Skype boss claims that Microsoft is now more focused on improving familiar features

Feb 18, 2014 09:16 GMT  ·  By

Back in October, Microsoft appointed a new head of Skype and Lync communications divisions, with Gurdeep Singh Pall taking over the leading spot in a unit that’s now playing a key role for Redmond’s long-term strategy.

With Skype and Lync playing key roles in Microsoft’s long-term strategies, Pall claims that the software giant has switched the focus on popular features and efforts to make them look more familiar, as “people have no patience for things that look odd.”

“When I look at Skype, it's used by over 300 million users around the world. It's a word people know. We want to build on that familiarity. The same tools you use at home, you want to use at work. People have no patience for things that look odd. Users don't want to configure something for half an hour,” Pall recently said in an interview with CNN Money.

“And the fact that it's in the cloud opens up all sorts of machine learning predictive capabilities. For example, when I'm on a conference call my phone should automatically go silent.”

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft’s efforts to bring familiar efforts can also be spotted in the way the Windows platform is getting improved over the years, with Redmond now trying to bring back the old usability of the operating system in the Modern UI.

Microsoft is believed to be working to bring back the Start Menu in Windows 9, which would indeed be a major step towards a much more intuitive interface for a modern operating system that was said to generate quite of confusion when it debuted in October 2012.

With Satya Nadella as the new CEO of the company, Microsoft is also shifting to a more consumer-oriented business, with the focus now on innovation and ways to improve all the other products beside Windows.