Microsoft Has Unbundled Teams Worldwide
They avoid lawsuits, and new customers get to pay more?
I had planned this week to be my off week, but then Microsoft made an important announcement that turned out not to be an April Fool’s prank.
If you haven’t seen the news - Microsoft splits up the Teams and Office apps worldwide, following EU split.
This got my attention, so I looked for the source—Microsft itself—partly to get more information and partially because this announcement was made on April 1. Maybe it’s a very elaborate April Fool’s joke?
I found the announcement along with an FAQ.
Looking over the details, I noticed some things.
New customers looking to purchase e3 or e5 licenses will see the new “No Teams” version. The price looks to be close to $3 less than last week.
The Teams add-on will cost $5.25 monthly, a net price increase for Enterprise licensing.
However, the FAQ notes that existing customers “May continue to use, renew, upgrade, and otherwise adjust their subscriptions as before. They may also now switch to suites without Teams at anniversary/renewal or add new user subscriptions to suites without Teams or to the new Teams standalone at any time (including alongside suites with Teams).”
Does that mean you can continue to renew at the current pricing? I tend to doubt it. I expect that renewing an existing Enterprise license will be more expensive the next time it is up to account for Teams' licensing. If I’m reading that correctly, Teams will still be bundled, but I wouldn’t expect to renew at the exact per-month cost.
What does it all mean? Probably not much. My initial reaction was similar to what I read from TechCrunch -
The market has matured to the point that many larger firms have made their choice, and since swapping out solutions isn’t a trivial matter, unbundling Teams is unlikely to have an appreciable impact on market share.
It’s true. I can’t see many current organizations using Teams in any capacity suddenly deciding to switch. It’s a lot of work. We know that many organizations started with Teams because they already owned it. This unbundling is likely too late for most to do anything different now.
I can see some smaller organizations that have primarily been using Zoom or other tools and haven’t made much effort to integrate Teams into their workflows, opting to stop paying extra for it. Is that a large enough user base to make a difference? Clearly, no. Microsoft has decided to take that loss in exchange for making these investigations disappear.
It makes sense. I can’t imagine any large customer relishing the thought of switching platforms.
What do you think? Would you switch to a different collaboration platform, or will this change any of your plans to roll out Teams?