Microsoft will stop packaging its Teams videoconferencing app with its Office software after the practice attracted antitrust scrutiny.
The tech giant announced that Office subscriptions purchased from this week onward will not include Teams. Microsoft will begin selling the two products separately globally, following a previous separation in Europe.
This decision came after the European Union’s executive commission initiated a formal investigation due to concerns that combining Teams with Office could give Microsoft an unfair advantage over its competitors.
The inquiry was prompted by a 2020 complaint from Slack Technologies, a popular workplace messaging software creator.
Slack, which is owned by Salesforce, claimed that Microsoft was using its market dominance to unlawfully eliminate competition by integrating Teams with its Office suite, including Word, Excel, and Outlook.
