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Microsoft has avoided a fine from the European Commission after it was charged with EU antitrust violations for bundling its Teams app with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions. The European Commission says it has accepted commitments from Microsoft to address competition concerns related to Microsoft Teams, following an anti-competitive complaint filed by Slack in July 2020.
“The commitments address the Commission’s concerns related to the tying of Microsoft Teams to the company’s popular productivity applications Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, included in its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites for business customers,” says the European Commission.
Microsoft has committed to do the following:
Make available versions of its Office suites without Teams and at a reduced price
Allow customers with long-term licenses to switch to suites without Teams
Provide interoperability for key functionalities between communication and collaboration tools that compete with Teams and certain Microsoft products
Allow customers to move their data out of Teams to facilitate the use of competing solutions
Most of the commitments from Microsoft will be enforced by EU lawmakers for seven years, with the interoperability and data portability ones in force for 10 years. Microsoft originally unbundled Teams from Office in Europe in 2023 in an attempt to address regulator concerns, and then spun off Teams from Office 365 as its own separate app globally last year.
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