For decades, Microsoft’s Office suite has brought some of the most important work software to our screens. In recent years, the video-conferencing app Teams has become more relevant for work alongside classic programs like Word and Excel. Now Microsoft has separated Teams from its Microsoft 365 subscriptions worldwide.
The Microsoft Teams Boom
Since 2020, the world has been hungry for digital working solutions. More people than ever work in a remote, online capacity. At the same time, those in the office increasingly need to communicate with those who are out of the office or somewhere else in the world. The result was a boom in work software like Zoom, Slack, and of course, Microsoft Teams.
Offering chatting and video calls, these apps work using familiar streaming tech that found widespread entertainment use in the 2010s, especially in online industries like iGaming. Live stream tech is widespread across video-sharing sites while iGaming hosts live gameshows like Adventures Beyond Wonderland. The same tech that delivers live-streamed entertainment has long existed for video-conferencing too, best seen by early 2000s services like Skype.
Despite owning Skype, Microsoft created Teams as their own team collaboration app in 2017. Certain Skype software like Skype for Business stopped updating as the focus switched to Teams instead, and it also replaced the Microsoft Classroom education app in the company’s Office 365 Education package. Its popularity soon skyrocketed and, as of 2024, Microsoft Teams has over 300 million monthly users worldwide.
Microsoft Teams in Europe
Microsoft Teams was integrated into Microsoft Office (A.K.A Microsoft 365) upon its launch in 2017. Then, during the 2020 video-conferencing boom, rival competitor Slack launched a challenge via The European Commission (EC). Their complaint stated that Teams’ inclusion in the Office package gave an anti-competitive edge to their service, over up-and-coming services. Slack’s main contention was that users of Office would get access to Teams by proxy, even if they were not interested in the software. It took nearly three years for an investigation to get underway in 2023.
In response, Microsoft stopped bundling Teams with Office and announced it would not be integrated into Windows 11. Most of these changes were restricted to the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland, to comply with the decision of European courts. That persisted until April 2024, when Microsoft announced that it would be expanding this approach worldwide.
Microsoft Teams’ New Plans
As part of their new plan, Microsoft will split Teams from its Office bundles globally. Multiple new Office bundles have been created, all excluding Teams. The Teams service has instead become a standalone option for Enterprise customers. Given Teams’ importance to digital workspaces, placing it closer to Microsoft 365 for Enterprise makes a lot of sense while still removing it from the ubiquitous Office suite.
The changes were announced in Microsoft’s blog post, which also includes a rundown of its existing suites and how they will change. There are no changes to the pricing of pre-existing suites, they are just being reshuffled to remove Teams. Then Teams will be available as a standalone Enterprise purchase priced at $5.25.
Both Microsoft and independent news firms like Reuters have previously claimed that Teams’ user base was unaffected by its European suite reshuffling in 2023. In light of that, it’s clear that the tech giant has decided it can take this approach worldwide, with no negative impact on their business model.
