Microsoft has decided to stop offering your business collaboration tool teams with the rest of the tools and utilities of your Office productivity suite. According to the Financial Times, it does so to avoid sanctions, as well as to get the closure of an official European Union investigation into monopoly.
According to what several sources have told this medium, companies will be able to choose whether they want to subscribe to Office, or buy it, with or without access to Teams. Of course, for now it is unknown how those from Redmond will do it. The decision does not for the moment prevent negotiations with the regulators of the European Union, which are already underway. It is also not clear if they will be able to reach an agreement.
As the company has stated, “we are aware of our responsibilities in the European Union, as a large technology company. We continue to engage cooperatively with the commission in its investigation, and we are open to pragmatic solutions that address concerns and meet customer needs.«.
This investigation was opened after the platform slacka competition from Teams and now owned by Salesforce, HE complain in 2020 to the regulators of the European Union. In this complaint, the platform asked officials to force Microsoft to sell Teams independently of its Office suite. The head of Slack then stated in this regard that they were asking for “the European Union to be a neutral arbiter, examine the facts and enforce the law«.
With this investigation, Microsoft is facing its first regulatory troubles in a decade. The company reached an agreement with the European Commission in 2009, in which it promised to offer its European customers a selection of browsers to choose from, and not force theirs as the default.
The Commission fined the company $561 million in 2013 for failing to consistently and robustly adhere to that agreement. But its most famous monopoly troubles came at the turn of the millennium, when they tried to force it to split into two companies, a decision Microsoft appealed and won in court.
The Redmonds settled on it with the Justice Department in 2001, agreeing to impose certain restrictions. Among them, sharing APIs with third-party developers, and letting PC manufacturers install non-Microsoft software on their computers.
