Microsoft office

microsoft-splits-up-the-teams-and-office-apps-worldwide,-following-eu-split

Microsoft splits up the Teams and Office apps worldwide, following EU split

different teams —

Changes may save a bit of money for people who want Office apps without Teams.

Updated

Teams is being decoupled from the other Office apps worldwide, six months after Microsoft did the same thing for the EU.

Enlarge / Teams is being decoupled from the other Office apps worldwide, six months after Microsoft did the same thing for the EU.

Microsoft/Andrew Cunningham

Months after unbundling the apps in the European Union, Microsoft is taking the Office and Teams breakup worldwide. Reuters reports that Microsoft will begin selling Teams and the other Microsoft 365 apps to new commercial customers as separate products with separate price tags beginning today.

“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”

The unbundling is a win for other team communication apps like Slack and videoconferencing apps like Zoom, both of which predate Teams but haven’t had the benefits of the Office apps’ huge established user base.

The separation follows an EU regulatory investigation that started in July of 2023, almost exactly three years after Slack initially filed a complaint alleging that Microsoft was “abusing its market dominance to extinguish competition in breach of European Union competition law.”

In August of 2023, Microsoft announced that it would be unbundling the apps in the EU and Switzerland in October. Bloomberg reported in September that Zoom had met with EU and US Federal Trade Commission regulators about Microsoft, further ratcheting up regulatory pressure on Microsoft.

In October, Microsoft European Government Affairs VP Nanna-Louise Linde described the unbundling and other moves as “proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way,” though the EU investigation is ongoing, and the company may yet be fined. Linde also wrote that Microsoft would allow third-party apps like Zoom and Slack to integrate more deeply with the Office apps and that it would “enable third-party solutions to host Office web applications.”

Microsoft has put up a blog post detailing its new pricing structure here—for now, the changes only affect the Microsoft 365 plans for the Business, Enterprise, and Frontline versions of Microsoft 365. Consumer, Academic, US Government, and Nonprofit editions of Microsoft 365 aren’t changing today and will still bundle Teams as they did before.

Current Office/Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers who want to keep using the Office apps and Teams together can continue to subscribe to both at their current prices. New subscribers to the Enterprise versions of Microsoft 365/Office 365 can pay $5.25 per user per month for Teams, whether they’re buying Teams as standalone software or adding it on top of a Teams-free Office/Microsoft 365 subscription.

For the Business and Frontline Microsoft 365 versions, you can either buy the version with Teams included for the same price as before, or choose a new Teams-less option that will save you a couple of dollars per user per month. For example, the Teams-less version of Microsoft 365 Business Standard costs $10.25 per user per month, compared to $12.50 for the version that includes Teams.

Updated April 1, 2024, at 4: 12 pm to add more details about pricing and a link to Microsoft’s official blog post about the announcement; also added a statement from a Microsoft spokesperson.

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Office 2024 will be the next standalone release, as the Office brand lives on

return to office —

Consumer prices stay the same; MS promises at least one more standalone release.

Office 2024 will be the next standalone release, as the Office brand lives on

Microsoft

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would soon begin offering previews of Microsoft Office 2024, the next standalone perpetually licensed version of the Office suite. Like Office 2021 before it, Office 2024 will be part of Microsoft’s Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which is intended for IT administrators and users who value stability and predictability over constant iteration.

But Microsoft is being clearer than ever that it would really like people to move to using Microsoft 365 subscriptions, referring to Office 2024 as “a specialty product that Microsoft has committed to maintaining for use in exceptional circumstances.” The company will be increasing prices for businesses by “up to 10 percent” compared to Office 2021, a price hike that Microsoft says will “support continued innovation in this niche space.” Pricing for the consumer version of Office 2024 should stay the same as it is for Office 2021.

Office 2024 will receive support and security updates for five years from its release date, which will be “later this year,” along with a new LTSC release of Windows 11. The company has also committed to releasing at least one more standalone version of Office in the future. If you bought Office 2021 and you’re still happy with it, you’ll still get support (including security updates) until October of 2026. Support for Office 2019 ended in October 2023.

Highlights of the Office 2024 release include “new meeting creation options and search enhancements in Outlook, dozens of new Excel features and functions including Dynamic Charts and Arrays; and improved performance, security, and accessibility,” according to Microsoft. One missing feature of note will be Microsoft Publisher, which will be discontinued in October 2026.

Like other standalone Office releases, Office 2024’s feature set will be frozen in time without the continuous changes present in the Microsoft 365 versions of the same apps. And while the perpetually licensed versions of Office can interact with Microsoft services like OneDrive, the company says that other features like the Copilot AI assistant won’t be available in Office 2024 because it is a “disconnected product.” It’s also missing real-time collaboration features available in Microsoft 365.

Is it a rebrand if you keep using the old brand name in parentheses?

Enlarge / Is it a rebrand if you keep using the old brand name in parentheses?

Microsoft

Among other things, the continued existence of the standalone Office product shows that the “Office” brand name will still be with us for a while, despite Microsoft’s formal decision to retire it back in late 2022. “Office” remains useful as a noun that refers to all of these apps collectively—and separately from the Microsoft 365 subscription product. Even in places where the Office name has been removed, Microsoft seems reticent to do away with it entirely; the Microsoft 365 app that comes built into Windows has the new name and the new logo but also includes “Office” in parentheses as if to say “yes, we know what name most people use to talk about this software.”

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