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

This 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."

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

A few months ago, Microsoft previewed Microsoft 365 Copilot , a new service that promised to integrate generative AI features into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and the other productivity apps formerly known as Microsoft Office . Among other things, Copilot promises to automate the creation of documents and emails, summarize meeting notes, and assist in the analysis of Excel data.

Microsoft has just announced pricing for the Copilot features, and it isn't cheap. Copilot will cost an extra $30 per user per month on top of whatever your business is already paying for Microsoft 365—in many cases, this will double or even triple your monthly costs. Copilot can be added to Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium ($12.50 and $22 per user per month, respectively) or to Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 accounts for enterprises ($36 or $57 per user per month). It can't be added to the cheaper Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan or to any home plans.

The relatively high cost is likely related to the high server costs for running these kinds of generative AI models. Copilot also draws context from the other emails, documents, and other files in your business's Microsoft 365 cloud, so each business that Microsoft supports will have a slightly different data set that it will need to be able to draw from.

Enlarge / Microsoft's new "Aptos" font family. (credit: Microsoft)

Two years ago, Microsoft announced its plans to move away from using Calibri as the default typeface for Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and the other apps in the suite formerly known as Microsoft Office . The company introduced five candidates for replacement fonts, and a winner has emerged : a font family called Aptos, formerly known as Bierstadt.

Microsoft has never laid out in so many words why it feels it needs to move away from Calibri, though today's announcement implies that Aptos was made with high-resolution, high-density displays in mind. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the suite's default font in Office 2007, at a time before "Retina" displays and when 1024×768 and 1280×800 screens were still the norm —a ClearType font , Calibri itself was a response to the shift from CRT to LCD screens.

Aptos was created by Steve Matteson, who is also responsible for Windows 3.1's original TrueType fonts (including Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New) as well as Segoe , which has been Windows' default system font since Vista and is also used for Microsoft's current logo. Given Matteson's history with Microsoft, choosing Aptos over the others feels like the safest possible choice.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is adding a new low-end subscription tier to its Microsoft 365 service designed to cater to existing OneDrive subscribers and people who want more features for their Outlook inboxes but don't need the full desktop versions of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

The Verge reports that Microsoft 365 Basic will cost $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year, and it includes 100GB of OneDrive cloud storage, removes ads from the Outlook web and mobile clients, and offers " advanced security " for Outlook users in the form of malware-scanning for links and attachments and additional encryption options .

The main shortcoming of the Basic plan relative to the other Microsoft 365 subscription tiers is that you won't get access to the full desktop versions of the apps formerly known as Microsoft Office : Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. You'll still be able to use the more feature-limited online versions, but those are also available to anyone with a free Microsoft account. To get those apps, you'll still need to upgrade to the Microsoft 365 Personal ($6.99 a month, $69.99 a year) or Microsoft 365 Family ($9.99 a month, $99.99 a year) tiers, each of which also comes with additional OneDrive storage and other perks.

Enlarge / Microsoft 365 will encompass Teams, OneDrive, and the suite of productivity apps formerly known as Office. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft Office was first released in 1990, and aside from Windows, it's probably the Microsoft product the general public has the most experience with. Individual apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook will all continue to exist, but starting now, the Office brand name these apps have all been grouped under will begin to go away, to be replaced by "Microsoft 365."

The change will come first for the online Office apps at Office.com , which will make the switch in November. In January of 2023, the Office app built into Windows 10 and Windows 11 and the Office mobile apps for iOS and Android will follow suit. When updated, the apps will pick up the Microsoft 365 branding and a new logo, seen above, which still looks kind of like an O, but in a different way from how the Office logo looks a bit like an O.

Microsoft's FAQ page on the transition says that Microsoft 365 will encompass the existing Office apps plus OneDrive and Microsoft Teams "and so much more." The company also points out that the Office brand will continue to exist, at least for a while. Existing Office 365 accounts aren't being renamed (yet), and Microsoft will still sell perpetually licensed versions of Word, Excel, and the other Office apps as Office 2021 . The company has previously pledged to offer at least one more of these perpetually licensed Office suites, but at this point, we don't know whether it will continue to be known as "Office" or if it, too, will pick up "Microsoft 365" branding in some way.