Microsoft
Microsoft: The competition between Zoom and Teams has been a topic of discussion for quite some time now. Microsoft Teams has been considered as the Volkswagen Beetle competing against Ferrari Zoom. Teams, which was launched in 2017, was originally designed as a group work platform to challenge the dominance of Slack.
After gaining initial success, Slack has remained stagnant in recent years with only 18 million users. Meanwhile, Teams has become the most popular communication tool among business customers with 280 million active users.
This is largely due to Teams being included in Office 365 suites. However, Zoom, the most popular video conferencing platform during the pandemic, has not disclosed its total number of users. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom reported that more than 300 million people participated in meetings through its platform each month. However, the number of paying corporate customers is just 213,000.
In order to stay competitive and meet the needs of its users, Microsoft has announced a new version of Teams that promises to be faster, more intuitive, and less heavy. According to Anupam Pattnaik, the platform lead at Microsoft, they have listened to the feedback of their users and reimagined Teams from the ground up.
The new version of Teams is said to open twice as fast, cutting down on the time it takes for people to join a meeting, and will use 50% less memory. Hopefully, this will prevent the app from crashing, as it does with some frequency today.
The update will be rolled out gradually, but participants registered for the preview program have already begun to have access to the new version, which will be available to all customers by the end of the year.
Apart from being faster and lighter, the new version of Teams will also decrease the number of clicks required to switch settings and jump from one function to another. Microsoft claims that a typical Teams user clicks 10,000 times a month to navigate between activities and operations.
The new, lighter program will speed up these transitions without waiting for content to load. In addition, the platform will bring artificial intelligence capabilities, which will help users prepare for meetings and respond to questions in a discussion.
In conclusion, the competition between Zoom and Teams has been ongoing for quite some time now, and with the new version of Teams promising to be faster, more intuitive, and less heavy, it seems that Microsoft is stepping up its game.
While Zoom still remains the most popular video conferencing platform, Teams’ popularity among business customers is steadily increasing. It will be interesting to see how these two platforms evolve and compete in the future.
