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The tech giant is in the process of decoupling Teams from its Office software suite as scrutiny mounts on both sides of the Atlantic.
By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. from Los Angeles Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni
Microsoft is spinning off Teams, its popular video and chat app, from its Office software suite in markets around the world, expanding a spin-off that began in the European Union last fall.
It appears to be the software giant’s latest effort to avoid investigations through global antitrust governance as regulators read up on the strength of Big Tech.
Competitors have complained about the Teams-Office suite for years. Microsoft first added the document and video collaboration program to its software suite in 2017, and saw Teams’ popularity skyrocket after the coronavirus pandemic sparked a boom in hybrid and remote work.
At the height of the lockdown in 2020, Slack filed a complaint with the European Commission accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive habit by combining Teams with Office (Three months later, Slack agreed to sell itself to Salesforce for $27. 7 billion). And last summer, Eric Yuan, CEO of the company Zoom, called the F. T. C. to the EU in the Teams-Office merger investigation.
It’s unclear whether Microsoft’s resolution will help it pass a European Union resolution, which could charge the company up to 10% of its global turnover. The company told Reuters that the move “responds to the European Commission’s comments by offering multinational corporations more flexibility when they need to standardize their purchases across geographies. “
This comes as tech giants are being investigated by regulators around the world. Last month, the Justice Department sued Apple over its strict use of the iOS operating system, as Google awaits a judge’s verdict in a U. S. lawsuit over its search monopoly.
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