While the coronavirus pandemic is having a huge negative impact on everything from travel to retail, there are some firms who are seeing explosive success during the crisis. Those firms include Microsoft, Slack and Zoom, which have added millions of customers over the past few weeks.
On March 19, Microsoft Teams confirmed that it had 12 million daily active users in just seven days, Slack has also seen a boom, although it only registered 7,000 new users between February 1 and March 18. Zoom has arguably been the biggest success story of the coronavirus pandemic, however, having become the darling of the remote working world, providing a place for teachers to teach classes of children and companies to conduct meetings.
While Zoom hasn’t stated exactly how many users it has added in recent weeks, the company did say that it’s added more monthly active users in the first part of 2020 than it did for the entirety of 2019. It’s also been the subject of a memo going around the Microsoft offices which cite Zoom as a threat to the company’s Microsoft Teams software.
Many wonder what will happen after the coronavirus pandemic ends, with some experts predicting that it would be hard for life to return completely to normal. Could that mean we end up with more remote working in the future? That could lead to even further success at these companies, with Microsoft already gearing up to offer a robust solution in the form of Teams. It has already announced a slew of new features coming to the platform, including:
- Offline and low-bandwidth support for reading messages and writing responses even when offline
- The ability to pop out chats into a separate window
- Real-time noise suppression for minimizing background noise
- A “raise hand” feature for sending visual signals during a meeting
- New integration between Teams and RealWear head-mounted industrial devices
- Inclusion of the Microsoft Bookings app in Teams for scheduling, managing and conducting virtual appointments
