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Microsoft Businesses

Microsoft Teams Surpasses 270 Million Monthly Active Users (geekwire.com) 128

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Microsoft's Teams communications and collaboration platform topped 270 million monthly active users in the December quarter, continuing to add users but at a much slower pace than in the initial months of the pandemic. From a report: Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, revealed the latest number Tuesday afternoon in conjunction with the company's quarterly earnings. The number represents an increase of 20 million monthly active users from the 250 million that Microsoft reported six months ago, in July 2021. Prior to that, the company used the metric of daily active users, so the numbers aren't directly comparable, but they do show how the growth has slowed. Monthly numbers are more forgiving because users don't need to use the product as frequently to move the needle. In daily active users, Teams jumped from 75 million in April 2020 to 115 million in October 2020 to 145 million in April 2021.
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Microsoft Teams Surpasses 270 Million Monthly Active Users More

Microsoft Teams Surpasses 270 Million Monthly Active Users

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  • I mean (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DarkRookie2 ( 5551422 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:10PM (#62209567)
    It is pretty easy to push those numbers up when you installed it for anyone with Office or 11

    • Re:I mean (Score:5, Insightful)

      by leonbev ( 111395 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:22PM (#62209611) Journal

      Yeah, it's pretty easy to improve your market share when you bundle your product and give it away for free.

      Microsoft basically did with Teams against Slack what they did 15 years ago with Internet Explorer vs Netscape.

      • It's even worse than bundling it or giving it away; employers force their employees to use it.

        • Yep. Soon I will no longer be allowed a phone in my office. I am expected to have a set of headphones which is interesting as I am an electronics Tech who is out in the workshop and will no longer hear my phone "ring".
          Oh well, I can check voice mail just before I go home I guess.

          • as I am an electronics Tech who is out in the workshop and will no longer hear my phone "ring".

            Err why not? If it's replacing your phone why do you not have Teams on your phone? Shithouse buggy, memory chewing garbage electron app that it is aside it is far more convenient and flexible compared to an actual phone and very feature rich, not the least of which is support for concurrent ringing on multiple devices, directing the ringing sound to wireless speakers / headphones if you want, hell I was in the kitchen eating lunch today and my fitbit was beeping to let me know I had a teams call (phone, lap

            • Accountants (who sit in their office all day and are issued with work cellphones anyway) have decided this.

              • So purely organisational problem then, nothing to do with Teams.

                There's so many MANY problems with Teams, we don't need to blame our own shortcomings on that garbage too :-)

        • In the case of where I work, even the managers hate it. It's buggy, it's slow, and it's an all around POS.

          In fact, ask anybody who has a higher resolution monitor how easy it is to share their desktop during meetings.

          Lately I've been running into what seems to be a brand new bug: Clicking on an image in a chat to open a native resolution just results in a blank chat pane. That's it, just a blank fucking chat pane. The only way out of it, because the close button isn't there, is to navigate to another chat c

      • Yeah, it's pretty easy to improve your market share when you bundle your product and give it away for free.

        And you also start it with Windows using the account they tricked you into creating.

        The thing should be called "team" though, "Microsoft Team". Not plural.

        IN the last year I've had several companies add me to their internal team using an account they created for me. The idea is to receive notifications, let them call me, etc.

        Guess how well that's working out on Microsoft team?

        • A, home user. Don't use Teams, uninstall it. For work users often the employer asked you to use it, and you use your work account. For home users, you can skip it and never create a Windows account and you never miss anything that way except the crap on the Windows Store.

          Apple was similar, you needed an Apple account to get xcode for instance. No way around it except to copy an installation .dmg file from a coworker. It's not tied to your computer though.

      • Microsoft basically did with Teams against Slack what they did 15 years ago with Internet Explorer vs Netscape.

        Eh, not really. MS already bundled a communications app with windows before the Teams push so it's not really comparable in the home use case. And in the corporate use case, bundling of multiple apps (including communication dates back even longer).

        Teams is just an update, a replacement for shit MS was already pushing (Skype forced install on all Windows 8 machines, Lync auto-bundled with all enterprise Office).

      • Yeah, it's pretty easy to improve your market share when you bundle your product and give it away for free.

        If they didn't improve it you would complain that they aren't adding value to the subscription, so they add features to justify the subscription.

        Microsoft basically did with Teams against Slack what they did 15 years ago with Internet Explorer vs Netscape.

        And now a consumer operating system is just expected to ship with a browser, they all do, it's a feature people naturally expect to be there.

    • so they can spam you with bullshit analytics emails...

    • Re:I mean (Score:5, Informative)

      by dirk ( 87083 ) <dirk@one.net> on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @02:00PM (#62209689) Homepage

      That does not get you active users. If this was installations you would have a point, but since it is active users, you do not.

      • It depends on how MS defines "active". Does that mean "logged in" which happens automatically when the user logs into their Windows account? Or does that mean the user sent a message? I have Teams on my work computer by default and I cannot remember the last time I sent a message. Am I an active user?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

          It depends on how MS defines "active". Does that mean "logged in" which happens automatically when the user logs into their Windows account? Or does that mean the user sent a message? I have Teams on my work computer by default and I cannot remember the last time I sent a message. Am I an active user?

          The article talked about monthly active users and daily active users having quite different numbers. That strongly suggests that you're not an active user.

          (Alternative explanation: maybe you are an active user, and the reason why MAU and DAU are different is because lots of people don't even log into their windows accounts most days. I don't believe this, since I expect most people will be signing in to use their computer for at least something on most workdays.)

          • Alternative explanation: maybe you are an active user, and the reason why MAU and DAU are different is because lots of people don't even log into their windows accounts most days. I don't believe this, since I expect most people will be signing in to use their computer for at least something on most workdays.

            That would assume that no one changes jobs (thus a new account) or takes any days off. Also that assumes only computer. If I log into a server using my Windows account, does that count twice?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

              Also that assumes only computer. If I log into a server using my Windows account, does that count twice?

              Are you asking how they measure DAU and MAU? Or more specifically, what is their definition of "user"? If they count the same user credentials as two different users, then this'd be a level of incompetence (or easily-seen-through misdirection) so staggering that I don't think you could even ascribe it to Microsoft.

              That would assume that no one changes jobs (thus a new account) or takes any days off

              If you're proposing that (1) they count people who have accounts and sign into Windows but don't actively use Teams under the term DAU/MAU, (2) the reason that DAU/MAU differ is because people cha

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 )
        so its possible that at some point they will auto-enroll everyone with a microsoft account (required just to log into windows) if they need another boost in numbers? Sort of the way google auto enrolled everyone in G+

      • That does not get you active users.

        Yes it does. People gravitate towards defaults and bundled inclusions. By shipping Teams with windows people will be less likely to go to alternatives when seeking communications platforms. When shipping it with enterprise office licenses the enterprise is less likely to engage an alternate vendor (paying someone vs getting something for "free").

        That all leads to active users. If it didn't they wouldn't bother doing ti.

    • Active Users are people actually using it, not people with it installed.

    • You guys think it's individuals using it, really? This is ~270 million corporate users with a very small need of individuals using it. The decision to use teams was made at the company level. It was not forced by MS it was a company decision.

  • Of which... (Score:3)

    by Patent Lover ( 779809 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:11PM (#62209575)
    ... a few people actually like it.
    • I use and like its core function, but it seems to be sprawling into an "everything" replacement. The whole home window thing seems superfluous - chat (OK)... calendar (a purple second copy of Outlook?)... "brainstorm"(?)... "apps"?

      • I am on Teams (Mac version) daily. I semi-regularly have to restart it because it freezes or otherwise stops functioning correctly.

        It's not my favorite app - seems like a bloated unoptimized mess. I would have preferred something else. But it's what my group uses.

        • I have to do the same thing on Windows. Teams seems to believe in equal opportunity for ruining your day.

          • Microsoft used to have a separate Mac team that wrote good code. Nowadays they seem to write all their cross-platform apps using Electron [electronjs.org] - which explains why we both have the same crappy experience.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
              We will have to se what happens when .NET MAUI finally goes GA in a few months, mayby ms decides to transition teams to it if the community port of MAUI to linux keeps up with the in house Windows//Mac version. In interesting question tho jis jf teams suck becaus it's bad sw ot if it sucks because if electron? Personally I have no idea, so I'll have to leave the question for the rest of you, Feedback, as always, will be appreciated
      • The apps section adds functionality like Jira and Smartsheet integration, which I find very helpful, as it means I get all my notifications in one place. This type of integration also exists for products like Discord.

      • As with most things MS I like parts of it, but other parts feel sloppy. The core function is fine, I actually like the chat/messenger, and since I use outlook it meshes reasonably with it.

        The phone app needs work. It's glitchy especially when attaching photos or files, and the calling feature is sloppy. I've had multiple times when I answered a call as a non-video meeting, had an entire conversation, then realized that it had turned my video on and the other person has been seeing the pinkish blackness of m

  • We all know Microsoft is Number 1 at being Number 2

  • How or why? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 )
    Teams isn't stable, at all, period, full stop! It's not stable on Linux, it's not stable on Windows 11 or 10, so where or why is anyone using it?

    I've had Teams crash while on a call with Microsoft, about Teams issues! When I reconnected, they laughed and admitted Teams is a pile of broken garbage. In the last 3ish years of the pandemic, I have never seen Teams run in a stable, or glitch free fashion. I've tried it on multiple operating systems, and Linux distros, to no success. I'm currently using

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      It's free for most businesses that have other Microsoft products and it's stable-enough. I've been running it for years and haven't seen that many crashes or problems. Lots of little annoying things, weird UI, and terrible at updating notifications, but it does the job. Maybe you're using it on Linux and they didn't do any testing there or something

      • To be fair, I'm on Windows 11 right now, and it's just as bad. They absolutely ignored Linux, and they'll admit as much, but for it to be a mess on Windows 10 and 11, that's just insane.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ksevio ( 865461 )

          Well I'm not sure what your setup is, but sounds like you've got a much worse version than everyone else does on Win 10

    • I've had N people tell me it's stable to the point they would trust it in a life and death situation

      Well I would call it stable, but in a life and death situation I'd probably die waiting for it to actually respond to a user input in a timely fashion. I have a list of problems with Teams long enough that I could publish a book, but crashing isn't something I've come across.

      My bigger problem is feature stability. Every time I turn on my laptop the fucking thing changed yet again.

  • Teams is often unusable (Score:3)

    by E-Lad ( 1262 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @01:44PM (#62209663)

    After having worked at a company that used Mattermost, I thought that things couldn't get much worse until my next place of employment used Teams. At first, I thought the issues were because of the Mac client, but the Windows one fared no better. The bugs were one thing - grossly delayed notifications, markdown that never reliably works, terrible UI lag, and random things such as files being shared in chat suddenly being rejected or not visible to anyone else. Then there are just the design issues - it's plainly attrotious. The modes of use are so stilted and awkward that it seems like someone's first-year experiment than any kind of polished app meant for wide consumption. And don't get me started on the whole OneDrive vs. Sharepoint schizophrenia.

    A dream would be "Discord but for business". I mean that in terms of a client that works and performs pretty well with features that are consistent, clear, and reliable. People seem to quickly dismiss that becuase dIsCoRd iS fOr kIDs aNd gAmErS

    • I completely agree. I have found Slack to be very usable when I had the fortune of using it over Teams, but the bar has been set so fantastically low with Teams that emails might seem more pain-free by comparison.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Same here. Once the subscription to Zoom ran out.
    • Gravitated towards it from what? Zoom? Emails? Pen and paper? Using teams over almost any other modern chat client is taking a massive step backwards in both functionality and ease of use.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Teams at its heart is a "chat client" (collaboration platform, video calling applet, whatever corporate buzzwords one would like to use). It ostensibly enables 2 or more people to communicate both synchronously and asynchronously. For that purpose, it is tragically underwhelming. I say this as someone who has used numerous "chat clients" (or whatever you want to call them) in the span of my corporate career.

        • If a "chat client" is what you think Teams is, then I see why you are confused.

          I think maybe this is like the old saying about emacs, "it's a great operating system, the only thing it lacks is a decent text editor"

          Since all I want from MS Teams is a chat client, it's understandable why I'm disappointed. Sure it has lots of garbage I don't want, but the chat functionality sucks and that's the only thing I actually want it to do.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbengt ( 874751 )

            Since all I want from MS Teams is a chat client, it's understandable why I'm disappointed.

            The last thing I want is any chat client.
            We use Teams for video calls, one-to-one or conference. Better than just phoning, not as good as in-person, but has the big advantage of not traveling.
            We use e-mail for most correspondence and that benefits from deliberate writing. (and we use it for sharing files outside the company, either attachments or links)
            Chat is good for one paragraph quips, but is not a suitable re

    • Office? What's Office? I just "upgraded" to windows 11 and found teams running in the background along with a popup telling me about the wonders of using a teams account.

      I was perplexed since I didn't even know Teams could run without a corporate / office account.

  • I started doubting me skills and sanity lately and I thought "Am I really the only one who things this tool is utter crap?"

    This comment section does me some good.

  • Fun fact: Teams bypasses 2FA in certain setups.

    Until recently, I had to 2FA into my Outlook, both via VPN+Client or OWA. But Teams - I could always just fire up Teams, it has my password stored, and it would show me my calendar with no 2FA, authentication or anything. :-)

    • My experience is that 2FA for Office requires you to 2FA once and it carries over into all Office365 apps on that machine. So if you log into Word, you're not required to 2FA into PowerPoint, OneDrive, etc. Since Teams is part of O365, it's included in that 1st 2FA auth. At the least the way we are configured. It's possible that's configurable. If you 2FA into a AzureAD-bound Windows device I believe that carries into Office as well. You can usually find this status in Settings->Accounts->Access work
    • That will be purely configuration of your environment, it doesn't bypass anything. Also remembering that it utilises the same token so if you have MFA'ed into outlook etc it will use the same token.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        Then we have a security issue, because I can 2FA into Outlook on one machine and then access Teams without 2FA from a different machine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      I've noticed that it sometimes pops up a login prompt, but then I can just hit the X in the corner and it gives me a couple seconds to view calendars or messages before prompting again. Definitely some fundamental security issues

      • not a security issue. What you see without authenticating is only the locally cached version, you won't get any updates from the server as that requires auth. Similar to open your email client and it prompting for server auth, you can still see and access the local cached emails and calendar, just won't get updates.

  • how many of them are happy (Score:3)

    by mwfischer ( 1919758 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @02:30PM (#62209755) Journal

    and don't already work for Microsoft?

  • Doesn't seem to be moving forward, seriously lacking in features and also buggy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      Doesn't seem to be moving forward, seriously lacking in features and also buggy.

      My experience of it is that it is not buggy and is pretty rock-solid. Features? I don't know, because I've never used any version other than the Linux one.

      It is sad that something so simple as video calling over the public Internet has spawned a regular elephant's graveyard of abandoned attempts - Skype, Hangouts, various open source clients - and left us with just two centralised (not to mention concealed-source) clients dominating the landscape.

  • While it is OK as a video conferencing tool, it is still a shitty chat app and a resource hog. Most integrations are useless and UI is from hell. I am kind of amazed how Microsoft fucked this up. But who cares if you own all of the corporate users.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jetkust ( 596906 )
      Chat is fine until you try to do any kind of search (which Microsoft consistently can't seem to figure out) or copy the chat text (which can be impossible for whatever reason) or try to go back in time for a long chat (something Microsoft seemed to not even take into account). Very unprofessional professional software as usual.

  • They did say these are active users, so not just someone who happens to install the product and create an O365 account.

    The organization I belong to just purchased several licenses at the lowest tier merely for Teams. It's cheaper than GoToMeeting or Zoom and I have controls to shut down file sharing as much as possible.

    I buy that they have 270 million active users globally though. They have free accounts and I have created a few sock puppets just for fun. ;)

  • All of them would rather be elsewhere. Just like Teams.

  • I am forced to use teams, working remotely.
    It's a pain. The chat looks ok, until you try to send a file over it - but no, you have to do that in a special area called chat. Hmm.
    But worst is the horrible way it eats your computer, rendering it unusable whilst running a video chat. The mouse is weird, in fact everything goes a bit weird. What is it doing?
    And just to add insult to injury, there's some weird bug (how do you even DO this?) so the text entry does quite work properly if you try to edit it. It's a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )
      I have a problem with my mouse freezing and jittering when Teams first starts a video call, but it seems to sort itself out after a while.

      • My mouse remains sluggish and really hard to use throughout a video conference. It may be related to the video card, or some excess usage of CPU, I don't know. My machine is reasonably powerful with loads of RAM and should not be troubled by a mere video conference - but it is with Teams.

  • With Corona, I've used nearly every software out there. They all have their problems. Teams is no exception, not least because the versions for different OS's are out of sync. That said, it is overall as good as anything else out there.
  • Their Linux client needs to reach feature parity with the Windows client. It is still limited to seeing 4 people and has no background options.

  • With this userbase they'll soon be able to afford a second dev to implement a search option.

  • My colleagues and I are quite happy using it. Find it a decent productivity tool.

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