Microsoft will stop packaging its Teams videoconferencing app with its Office software in Europe in an effort to head off anti-trust penalties by regulators.
The tech giant also said that it would take steps to make it easier for competing products to work alongside its software.
The announcement comes a month after the European Union’s executive Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top competition enforcer, opened a formal investigation over concerns that bundling Teams with Office gives the company an unfair edge over competitors.
The investigation was triggered by a complaint filed in 2020 by Slack Technologies, the maker of the popular workplace messaging software.
Slack, owned by business software maker Salesforce, alleged that Microsoft was abusing its market dominance to eliminate competition — in violation of EU laws — by illegally combining Teams with its Office suite, which includes Word, Excel and Outlook.
Microsoft’s vice president of European government affairs, Nanna-Louise Linde, said in a blog post: “Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we co-operate with it.”
It is not clear if the concessions will be enough to address the Commission’s concerns.
A Commission spokesperson said: “We take note of Microsoft’s announcement. We have no further comment to make.”
Ms Linde said the changes were made to address EU concerns that customers should be able to buy Office without Teams for a cheaper price and “that we should do more to make interoperability easier” with rival communications and collaboration software.
The changes will take effect on October 1st in the 30-nation European Economic Area and Switzerland.
For its core enterprise customers, which represent most of its business in the region, Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington, will cut the price by
In the most current case a customer purchased a boutique piece of sports equipment worth much more than $1,000 from the company’s on-line store. As Aeron Davis notes , even in 1997 only 7{7c369dd3bad84096ce68eba2f751621ac086837d8c0b7e61ead8450d0110e1cc} of the business community voted Labour and 69{7c369dd3bad84096ce68eba2f751621ac086837d8c0b7e61ead8450d0110e1cc} voted Conservative, despite all of Blair’s efforts to show Labour was business friendly. In business, details trump theory, so discover what you can to assistance your thought and bolster your plan. Al Jazeera America was the greatest-funded startup cable and satellite television news channel in the US current years soon after beginning operations in 2013. Chris Jones has been blogging for years and enjoys helping folks to be productive in their personal residence business. If you are not passionate about your current home business opportunity, then start looking for one that makes you ought to effortlessly find one particular that you can be passionate about. In today’s post-sequestration business climate, government contractors are continually challenged with shrinking margins, strong price competition and flat or decreased agency spending.
…
A business program is essential for your accomplishment and growth as an entrepenuer. Thanks for the post as I am planning to move to Ooma as standard program plus 9.99 international must cover my all international wants and saving would be large more than Vonage. The concept of a business strategy is not so significantly about the strategy as it is about researching and considering about the how to tie your dream to actionable measures. Valupak: Valupak is, in my opinion, not a good choice for this sort of business. We’re excited to announce some modifications we are creating to the format of Women in Business that we hope will assist us construct our self-confidence and strengthen our connections. In my case, I ended up installing Skype for Business Debugging Tools on the Mediation server VM, and making use of CLS Logger.