Microsoft seeks to placate EU with pledges to unbundle Teams, Office

Microsoft on Friday made recent commitments to unbundle its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 tool suites from its Teams place of business conversation app so as to deal with festival considerations from European regulators and keep away from a conceivable antitrust high-quality.

The European Commission, which is the chief arm of the European Union, mentioned in a observation Friday that Microsoft made a sequence of commitments to handle considerations over the tying of Teams to its widely-used productiveness gear, equivalent to Word and Outlook.

Under the proposals, Microsoft has mentioned it’ll make variations of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 to be had with out Teams at a discounted worth, in addition to permit consumers to modify to the gear with out Teams, together with underneath current contracts.

Microsoft additionally dedicated to provide Teams’ competition higher interoperability with different Microsoft merchandise and let consumers transfer their knowledge out of Teams to competing merchandise. Interoperability refers back to the observe of permitting other programs to keep in touch with each and every different extra simply.

“The proposed commitments are the result of constructive, good-faith discussions with the European Commission over several months,” Nanna-Louise Linde, vice chairman of European govt affairs at Microsoft, mentioned in a observation.

“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 well-liked Office productiveness suite following a felony declare made by means of place of business messaging app Slack in 2020 that the package deal represented an abuse of marketplace energy.

Slack used to be obtained by means of Salesforce for $27.7 billion in 2021.

Sabastian Niles, Salesforce’s president and leader felony officer, mentioned 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.

Microsoft previously made a pledge to unbundle Teams from Office in 2023, providing to promote Microsoft 365 with out the chat and videoconferencing provider at a reduced worth. It then expanded on that transfer globally with an be offering to promote the 2 merchandise one after the other.

Friday’s information marks an try by means of the Redmond, Washington-based tech titan to finish the EU dispute and avert a possible hefty antitrust high-quality.

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