In April I wrote a LinkedIn article entitled, "Get Ready to view Microsoft as the Kings of Collaboration". It explained my predictions and thoughts about how Microsoft understand how we will work differently in the coming months and years - so much better than every other large corporation on the planet.

Since that article was written (less than 80 days ago), Microsoft have bought GitHub, bought Flipgrid (and immediately made it free for schools)...and today made their collaboration platform, Teams, free for companies up to 300 people. THIS IS A HUGE THING!!!!

Microsoft Teams, for those that haven't used it, is a collaboration platform - not merely a 'chat app' as several journalists covering this news have written - that allows people to work better together. It allows for a consistent experience of communication whether an employee is at the train station, the office, the bar, France, Texas, or even Timbuktu. People like to associate Teams with Slack, but with Teams now free to the vast majority of Slack's paying audience, the game has changed (most definitely for Slack staff).

Like for like, perhaps at present most may prefer Slack's interface and usability, but the sheer nature of Teams' integration with Microsoft's other products such as Office 365, makes it so much more palatable to small businesses already using Office 365 and other Microsoft platforms. The IT distribution channel will go 'all out' on Teams and adoption rates will start to move very fast now.

In isolation, as journalists have written, Teams could be seen as merely a 'chat app', but in fact it's going to change how hundreds of thousands of businesses operate. You see, at the moment, the clever people that work in companies - the directors, the key staff, the annoying outlier that is hard to manage - can work away from the office with little fuss. They don't need managing so much. But Teams will allow many more types of staff members to be able to work from home. Not just in cool digital agencies, not just in housing associations, but in industrial plastics manufacturers and commercial refuse collectors - every company. And this is why this move to make Teams free is so important.

I do find it startling that many people are not putting the various pieces together, but seeing each Microsoft move in isolation. It's lazy, it's narrow-minded. Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella is a bloody genius and he and whoever he has advising him, are changing something much bigger than is almost possible to see. People publicly revere more obvious 'game changers' such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the like, but Mr. Nadella is working on allowing you, me, all your co-workers and friends to really have that work-life balance thing that people have been talking about (but doing not much about) for years. His work will allow you to spend more time with your kids, spend more time with nature, more time away from nylon carpets, cluttered fridges full of coworkers out-of-date sandwiches, and office politics...people need to start to realise this.

Collaboration Moves

These moves (Teams, GitHub, Flipgrid and many more), in varying degrees, are gigantic (not massive, not huge, but gigantic) statements of intent, and further show that Microsoft not only understand the total and utter thirst for collaboration by students, teachers, workers and businesses alike, but are doing something about it with actions, vigour, and money.

At the epiorganism view of workers in the modern world, the patterns of behaviour are drastic in their changes in recent times, and these patterns are continually moving away from what we have known for 100 years or more. It is easy to state the fact of more people working from home more frequently, but it's much more than that...its how people are now working on more projects that contain colleagues from different departments, divisions, and even companies - wherever they are located.

And this is why this move to make Microsoft Teams free is so fascinatingly important - and exciting.