BRUSSELS : The European Commission has accepted commitments offered by Microsoft to address competition concerns related to its Teams platform, the EU executive body said on Friday.
Under the commitments, Microsoft will make available versions of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites without Teams and at a reduced price, among other changes.
Nanna-Louise Linde, a Microsoft vice president for European government affairs, said in a statement: “We appreciate the dialogue with the Commission that led to this agreement, and we turn now to implementing these new obligations promptly and fully.”
EU regulators opened an investigation after a complaint by Slack Technologies Inc, now owned by Salesforce Inc. German rival alfaview also filed a similar complaint.
Regulators’ preliminary decision was that Microsoft had granted Teams an undue competitive advantage and restricted competition in the market for cloud-based communication and collaboration products when it bundled Teams with productivity applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
Microsoft unbundled Teams from Office after the EU probe was opened, but regulators found the changes were insufficient.
Reuters reported in May that Microsoft was expected to avoid an antitrust fine as EU regulators were likely to accept its offer on Office and Teams products.
