Oversize #25: Microsoft one step closer to making Teams a one-stop shop

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Editor's note: The world around us has changed dramatically over the last 18 months and team productivity has come to the fore instead of individual productivity. The new hybrid work models—where some people work remotely and others work on-premise—that this entails will require structural changes to how we build and interact with apps. Last month, at its annual developer conference, Microsoft Build, Microsoft signalled towards the next generation of application development by defining collaborative apps for hybrid work. Rajesh Jha, executive vice president at Microsoft who leads the Office Product Group amongst his other responsibilities, has deemed this “the era of collaborative apps”. This new class of apps will focus on the “new realities of hybrid work models, enabling people to work from anywhere, at any time, and on any device”. These apps will be centred around collaboration versus individual productivity, whether it be synchronous in the context of a video conference or asynchronous with documents and chat. And surprise, surprise, Microsoft wants Teams to be the platform for collaborative apps. The digital platform Teams, Microsoft’s Slack competitor, has evolved from a …