The US tech giant has made the concession to avoid a formal investigation, said two people with direct knowledge of the decision, following a 2020 complaint by rival Slack which claimed Microsoft's practice of bundling the two services together was anti-competitive.

These people said that, in future, when companies buy Office they can do it with or without Teams if they wished, but the mechanism on how to do this remains unclear.

Talks are still ongoing and a deal is not certain, but if Vole agrees it will make everyone's life a lot easier. Microsoft is keen to avoid what would be its first antitrust probe in more than a decade, having sought to avoid legal battles with the European Commission and lost.