Microsoft Is Rolling Out a New Version of Teams ⇥ microsoft.com

Jeff Teper of Microsoft:

We have been listening to your feedback which has culminated in a reimagining of Teams from the ground up. The new app is built on a foundation of speed, performance, flexibility, and intelligence—delivering up to two times faster performance while using 50 percent less memory so you can save time and collaborate more efficiently. […]

As you check out the screenshots and recordings in this post from a team thrilled to announce their basic chat application is able to launch in just over nine seconds instead of taking over twenty, and now consumes half a gigabyte of memory instead of a full gigabyte, it is a good time to remember that you, as an employee of an organization which uses Office, are not the end user Microsoft really cares about. It is instead focused on providing a complete experience for its customers — institutions, businesses, governments, and their I.T. departments — from which is hard to move away, in part because it has few competitors which, in turn, is partly because it is hard to switch. Neat how that works out, right? Teams is successful, but not because it is good; it never really needed to compete on those terms.

This new version of Teams is out first on Windows in preview capacity — your I.T. department might need to enable access — and is coming to Macs and the web later this year.