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Teams 2.0 has yet to have an official launch date, but Microsoft continues to release updates since it released the new Teams in preview this March. This week came the announcement of a new Meet app for Teams, aimed at streamlining meeting management and outputs.
Information about the new app appeared in the private Microsoft 365 admin center and was reported on its Techcommunity blog.
The Meet app will provide a single location to catch up and follow meetings and include access to notes, meeting recaps, agendas and previous chats. The app will divide between two main sections: Up Next and Recent. The Up Next solution includes an AI integration to help employees find, work on and develop meeting related documents.
Microsoft Teams Premium subscribers also get access to generative AI functionality across the Meet app, which provides suggestions about follow-up tasks and information and profiles about people in attendance.
Rollout of the app is expected to start in mid-August and be finalized by mid-September. The post suggests the Teams 2.0 for Windows launch will happen before the end of the year.
The announcement follows Microsoft's confirmation earlier this month that Copilot is also coming to Teams chat.
The integration will provide access key points in each chat as well as summary of long, extended conversations. Customers can also pull Copilot into the call interface in Teams and in regular chats, beyond the meeting experience.
The Teams app news follows Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's Q4 earnings call, where he announced Microsoft Teams Premium has more than half a million users.
EU Launches Anti-Trust Investigation Into Microsoft Teams
It’s not all good news this week for Microsoft. While it is been on the cards since 2020, the European Commission announced this week it is moving forward with the anti-trust investigation into Microsoft.
While recent reports suggest Microsoft has been in prolonged discussions with the European Commission in the hope of resolving the issue, no agreement has been reached.
The crux of the issue is a complaint made by Slack in 2020 accusing Microsoft of anti-competitive practices related to its bundling of Teams into the Office suit, in effect forcing Teams as a communication product onto any Microsoft 365 customer.
Recent reports suggested Microsoft was prepared to offer Office without Teams at a reduced price, but the EU was reportedly unhappy with the price cut on offer.
Officials also raised concerns about interoperability issues between Microsoft’s software and third-party products.
“These practices may constitute anti-competitive tying or bundling and prevent suppliers of other communication and collaboration tools from competing,” the Commission stated in a statement.
“Remote communication and collaboration tools like Teams have become indispensable for many businesses in Europe,” Margrethe Vestager, executive VP in charge of competition policy for the EU said in an announcement opening the investigation. “We must therefore ensure that the markets for these products remain competitive, and companies are free to choose the products that best meet their needs. The US tech giant has racked up 2.2 billion euros ($2.5 billion) in EU antitrust fines in the previous decade for practices in breach of EU competition rules, including tying or bundling two or more products together.”
Microsoft responded in a widely circulated statement: “We respect the European Commission’s work on this case and take our own responsibilities very seriously. We will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns."
If Microsoft is found in breach of EU competition rules, it could face a fine of up to 10% of its total global annual turnover.
Box Releases Plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot
In a sign of the growing popularity and widespread use of Microsoft Copilot, SaaS content management and collaboration provider Box announced the rollout of its plugin for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
According to a company statement, the new plugin will provide Box and Microsoft 365 customers better access to content in the Box Cloud from Microsoft Teams and Office products.
The use cases here are obvious. Box, despite its development in content services management, is still a content storage offering. Microsoft Copilot will enable users to synthesize and summarize their content stored in Content Cloud in Teams and enable better collaboration with teams inside and outside the enterprise. The Office addition will also allow users to collaborate in real-time in Word, PowerPoint and Excel, as well as edit and share files between Box Drive, Box Web app and other Office apps.
The addition of the Copilot plugin to Box is just the latest in a long collaboration between the two companies and follows the release of Box AI in May, which aims to bring generative AI across the entire Box Content Cloud. The company said at the time that it would be looking at other foundational AI models to use with the content stored in Box to enhance productivity and increase the value of existing content for workers.
The Box for Office desktop co-authoring feature, the Box Connector for Microsoft Graph, and the enhanced productivity and collaboration capabilities are all available to Box and Microsoft 365 customers as of this week.
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Google Workspace Users Flock to Generative AI
Speaking at its Q2 earnings call earlier this week, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said more than 750,000 Workspace users have access to new generative AI features in preview and that this was only the beginning.
“We’re making it easier for others to innovate using AI," he said. "One way is by providing Google Cloud’s high-performance infrastructure, optimized for a range of generative AI models."
He also stressed the company is developing AI "responsibly" so that everyone can benefit.
By comparison, while it is impossible to know how many users are now using Copilot in Microsoft, clearly the take up across Microsoft products is significant. Nadella during the Microsoft earnings call revealed that Azure OpenAI now has more than 11,000 customers and that more than 27,000 organizations are using GitHub Copilot to increase the productivity of their developers.
This is only the start and gives some insight into why the major tech companies are so anxious to develop their own generative AI offerings.
Meta’s Reality Labs Reports Further Losses
Meanwhile Meta closes off a mixed week of news in which questions around the viability of its Reality Labs once again entered the spotlight.
First, the good news: Overall, Meta said its revenue for the second quarter jumped 11% from a year earlier, to $32 billion. Profits rose 16%, to $7.8 billion.
The bad news is Reality Labs suffered an operating loss of $7.7 billion during the six months ending June 30 and nearly $21 billion in the last 18 months.
Reality Labs is where much of the company's metaverse development takes place, along with Meta’s other AR and VR projects.
While the revenues will no doubt please investors, the fact that the company is incurring such loses in the development of its metaverse visions has not gone unnoticed. In the Q2 earnings call, even Zuckerberg was less bullish than usual.
"I can’t guarantee you I’m going to be right about this bet,” he said, “But I do think this is the direction the world is going in.”
Zuckerberg continues to pump money into his metaverse vision and warned investors that its new VR headset, the Quest 3, is likely to see costs initially rise.
"For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” the company said in a statement outlining the figures.
EU Regulators Investigate Adobe's Figma Buy
Finally this week, while Microsoft’s problems with EU anti-trust regulators captured the spotlight, it also emerged that Adobe’s $20 billion proposed buy-out of cloud-based designer platform Figma is also facing an EU anti-trust investigation.
This follows reports earlier this year that Britain's anti-competition board was looking into the deal, while Bloomberg reported in February that the US Justice Department was preparing an antitrust lawsuit to block the deal.
EU authorities plan to push forward with an investigation over anti-competition concerns, according to reports in the Financial Times. Reuters news service reported regulators will decide by Aug. 7 whether to give Adobe’s plans a green light.
The EU is concerned if the deal goes ahead, it will negatively affect competition in the whiteboarding and interactive design market.
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