Big Tech deferring to Europe demonstrates remote work is no fad
If there was any doubt that hybrid and remote work have bedded in as a routine aspect of remote life, at least for formerly office-bound workers, then recent news that Microsoft is to ‘unbundle’ its Teams collaboration software should put an end to it.
The move comes after the European Commission launched an investigation in July following an antitrust complaint by competitor Slack.
As reported in TechCentral.ie, Nanna-Louise Linde, Microsoft’s vice president for European government affairs, confirmed the decision came in response to EU concerns.
“Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission’s investigation continues and we cooperate with it,” she said.
The decision to split out Teams does make a lot of sense from a regulatory point of view. Indeed, the sharp rise of Teams was a direct result of the Microsoft office productivity and enterprise computing juggernaut. Many businesses use all sorts of systems and applications developed by technology firms from IBM to Salesforce to Oracle, but few use absolutely no Microsoft software whatsoever. As a result, bundling Teams as part of Microsoft’s basic Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) package saw adoption skyrocket.
Early in the pandemic, relative newcomer Zoom rose to prominence, largely as a result of offering most functionality at no cost and also being very easy to use. Faced with the Zoom onslaught, longstanding players such as Cisco’s WebEX and Microsoft’s Skype were left in the dust.
Microsoft can not be accused of slacking, though. Having, at least according to some accounts, failed in a bid to buy Slack due to internal disagreements, Microsoft developed Skype into Skype for Business and, finally, Teams, and then slapped it into Office and its growing cloud platform.
Launched in 2017, Teams had racked up 300 million users by 2022.
Whose team are you on?
Anecdotally, Teams has, in my life, outstripped all other means of communication with people in business, including Zoom and Google Meet (much to my chagrin, as I prefer the telephone or, better yet, silence).
It’s not just me, though. According to analytics company Aternity, Microsoft Teams usage growth surpassed Zoom between February and June 2020. This is why the ‘unbundling’ was inevitable, and from October onwards, Microsoft will sell its office software without Teams to commercial customers in the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland. Teams itself will also be available as a standalone product, priced at €5 per month for new customers.
The move certainly tells us that the tech giants have not failed to notice that they are firmly in the sights of regulators and politicians.
It tells us something else, though: the fact that the bundling collaboration software with other products even matters indicates that the shift to hybrid and even fully-remote work is not a flash in the pan.
Despite concerns, across Europe remote work has become, if not the norm, at least unremarkable. Figures published by Eurostat in 2021 showed that 12.3% of EU workers did so remotely, and 21.5% of Irish workers.
The Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act (2023) coming into force will undoubtedly cement the trend.
In fact, Ireland, likely pushed on by both its large white collar sector and an endless housing crisis, which has driven property costs insanely high in the Greater Dublin area, already virtually top the polls when it comes to remote work (in the 26 Counties, at least. Up North, remote working lags).
According to a survey published last month by BNP Paribas Real Estate Ireland, more than three times as many people work from home in Ireland than did in 2019. Ireland is now among the top five EU nations for remote working, alongside Malta, the Netherlands, Germany and France, it found.
A European Commision report from 2022 has already listed “Eastern and Midland […] Ireland and […] Stockholm in Sweden” as among the keenest adopters of remote working.
“In other words, when comparing the pre-pandemic situation in 2019 with the situation in 2021, the share of employed people usually working from home increased in these two capital regions by an amount that was more than four times as high as the increase for the EU average,” it said.
Of course, that data was collected at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But the Microsoft decision suggests that a return to normality is not seeing workers jump with joy at the prospect of re-joining the daily commute.
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