EU dissatisfied: Microsoft plan to unbundle Teams is not enough

Microsoft wanted to make EU investigations obsolete

Microsoft had recently launched a new team sales strategy announced to business customers, in which the communication platform from the enterprise versions of Microsoft 365 want to separate them out in order to distribute them separately. However, this approach, in which corporate customers are supposed to purchase teams separately in an annual subscription at a discount, probably does not satisfy the EU competition authorities.

Like the US Economic Service Bloomberg Citing sources close to the EU Commission, the competition regulators continue to have concerns that Microsoft’s business practices could still hinder competition within the European community of states.

The EU therefore wants to continue working on a formal complaint against Microsoft, so that the software company continues to face a possible fine or other measures for violating competition law. The EU Commission is currently reportedly preparing a list of objections that it wants to present to Microsoft within the next few months. Microsoft had announced that Teams would no longer be distributed as standard for corporate customers as part of Office 365 and Microsoft 365. Instead, the prices for the monthly subscriptions for the two packages mentioned are being reduced slightly and teams want to be bookable separately instead.

What exactly bothers the EU competition watchdogs about this approach has not yet been made public. Microsoft’s latest problem with the EU stems from complaints from its competitor Slack, which sees the bundling of teams with Microsoft’s Office packages as hindering competition.

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