Satya Nadella says 2021 will be the year of Microsoft Teams

CEO has high hopes for Microsoft Teams

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Microsoftchief executive Satya Nadella has great ambitions for his company’s video conferencing softwareMicrosoft Teamsin 2021, hoping to build on last year’s success. The arrival of the coronavirus pandemic led to ahuge surge in popularityfor the likes of Teams, Zoom, Cisco’s Webex, and other similar digital tools.

Now, in an interview with theFinancial Times, Nadella has outlined his vision for turning Teams into a “digital platform as significant as the internet browser.” Ultimately, collaboration tools like Teams could serve as the glue that holds the digital work environment together, offering meetings, chat applications, and other programs through a single, unified interface.

Nadella’s hopes for Teams would probably not be quite so ambitious if not for the coronavirus pandemic, which forced many businesses to adopt digital collaboration tools in order to remain functioning while social distancing measures were implemented. By the end of September, for example, the number of daily active Teams users reached 115 million, a rise of more than 100 million compared to the year previous.

The post-pandemic world

Microsoft moved fast to fix bugs and make improvements to Teams throughout the last year, making use of the vast amounts of feedback the company received as its user figures surged. For example, Microsoft addeda Large Gallery viewto facilitate bigger meetings and streamlined thecall experience.

However, Microsoft knows that it will need to keep iterating if Teams is to fight off stiff competition from a host of other video conferencing tools. Many of the app’s rivals also added new features throughout 2020, whileSalesforce’s acquisition of Slackat the tail-end of last year could provide further competition in the digital collaboration space.

Microsoft has begun offering Teams as a free add-on to its Office software, making it a natural choice for businesses that already pay for the productivity suite. Of course, what the world of work will look like exactly in the coming years is difficult to say. Although the pandemic has shifted workplace trends markedly, how the office will look once the pandemic recedes is anyone’s guess.

Via theFinancial Times

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Barclay has been writing about technology for a decade, starting out as a freelancer with ITProPortal covering everything from London’s start-up scene to comparisons of the best cloud storage services.  After that, he spent some time as the managing editor of an online outlet focusing on cloud computing, furthering his interest in virtualization, Big Data, and the Internet of Things.

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