The European Commission (EC) has agreed to commitments proposed by Microsoft to address antitrust concerns related to the integration of Teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites.

These measures will be legally binding under EU antitrust laws.

The commission’s investigation focused on Microsoft’s practice of bundling Teams with widely used productivity applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

This practice raised concerns about potential anticompetitive behaviour by limiting opportunities for rival communication and collaboration tools.

To resolve these issues, Microsoft will provide versions of Office 365 and Microsoft 365 without Teams at a reduced price. Customers, including those with long-term licenses, will have the option to switch to these new versions.

The company will also enhance interoperability between competing products and Microsoft services, alongside improving data portability from Teams to other platforms.

Additionally, Microsoft will modify its licensing and pricing structures in line with these commitments while ensuring customer needs are met. From 1 November 2025, customers can choose between product suites with or without Teams globally.

The EC’s investigation, launched in July 2023, preliminarily found concerns about Microsoft’s integration of Teams since April 2019.

This practice might breach Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union by restricting competition within the European Economic Area market for software-as-a-service productivity applications.

A market test conducted between May and June 2025 assessed Microsoft’s commitments. Based on the feedback, Microsoft agreed to increase the price difference between packages with and without Teams by 50% for certain business segments.

The tech giant also committed to prominently advertising both options.

EC clean, just, and competitive transition executive vice-president Teresa Ribera said: “Organisations big and small across Europe and around the world rely heavily on videoconferencing, chat and collaboration tools, especially since the coronavirus pandemic.

“With today’s decision, we make binding for seven years or more Microsoft’s commitments to put an end to its tying practices that may be preventing rivals from effectively competing with Teams.”

This agreement follows complaints from Slack Technologies and alfaview regarding Microsoft’s alleged competitive conduct. Both entities retracted their complaints following Microsoft’s proposed commitments.

Under EU antitrust regulations, companies can offer commitments during investigations to address concerns without concluding an infringement.

Non-compliance could lead to substantial fines or daily penalties based on global turnover.

Microsoft will standardise pricing for its Online Services products, which include Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, effective Nov. 1 or at a customer’s next renewal date, the company said Tuesday. The change eliminates volume licensing program discounts under Enterprise Agreement and Microsoft Products and Services Agreement licenses but does not affect on-premises software pricing.

“This update builds on the consistent pricing model already in place for services like Azure and reflects our ongoing commitment to greater transparency and alignment across all purchasing channels,” Microsoft said.

The move hits Microsoft’s largest customers hardest, raising costs by 13.6% or more on ubiquitous SaaS products, according to Gartner. “This is a double-digit increase in list prices in the biggest software vendor expense for tens of thousands of customers,” said Gartner Senior Director Analyst Stephen White. “These are big companies that expect not to pay retail.”

Microsoft’s pricing model adjustment coincides with heightened IT budget scrutiny triggered by shifting U.S. trade policy. Last week, President Donald Trump threatened to impose levies of approximately 100% on imported semiconductors, which had previously been protected from the tariff regime.

The U.S. government, along with organisations partnered with Microsoft’s worldwide Education division, will not be subject to any pricing changes, the company said in the announcement. In Europe, where the company’s licensing practices have been under the regulatory microscope for several years, no such privileges were extended.

“That will be very visible to European governments and in other countries around the world. We’ve already seen examples of European governments that have chosen to move away from Microsoft,” White said, pointing to Denmark and Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein province.

Microsoft’s move also comes just two weeks after the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority took Microsoft to task for market-distorting product pricing.

“Microsoft’s licensing practices are adversely impacting the competitiveness of AWS and Google in the supply of cloud services, particularly in competing for customers that purchase cloud services which use the relevant Microsoft software as an input,” the watchdog agency said in the final decision of its nearly two-year cloud services market investigation.

Price increases aren’t new to Microsoft customers. Last year, the vendor updated terms for the Dynamics 365 business application suite, raising customer costs by an average of 11%. In 2022, the Microsoft 365 office productivity bundle received its first significant pricing bump in a decade.

The Tuesday announcement upends a tiered structure that had been in place for more than two decades for large enterprise customers, White said. Organisations with fewer than 2,400 seats — Level A customers — lost their Enterprise Agreement discounts in 2018, while the larger Level B, C and D tier agreements were left in place.

“One of the worst-kept secrets in the enterprise software market is that Microsoft wants to eventually dispose of the vaunted Enterprise Agreement,” Scott Bickley, advisory fellow at Info-Tech Research Group said. “With all eyes on the dual tailwinds of Azure cloud growth, powered by the current AI hype cycle, Microsoft has finally decided to exercise its near-monopolistic control of the office productivity and core O/S space to pull the rug out from under its largest customer base.”

The elimination of tiered pricing leaves room for enterprises with sufficient clout to negotiate individual discounts. Nonetheless, the changes will be a bitter pill for many customers.

“It’s a significant change for large organisations with 15,000-plus users that have historically benefited from volume-based cloud licensing incentives,” Jeff Elliott, principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research, said in an email.

The firm expects a wave of early renewals as customers try to lock in existing terms in advance of the November deadline. “The longer-term concern here is that this will simplify Microsoft’s path to phasing out the Enterprise Agreement model altogether, or consolidating licensing programs even more,” Elliott said.

Microsoft’s advertised end-of-support date for Windows 10 is October 14, 2025. But in reality, the company will gradually wind down support for the enduring popular operating system over the next three years. Microsoft would really like you to upgrade to Windows 11, especially if it also means upgrading to a new PC, but it also doesn’t want to leave hundreds of millions of home and business PCs totally unprotected.

Those competing goals have led to lots of announcements and re-announcements and clarifications about updates for both Windows 10 itself and the Office/Microsoft 365 productivity apps that many Windows users run on their PCs.

The latest addition to the pile comes via an update to a support document that outlined when Windows 10 PCs would stop receiving new features for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 apps. Most home users will stop getting new features in August 2026, while business users running the Enterprise versions can expect to stop seeing new features in either October 2026 or January 2027, depending on the product they’re using.

Microsoft had previously committed to supporting its Office apps through October 2028—both the Microsoft 365 versions and perpetually licensed versions like Office 2021 and Office 2024 that don’t get continuous feature updates. That timeline isn’t changing, but it will apparently only cover security and bug-fixing updates rather than updates that add new features.

And while the apps will still be getting updates, Microsoft’s support document makes it clear that users won’t always be able to get fixes for bugs that are unique to Windows 10. If an Office issue exists solely on Windows 10 but not on Windows 11, the official guidance from Microsoft support is that users should upgrade to Windows 11; any support for Windows 10 will be limited to “troubleshooting assistance only,” and “technical workarounds might be limited or unavailable.”

To gather it all into one place, here are all the major things to know about continuing to use Windows 10 after this October: