Microsoft is offering to make a series of concessions for up to ten years to pacify European Commission antitrust regulators. This follows protests from users that tying Teams with its biz productivity applications hinders competition.

The executive body of the EU confirmed today it is seeking feedback on those modificaitons proposed by the US cloud and software corporation.

Under the commitments proposed, the EC says Microsoft would make versions of Teams with Office 365 and Microsoft 365 available at a “reduced price”; let customers buy the suites without Teams, including those within existing contract frameworks; give rivals better interoperability with other Microsoft software; and allow clients to move data out of Teams to “facilitate the use of competition solutions.”

This comes almost five years after Slack general counsel David Schellhase grumbled to the EC that Microsoft was “reverting to past behavior,” adding: “They created a weak, copycat product and tied it to their dominant Office product, force installing it and blocking its removal, a carbon copy of their illegal behavior during the ‘browser wars’.”

He called on the EC to “take swift action,” and here we are, half a decade later, with Microsoft making further concessions to deflect the real threat that something actually might be done by the competition police, at some point in the near future.

Microsoft already unbundled Teams from the productivity suites in 2023 across the EU – and then globally – after the EC opened a formal investigation and found Microsoft was a dominant player in SaaS productivity applications used by businesses, and that tying Teams to Office since April 2019 breached Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and Article 54 of the Agreement on the European Economic Area.