The number of companies working from home increased as the social isolation measures were tightened within the scope of the fight against the new type of coronavirus, which spread to the world after it emerged in Wuhan, People’s Republic of China, causing 90,057 deaths. While the number of users of video conferencing applications such as zoom peaked, Microsoft’s video conferencing application also broke a record. According to the statement made by Microsoft, the daily meeting with Microsoft Teams increased to 2.7 billion minutes and the record was broken. The previous record was the 900 million-minute meeting held on March 16. In this case, the rate of increase has reached 200%. 44 million daily users in March: Microsoft Teams, released in March 2017, had 44 million daily active users, according to data released in mid-March. At the beginning of March, this number was 32 million. Last November, the total number of daily active users was 20 million. Microsoft’s latest report did not reveal the number of active users per day. Due to this huge increase, Microsoft Teams experienced problems from time to time but these problems seem to be solved for now. The latest figures also give clues about the growing competition between Microsoft and Zoom. Zoom recently said that the number of active daily users has exceeded 200 million. The number of active users of Zoom 3 months ago was 10 million. However, the privacy and security issues in Zoom confuse the app. Although the company says it will overcome these problems, confusion is thought to benefit Microsoft in the competition. Last month, new features for users were added to Microsoft Teams. In the statement made today, it was stated that some new features were added in order to improve meeting management. With these new features, it is aimed to close the gap with already existing features in Zoom. Microsoft announced that the customized background feature is also available in Teams, and uploading customized photos will be available in November. It is stated that the ‘Raise hand’ feature will be used globally at the end of this month. Meeting organizers will be able to end the session of everyone who attends the meeting with a single click. In addition, organizers will be able to download reports of who attended the meeting. It is also stated that towards the end of this year, Microsoft’s real-time noise attenuator working with artificial intelligence will be used.
