Cat asses, neighbors drilling and colleagues in their pajamas: it’s not something you thought would play such a big role in your life, but 2020 just surprised us with a pandemic and measures. As a result, we can be found constantly on video conference tools, which is also evident from new figures about Microsoft Teams.
No longer in the office
If you have an office job, it now means something completely different. Unless you have a free room in your house to create an office, you’re probably sitting on the sofa or working at the dining table. Being in the office with its open plan offices, jargon, coffee machine talk and of course looking at the clock to see if it is already 5 o’clock: we have not been doing that for more than six months now.
Instead, we are busy video conferencing. Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp Video and Microsoft Teams are constantly being tapped to just see a different person. Sometimes because it is fun with a group of friends, sometimes because you have a work meeting with your manager. Now, of course, we’ve known for a long time that the pandemic has caused video conferencing to grow so dramatically, but new figures show that Microsoft’s service continues to thrive: there are as many as 115 active users online every day.
Satya Nadella
The growth that Microsoft saw at the start of the pandemic is continuing well. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced that Microsoft Teams has a whopping one and a half times as many daily active users. Six months ago it was still 75 million. How the competition is doing is unfortunately expressed slightly differently: Google says, for example, that there are 100 million daily active participants within Google Meet, but whether that also includes people who log in three times a day (so they are counted three times ). Zoom has 300 million daily active participants and the same goes for Slack.
However it relates to each other: the numbers are considerable and Microsoft has a large share of them thanks to its Office package at companies. It has even added special features due to the pandemic, such as Together Mode where you see people sitting next to each other virtually. Instead of people all being visible in a rectangle from their house, it seems as if the team fills an entire lecture hall.