Musings: Microsoft Teams and the future

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Hi all,

reading through some of my notes on Microsoft CCs, as well as some of the interesting posts on the board re: ZS, DDOG, WORK, MDB etc. I have no position in DDOG atm, and at the moment am thinking more about Slack (WORK), and obviously MSFT Teams is the competition for Slack.

One quote from the latest MSFT CC (Q4 2019) re: a question about Teams was why customers were adopting Teams, and the response struck me as fundamental to the premise of almost all of the companies discussed here.

In particular, Amy Hood stated their belief that there will be 500m new applications built in the next 5 years.

Those applications will need monitoring and search and security and messaging and analytics and cloud stuff. The secular trends lifting these stocks might just be stronger than most could imagine.

cheers
Greg

Q: Why customers are adopting Teams? how critical is Teams to E3 E5, and M 365?
A: Satya Nadella:
Breakout year for Teams. Haven’t had this sort of platform effect before (maybe Windows?). It’s the communications tool, it’s the collaboration tool, it’s the line of business tool for meetings as well as business process.

Also for non-knowledge workers.

Amy Hood: - not outsized part of M365 value. “When we have 500 million new applications built in the next five years, you’re going to see and I believe Teams to be one of the major interfaces through which that experience and business process reinvention will happen.”

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Haven’t had this sort of platform effect before (maybe Windows?).

I happen to have had the opportunity to use Teams. It’s kind of like Sharepoint with a chat feature that does a better job of auto-saving multiple people’s changes. Or email with a file tracking feature. I find it to be useful but clunky. It doesn’t have a bunch of things that I would like to see. For example, Jira tracks who’s got what much more easily.

So is Teams an incremental step toward better collaboratino tools? Yes, I think it is. Is it a game changer? Meh. Not yet.

ThyPeace, not confident in the file saving and tracking stuff yet, either.

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I’m also an MS Teams user. Not be choice. The problem is, I am forced to go down this path with these tools because we are an O365 shop. As a result, my capital dollars are going towards developing power apps, Power BI reports, Teams interfaces and structures.

All of the other, better tools are irrelevant. I cannot use them without violating our IT strategy or running amok of unsanctioned programs. (I can’t use freeware, either)

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