In response to Teams' announcement, Slack deepened in-product integration with Google services. Microsoft has since added this functionality. 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. Though Slack is used by 28 companies in the Fortune 100, The Verge wrote executives will question paying for the service if Teams provides a similar function in their company's existing Office 365 subscription at no added cost. Slack ran a full-page advertisement in the New York Times acknowledging the competing service. After the departure of Lu later that year, Microsoft announced Teams to the public as a direct competitor to Slack on November 2, 2016. Qi Lu, EVP of Applications and Services, was leading the push to purchase Slack. On March 4, 2016, Microsoft had considered bidding $8 billion for Slack, but that Bill Gates was against the purchase, stating that the firm should instead focus on improving Skype for Business. On August 29, 2007, Microsoft purchased Parlano and its persistent group chat product, MindAlign. Microsoft Teams is a web-based desktop app, developed on top of the Electron framework from GitHub which combines the Chromium rendering engine and the Node.js JavaScript platform. It was created during an internal hackathon at the company headquarters, and is currently led by Microsoft corporate vice president Brian MacDonald. Microsoft announced Teams at an event in New York, and launched the service worldwide on March 14, 2017. As of 2021, it has about 250 million monthly users.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Teams, and other software such as Zoom and Google Meet, gained much interest as many meetings have moved to a virtual environment. Teams is replacing other Microsoft-operated business messaging and collaboration platforms, including Skype for Business and Microsoft Classroom. Teams primarily competes with the similar service Slack, offering workspace chat and videoconferencing, file storage, and application integration. Microsoft Teams is a proprietary business communication platform developed by Microsoft, as part of the Microsoft 365 family of products.
A brand new Outlook mail app will also span across Windows 10 on desktops, tablets, and even phones.English, Albanian, Akan, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh. The UI and functionality is very similar to existing versions of Office for iPad, but Microsoft is combining inking and touch modes to take advantage of some of the unique parts of Windows 10.
Microsoft is planning to preview Office for Windows 10 in the coming weeks, and the company says it will release final versions later this year. Office for Windows 10 preview coming soon Finger-friendly versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook will all be available in Microsoft’s next operating system. The real changes for Office are coming with the touch-optimized version for Windows 10, a separate suite of apps designed primarily for tablets and phones. Microsoft is also making various other UI tweaks and feature additions, but Office 2016 is expected to look and feel very similar to Office 2013. While Microsoft isn’t revealing features for Office 2016, we exclusively revealed that the next version will include a darker theme and a Clippy-like helper. "We expect to make Office 2016 generally available in the second half of 2015."
"We will have more to share on Office 2016 in the coming months, but this suite will remain the comprehensive Office experience you’re long familiar with, best suited for a PC with keyboard and mouse," says Julia White, Microsoft’s Office general manager. Microsoft is announcing today that its next major version of Office, aptly named Office 2016, will be available later this year.