Microsoft sees a strong spike in Skype-to-Skype calls, strong demand for remote work

Yahoo Finance Video
Updated

Microsoft saw a 220% in Skype-to-Skype calls. Dan Howley joins Yahoo Finance to discuss.

Video Transcript

- We want to turn to technology now. And Dan Howley is looking at the latest numbers from Skype. Perhaps not surprisingly, Microsoft reported today a huge increase in the number of Skype calls. Talk to us about those numbers, Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. We're going over the numbers now. What you're seeing is this huge spike in the amount of people that are actually calling with Skype, 220% increase. That's massive for a company like Microsoft to see this. And Skype is already so widely used. It's basically the go-to name for video chatting or online chatting software for a lot of organizations, a lot of people. So to see that kind of jump is huge.

Their Team software also seeing a big jump. In fact, between the first-- second week of March, they added about 12 million new users to Teams. That's their collaboration software. And along with the Teams, there's a story going out now that Microsoft is changing up the way you access Teams. Rather than it only being available to corporations, the company is now making it available to consumers. So there will be a personal version of Teams that you'll be able to use.

This all goes into Microsoft's rebranding of its Office 365 software. They're changing that to Microsoft 365, kind of taking away the little dull, stodgy version name of that suite, make it more personal to better compete with the likes of Slack and Google's G Suite. So big changes coming to Microsoft over there.

But obviously, the Teams news, the fact that it's going to be available for consumers and the increase in Skype usage, that's the big news at the moment, especially considering the coronavirus outbreak having a direct impact on those.

- Yes indeed, a lot of demand for remote work-- case in point-- these days, Dan Howley. I just wanted to mention as well we're going to be speaking to an executive from Microsoft, the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President Kevin Scott. He will be joining us a week from today and can talk us through more of the changes that Microsoft is making.