Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products that acts as a central hub for workplace conversations, collaborative teamwork, video chats and document sharing. Teams primarily competes with the similar service Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencing, and application integration. Teams replaced other Microsoft-operated business messaging and collaboration platforms, including Skype for Business and Microsoft Classroom. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Teams, and other software such as Zoom and Google Meet, gained much interest as many meetings moved to a virtual environment. it had about 280 million monthly users. Newer versions do not allow using browsers from other vendors to open links. On August 29, 2007, Microsoft purchased Parlano and its persistent group chat product, MindAlign. On March 4, 2016, Microsoft had considered bidding $8 billion for Slack, but Bill Gates was against the purchase, stating that the firm should instead focus on improving Skype for Business. Qi Lu, EVP of Applications and Services, was leading the push to purchase Slack. After the departure of Lu later that year, Microsoft announced Teams to the public as a direct competitor to Slack at an event in New York on November 2, 2016, and was launched worldwide on March 14, 2017. It is currently led by Microsoft corporate vice president Brian MacDonald. Slack ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times acknowledging the competing service. Though Slack was used by 28 companies in the Fortune 100, The Verge wrote that executives would question paying for the service if Teams provides a similar function in their company's existing Office 365 subscription. ZDNet reported that the companies were not competing for the same audience, as Teams, at the time, did not let members outside the subscription join the platform, and small businesses and freelancers would have been unlikely to switch. Microsoft has since added this functionality.