Microsoft is spinning off Teams into its own service

Once a company is big and has a strong foothold in a market, you can bet that regulators are going to be peeking in. A while back, Microsoft was compelled to spin off Teams from Office 365 into its own service in the EU. This was partially due to a complaint from Slack that bundling Teams into such a widely used application platform constitutes anti-competitive practices. Well, Microsoft is spinning off Teams from Office 365 globally.

Microsoft Office 365 is the company’s equivalent to Google Workspace. It is a suite of applications and services that companies and users can use for business. Office 365 includes services such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Etc. Rather than paying a lump sum for the service like in the old days, Microsoft 365 costs a monthly fee.

Teams is the company’s primary communications platform. It’s the equivalent of Slack in that you’re able to communicate and collaborate with your colleagues.

Microsoft is spinning off Teams from Office 365

Microsoft Office is and has been an industry standard for businesses around the world. This means that Office 365 is used by a metric ton of people. However, Slack did not take too kindly to this. Since Office is so ubiquitous, it felt that users are basically forced into using the Office communications platform. This, ostensibly, means that it’s much harder for other communication platforms to make it to other users. That is Slack’s complaint.

Right now, since Microsoft is in the midst of an ongoing anti-competition lawsuit in the EU, it seems necessary that the company should spin off Teams into its own service. This seems to be a move to take some of the heat off of the company while the EU is digging into it.

So, people signing up for a new Office 365 plan will not have access to Teams. Rather, they will have to buy a separate subscription service for it. Buying a separate plan for Teams will cost the user $5.25/month. With the diminished selection of services, Office 365 will then cost $7.75/month.

However, if you already have a Microsoft 365 plan, and you’ve been using Teams, you can still access it using your account. This new plan only applies to new signups. However, at this point, we don’t know how long Microsoft will provide Teams for existing customers.