At Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company’s business communications software, Teams, has hit 115 million daily active users (DAUs), up 53% from 72 million in April. Announcing the new milestone, Nadella said: “We are seeing increased usage and intensity as people communicate, collaborate, and coauthor content across work, life, and learning. Microsoft 365 users generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day this quarter”.
Overall, Microsoft saw a massive increase in its revenues and profits in Q1 2020-21, reporting a net income of $13.9 billion on consolidated revenues of $37.2 billion. While the former is a 30% increase YoY, the latter denotes 12% growth over the same period last year. According to CEO Satya Nadella, “The next decade of economic performance for every business will be defined by the speed of their digital transformation. We are innovating across our full modern tech stack to help our customers in every industry improve time to value, increase agility, and reduce costs”.
With a view towards making Microsoft Teams one of the leading options in a sector dominated by the likes of Zoom and Google Meet, the company has been rolling out a number of user-friendly features, including Cortana support on iOS, permanent virtual backgrounds, third-party app support, AI-based Together Mode and various other chat features. The app is also set to get improved AI-based noise suppression next month.
The efforts seem to paying off, with the app starting to attract more users amidst the astronomical increase in work-from-home because of the pandemic. According to Venture Beat, Teams has seen more than 200 million ‘meeting participants’ in a single day, as compared to 100 million meeting participants on Google Meet and 300 million on Zoom. Do note that unlike DAU, ‘meeting participants’ can count the same user multiple times.
