Sources say that the European Union will formally charge Microsoft Office with bundling Teams for suspected monopoly.

According to reports on the evening of September 14, Beijing time, the European Union will formally charge Microsoft Office with suspected monopoly of bundling chat and video application Teams, according to reports. This means that Microsoft's proposal to separate Teams from Office does not allay EU concerns.

In July this year, the European Union launched a formal antitrust investigation into Microsoft's Office office suite bundling Teams applications, which is the first time that Microsoft has faced an antitrust investigation by the European Union in 15 years.

At the end of August, Microsoft announced that it would separate Teams from Office to make it easier for competitors' products to work with Microsoft's software to avoid antitrust penalties from the European Union.

But the European Commission is not satisfied with this and is preparing a statement of dissent, which is expected to be released in the coming months, people familiar with the matter said today.

Microsoft and the European Commission have yet to comment.

The case began in July 2020, when Slack Technologies complained to the European Commission that Microsoft abused its market dominance by bundling Teams with its popular Office office software to eliminate competition from Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams is an intelligent team collaboration tool based on chat, which can share documents synchronously and provide instant messaging tools for members, including voice and video conferencing. Slack Technologies also operates similar products.

Microsoft's bundling of Teams with Office means that millions of users are forced to install Teams and cannot be deleted. Over the past decade, Microsoft has been fined 2.2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) by the European Union for bundling and other practices.