Microsoft’s rivals won a reprieve on Monday, when the software giant said it would split up its Teams and Office bundles following scrutiny from European regulators.
Zoom, whose video chat app took off during the Covid pandemic, has struggled of late to compete with Microsoft’s suite of communications products. Slack, now owned by Salesforce, has long pined for this type of split, submitting an antitrust complaint to the European Commission in 2020 over what it viewed as illegal tying of Teams into Office.
With Microsoft’s latest announcement, some customers will have to pay more money to get the same features. For example, new clients of Office 365 E3 will pay $3 more per person per month with the split than they would for the combined offering, according to a blog post and previous price lists.
Analysts at Mizuho Securities wrote in a note on Monday that “while customers believe Zoom is a superior platform vs. Teams” and other vendors, “the bundling of MS Teams to Office 365 has always been enticing for customers to consider Teams.”
Zoom’s revenue growth, which peaked at over 350% in 2020 and 2021, slowed to 2.6% in the latest quarter and has been in single digits for seven straight periods.
“In our view, the unbundling of MS Teams should help alleviate some enterprise churn headwinds,” wrote the Mizuho analysts, who recommend buying Zoom shares.
Organizations that already pay for the Microsoft bundle can keep using Teams and Office as is or, “if they wish to switch to the new lineup, they can do so on their contract anniversary or renewal,” the blog post said.
Last year, Microsoft generated almost $53 billion in revenue from Office, including Teams, up about 14% from 2022. CEO Satya Nadella told analysts on the company’s earnings call in October that Teams had over 320 million monthly active users.
Salesforce, which competes with Microsoft in a number of areas including communications and collaborations tools, acquired Slack in 2021 for $27 billion, its most expensive purchase since the company’s founding 25 years ago.
In July 2020, months before Salesforce announced the agreement, Slack filed a complaint about Microsoft in Europe.
“Microsoft is reverting to past behavior,” David Schellhase, Slack’s general counsel at the time, was quoted as saying in a press release, referring to the “browser wars” of the 1990s. “They created a weak, copycat product and tied it to their dominant Office product, force installing it and blocking its removal.”
The year prior, Slack wasn’t expressing much concerns about Teams. Slack founder and former CEO Stewart Butterfield said on an earnings call in December 2019 that while most of the company’s top customers used parts of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite, they were choosing slack for messaging instead of the Teams app.
Zoom’s stock slipped about 1% on Monday and Salesforce shares rose 0.4% A Zoom representative didn’t respond to a request for comment, while Salesforce declined to comment.
The Financial Times reported last year, citing unnamed individuals, that Microsoft would eventually let companies choose to buy productivity software subscriptions with or without Teams to head off a competition investigation from the European Union. Months later, the European Commission disclosed a probe into Microsoft’s Teams and Office bundling.
In response, Microsoft started selling distinct subscriptions for Teams and for other productivity software in 31 European countries.
“To ensure clarity for our customers, we are extending the steps we took last year to unbundle Teams from M365 and O365 in the European Economic Area and Switzerland to customers globally,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an email. “Doing so also addresses feedback from the European Commission by providing multinational companies more flexibility when they want to standardize their purchasing across geographies.”
George Kurtz, chief executive officer of Crowdstrike Inc., speaks during the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica, California, U.S., on Wednesday, March 4, 2020.
Patrick T. Fallon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
CrowdStrike shares fell 7% in extended trading on Tuesday after the security software maker issued a weaker-than-expected revenue forecast.
Here’s how the company did against LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: 73 cents, adjusted vs. 65 cents expected
Revenue: $1.10 billion vs. $1.10 billion expected
Revenue increased by nearly 20% in the fiscal first quarter, which ended on April 30, according to a statement. The company registered a net loss of $110.2 million, or 44 cents per share, compared with net income of $42.8 million, or 17 cents per share, in the same quarter last year.
Costs rose in sales and marketing as well as in research and development and administration, partly because of a broad software outage last summer.
For the current quarter, CrowdStrike called for 82 cents to 84 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $1.14 billion to $1.15 million in revenue. Analysts polled by LSEG were expecting 81 cents per share and $1.16 billion in revenue.
CrowdStrike bumped up its guidance for full-year earnings but maintained its expectation for revenue. The company now sees $3.44 to $3.56 in adjusted earnings per share, with $4.74 billion to $4.81 billion in revenue. The LSEG consensus was $3.43 per share and $4.77 billion in revenue. The earnings guidance provided in March was $3.33 to $3.45 in adjusted earnings per share.
Also on Tuesday, CrowdStrike said it had earmarked $1 billion for share buybacks.
“Today’s announced share repurchase reflects our confidence in CrowdStrike’s future and unwavering mission of stopping breaches,” CEO George Kurtz said in the statement.
As of Tuesday’s close, the stock was up 43% so far in 2025, while the S&P 500 index had gained less than 2%.
Executives will discuss the results on a conference call with analysts starting at 5 p.m. ET.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks as he visits Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to announce a U.S. supercomputer to be powered by Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin chips, in Berkeley, California, U.S., May 29, 2025.
Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters
Nvidia passed Microsoft in market cap on Tuesday, once again becoming the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
Shares of the artificial intelligence chipmaker rose about 3% on Tuesday to $141.40, and the stock has surged nearly 24% in the past month as Nvidia’s growth has persisted even through export control and tariff concerns.
The company now has a $3.45 trillion market cap. Microsoft closed Tuesday with a $3.44 trillion market cap.
Nvidia has been trading places with Apple and Microsoft at the top of the market cap ranks since last June. The last time Nvidia was the most-valuable company was on Jan. 24.
Last week, Nvidia reported 96 cents in adjusted earnings per share on $44.06 billion in sales in its fiscal first quarter. That represented 69% growth from the year-ago period, an incredible growth rate for a company as large as Nvidia.
Nvidia’s growth has been fueled by its AI chips, which are used by companies like OpenAI to develop software like ChatGPT.
Companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Oracle, and xAI have been purchasing Nvidia’s AI accelerators in massive quantities to build ever-larger clusters of computers for advanced AI work.
Nvidia was founded in 1993 to produce chips for playing 3D games, but in recent years, it has taken off as scientists and researchers found that the same Nvidia chip designs that could render computer graphics were ideal for the kind of parallel processing needed for AI.
An attendee wearing a cow costume while playing Mario Kart World by Nintendo Switch 2 during the Nintendo Switch 2 Experience at the Excel London international exhibition and convention centre in London on April 11, 2025.
Isabel Infantes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday talked up the capabilities of Nintendo‘s new Switch 2, days before the long-awaited console is set to hit store shelves.
In a video posted by Nintendo, Huang called the chip inside the Switch 2 “unlike anything we’ve built before.”
“It brings together three breakthroughs: The most advanced graphics ever in a mobile device, full hardware ray tracing, high dynamic range for brighter highlights and deeper shadows, and an architecture that supports backward compatibility,” Huang said.
He added that the console has dedicated artificial intelligence processors to “sharpen, animate and enhance gameplay in real time.”
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Huang’s comments come as Nintendo prepares to release the Switch 2 on Thursday. The Switch 2 is Nintendo’s first new console in eight years, and it is expected to be a bigger and faster version of its predecessor. The device costs $449.99.
Huang also paid tribute to the vision of former Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata, who died before the original Switch was released.
“Switch 2 is more than a new console,” Huang said. “It’s a new chapter worthy of Iwata Son’s vision.”