Six months after Microsoft took its first steps in the EU, the company is now (almost) completely removing Teams from its Microsoft 365/Office package. In this way, Redmond hopes to appease antitrust investigators.

Microsoft is splitting Microsoft 365 and Teams into two separate products. Microsoft 365 includes the Office applications and Teams is no longer part of the package by default. In April last year, Microsoft took the first steps to split the two solutions in Europe. The move came in response to an antitrust investigation launched following a complaint from Slack in 2020.

Microsoft is now implementing the division worldwide. The US government’s greater interest in antitrust investigations may have played a role in this decision. However, the division is not absolute: Anyone who has a license for the Office and Teams bundle can continue to use it. The bundled offer is still available, but customers have the choice to purchase Microsoft 365 without Teams or, conversely, not to sign up for the Microsoft ecosystem but continue to work with Teams.

Unfair competition

In 2020, Slack found that Microsoft was competing unfairly by introducing Teams in Office. After all, why should a company consider an additional subscription to Slack if they’re already paying for Teams? The strategy paid off. Slack essentially invented the modern collaboration tool, but it now has about 32 million users, compared to 320 million global users for Teams.

It’s not surprising that Microsoft now sees a split: the damage is done. During the pandemic, companies large and small decided which collaboration tool to build their hybrid strategy on, and thanks to bundling, Microsoft Teams emerged as a big winner. As individual purchase options emerge, companies are unlikely to change course.

Strategic division

In fact, the separate Teams subscription is a new weapon in Microsoft’s arsenal. With Teams now ubiquitous among Microsoft 365 users, Microsoft can attempt to break into organizations not otherwise represented in the Microsoft ecosystem via the separate license.

When Teams was introduced, such a separate formula was a disadvantage because Microsoft then had to compete with the (in our opinion) superior Slack. Today, Teams is a more mature solution that has become the norm thanks to its bundling strategy.

The separation of Teams and Office is a necessary step, but at this point it is at best symbolic and, at worst, represents a further challenge for the competition. A standard subscription to Microsoft Teams costs us 3.7 euros per user per month, excluding VAT.