Microsoft which last year dropped Teams from the Office productivity and other suites in the European Union to avoid a hefty fine, will now remove its collaboration app from enterprise software bundles worldwide.
The IT giant called the move "globally consistent licensing" that "helps ensure clarity for customers and streamline decision making and negotiations".
Salesforce, which now owns competing collaboration app Slack, had complained to EU regulators that Microsoft was acting anti-competitively by bundling Teams with its business software application suites for free.
The European Commission agreed with Salesforce, and Microsoft is now extending the Teams unbundling globally.
Microsoft has now removed Teams from the following suites:
- Office 365 E1
- Office 365 E3
- Office 365 E5
- Microsoft 365 E3
- Microsoft 365 E5
The Frontline Microsoft 365 F1 and F3 suites, along with Office 365 F3 will also have Teams removed, with pricing going down by 50 cents per month.
Microsoft's Business Basic, Standard and Premium will also see price reductions after Teams is unbundled from April 1.
Existing customers can continue to use their suites with Teams, or switch to editions without the collaboration software.
4 Comments
It will end up being very profitable for MS - astounding but not unexpected stupidity from the bureaucrats. They will now be able to make another $5 per 365 user...sigh.
Please, please if there are any government officials thinking they can outsmart the global giants, please don't, we can't afford it.
Quite happy about this.
MS has been known for bloatware where a heap of stuff gets added 'for free' into their core products. Sometimes people have no idea what the extra stuff gets up to, e.g. random services sucking up resources, presence indicators to see if you're at your keyboard, programs you'll never use hogging disk space, etc. The list goes on and on. And in the end I get to pay for all this crap.
Buggy as hell too. Was on the "new" Teams for a while recently, kinda worked but then my Bluetooth headset stopped working in calls. Tried everything. Then I switched back to the old Teams and it started working right away.
Ever used Microsoft's "YourPhone"? Great idea to integrate cell phone control/calling via your PC. Just a shame about the abysmal execution.
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