In January of this year, Microsoft managed to surpass Apple in market capitalization and become the most valuable company in the world. Currently, the Redmond firm exceeds 3 billion dollars of capitalization (about 2.8 billion euros at the current exchange rate).
Some analysts have tried to explain the success experienced by Microsoft linking it to the firm commitment that the technology company has made to generative artificial intelligence, which has even led it to be ahead of giants such as Amazon, Google, Meta —the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp— or Nvidia (another company eminently linked to the rise of AI).
However, we should not lose sight of the fact that the company led by Satya Nadella is not only dedicated to the development of generative artificial intelligence models, a task for which has relied on startups like OpenAI or —more recently— Mistral AI, but their businesses go much further.
So much so that just a few months ago, for example, it managed to complete the most valuable acquisition in the history of the technology industry, thus taking control of a video game giant such as Activision Blizzardcompany responsible for titles such as Call of Duty, Candy Crush Saga o World of Warcraft (to name just a few).
As has happened to other companies in the technology sector, the situation that Microsoft is currently facing has drawn the attention of regulatory bodies, which would be investigating the Redmond firm for possible monopolistic practices. Without going any further, the European Commission reportedly met with Microsoft last week to address these issues.
With the aim of trying to avoid this scrutiny, the technology company announced this Monday through its official blog that is going to take a series of measures among which would be the spin-off of its business messaging and video calling app, Teamsfrom its office services package, Office 365.
The news has been published first by Reuters, which has indicated that Microsoft’s intention is to market Teams separately from its Office product worldwide. This would be a measure that the organization would have already carried out in the European Economic Area (EEA) and in Switzerland in October 2023.
Apparently, European regulators would have been investigating the link between Office and Teams by Microsoft since 2020, at which time Slack, the workspace messaging application owned by Microsoft’s competitor (Salesforce), filed a complaint against the technology giant.
Its competitors would have argued that packaging the products together gives Microsoft an unfair advantage, which would have led the Redmond firm to start marketing them separately a few months ago.
“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are expanding the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the EEA and Switzerland to customers globally,” a company spokesperson told the news agency. British.
“Doing this also responds to feedback from the European Commission, providing multinational companies with more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across different geographical regions,” he added.
Industry experts have been quick to point out that This measure could have an impact on consumers’ pockets. Specialized journalist Tom Chivers has published in Xthe social network formerly known as Twitter, which “Microsoft used to give away Teams with Office,” but is now going to stop doing so, “so buyers get Office, at the same price, without Teams.”
For his part, the analyst Florian Müller has pointed out what “It will be interesting to see how much Teams will cost on its own. and how the price of Office will change” and has asked: “Will end users get any benefit? Or is it just to make Salesforce/Slack happy?”