14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Teams is without a doubt Microsoft’s fastest growing service in history, and the figures that the company itself shared recently are living proof in this regard.
Teams reached 75 million daily active users in late April, a surprising increase from 44 million only a month before. Of course, the 31 million daily active users growth was fueled by the global health crisis, but on the other hand, Microsoft says all the efforts that it put in the last two years in getting Microsoft Teams right are finally paying off.
And now the software giant says it expects Microsoft Teams to continue its growth. But how far will it go? Until it becomes bigger than Windows, says Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, in an interview with VB.
Microsoft’s plan to make Teams bigger than Windows is an ambitious goal but clearly doable. Windows 10 is running on some 1 billion devices across the world, but with Teams’ growth improving at a super-fast pace, it’s not hard to imagine that the platform overall can become Microsoft’s new champion.
A money-making machine
But Microsoft itself admits that Teams will somehow try to follow in Windows’ footsteps and evolve from a typical collaboration solution to a fully-featured platform.
“Windows is going to be the next Windows,” Teper explained. “But it’s a platform that transcends operating systems that will be even bigger than Windows. Yes. We want people to build Teams-based applications that run on iOS, Android, the web, the Mac, as well as Windows. So by that definition Teams will be ultimately, even more ubiquitous platform over time. It won’t obviate the need for Windows but…”
Eventually, the purpose of Teams is to become a key part of a truly powerful ecosystem which Microsoft wants to build using a series of essential products, including Office 365 and Windows. But the company is well aware that the increase would slow down at some point, albeit growth is the only thing everybody at Microsoft is thinking about in the long term.
“We’ll see strong growth, hundreds of millions of people using Teams. At some point, the percentage of time people are spending in online meetings has got to go back down. So, the 4 billion daily minutes, that will continue to grow. But at some point, that number is going to level off because people don’t want to spend eight hours a day in online meetings if they can meet in person. But as far as the users, I’m very bullish on that’s going to continue to grow,” Teper said.