanna-Louise Linde, vice president of European government affairs at Microsoft, said in a statement.
“We believe that they represent a clear and complete resolution to the concerns raised by our competitors and will provide European customers with more choices.”
The EU has been scrutinizing Microsoft’s tying of Teams with its popular Office productivity suite following a legal claim made by workplace messaging app Slack in 2020 that the bundle represented an abuse of market power.
Sabastian Niles, Salesforce’s president and chief legal officer, said the European Commission’s announcement Friday “further affirms that Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices with Teams have harmed competition and require a binding, enforceable, and effective remedy.”
“We will carefully scrutinize Microsoft’s proposed commitments,” he added.
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