Microsoft will sell its chat and video app Teams separately from its Office product globally, the U.S. tech giant said on Monday, six months after it unbundled the two products in Europe in a bid to avert a possible EU antitrust fine.
The European Commission has been investigating Microsoft’s tying of Office and Teams since a 2020 complaint by Salesforce-owned competing workspace messaging app Slack.
↫ Foo Yun Chee at Reuters
I honestly misread this as Microsoft selling Teams off, which would’ve been far bigger news. Unbundling Teams from Office globally is just Microsoft applying its recent European Union policy to the rest of the world. All we need now is Microsoft to stop trying to make Teams for families and friends happen, because nobody will ever want to use Teams for anything, let alone personal use.
Without teams, zoom will charge apple prices. Nobody will ever want that.
It’s not ditching Teams, just “removing” it from Office, it’ll still be sold / worked on etc.
That was a comment on Thom’s last line.
I do not want to use Teams at all at work, and so far i have managed to avoid it by logging out and disabling it from autostarting.
It’s an absolute nightmare! We tried it briefly at work after we ran up against Slack’s usage limits (we aren’t big enough at all to afford an enterprise license). Just creating new accounts felt like something out of the movie Brazil, and several users had issues getting and/or staying logged in once accounts were created. Messages didn’t get received sometimes, and creating groups/channels was overly complicated.
I ended up setting up a Linux server on our private network running Mattermost and it works perfectly fine. It’s also easy to administer and update, it’s basically as good as Slack without the cost.
Morgan,
Never heard of that one before, but I’m taking a closer look at it. It should go without saying by now, but I have a strong preference for technology that runs locally and doesn’t force you into dependency on services you don’t have control over.
It’s been great so far. They do like to nudge you towards a paid tier, but the only thing that offers over the free tier is paid support, SSO options, and screen sharing, things we don’t need in our business. From what I know about you based on your posts here, it would be an easy and fun project for you. 🙂
Sounds like you don’t have a job then… LOL
Well at least Teams isn’t Zoom, WebEx or Polycom, who somehow all manage to be even worse than the unstable crap that is Teams.
I always feel kinda dirty when I’m defending something from Microsoft but after using Teams for a while I now think it works good enough and definitely has gotten better over time.
It has some good features and after they released the new Teams clients it’s not horribly slow anymore and it’s no longer horrible to use over multiple tenants so I actually think Teams is “decent enough” now.
It’s nice when a program like Teams actually does get better over time for a change.