Ever since the early days of Microsoft Teams, it’s always been a better app for meetings and video calls than Slack, the main competing communications platform owned by Salesforce. Microsoft took the foundations of Skype for Business and added the idea of channels and chats for people to communicate rapidly without having to head into their Outlook email client. But Microsoft Teams has always fallen behind Slack when it comes to text chat.
Microsoft Teams is finally cleaning up chats and channels
Xbox employees are also all under one roof again.
Xbox employees are also all under one roof again.
The Verge
is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
Now, Microsoft is fixing one of the big reasons Teams sucks for messaging by combining chats and channels into an improved UI. Sources familiar with the situation tell me Microsoft has started testing a new update to Teams that puts chats and channels in one place. “Our new experience brings chats and channels together to get you to what matters faster,” reads the message that appears in internal versions of Microsoft Teams.
The existing messaging features in Microsoft Teams include a separate chat section for direct messages and small group chats and then what are known as channels for dedicated text chat between larger groups of people. The split interface has led many organizations that use Microsoft Teams to focus more on group chats between smaller groups of people, with channels left lingering or used primarily for wider announcements.
The new combined chats and channels section also includes a lot of customization options. You can organize chats and channels by topic or into project sections and move them around to sort them in a way that makes sense. It looks similar to how you can sort and organize Slack text channels into groups, with custom emoji to make them quickly glanceable.
I think this new interface will greatly help Teams users who have to flick through multiple group chats daily, and it may even encourage people to use channels more often, especially if they don’t have to switch to a separate view.
Microsoft has only just started testing this new interface in what are known internally as early “dogfood” versions of Microsoft Teams. Until Microsoft officially announces this new chats and channels interface, it’s difficult to predict when it will be available to all Teams users. I first heard in February that Microsoft was testing custom emoji in Teams, before that feature was officially announced in May and then started rolling out broadly last month.
Microsoft does like to announce lots of new Teams features during its Ignite conference, which is taking place in November this year. So perhaps we’ll hear more about it then.
Xbox under one roof
Over the past couple of weeks, lots of Xbox employees have started returning to the buildings where Xbox began. The Xbox studio campus was originally built during the Robbie Bach era more than 20 years ago, but the covid-19 pandemic forced many Xbox employees to work remotely or take up office space in other buildings as Microsoft cautiously reopened offices.
Xbox chief Phil Spencer is now back on the Xbox studio campus, alongside many of the core Xbox team inside Studio D. Sources at Microsoft tell me they’ve spotted Spencer on campus multiple times recently, allowing Xbox employees to have the type of spontaneous hallway chats with executives that haven’t been possible in recent years.
I’m told Xbox hasn’t had a return-to-work policy in recent years, and a lack of regular quarterly offsites, hallway meetings, and togetherness has created a feeling of disconnect for some. Microsoft certainly struggled to communicate its Xbox strategy effectively both inside and outside the company earlier this year, when some Xbox-exclusive games were announced for PS5.
Most Xbox employees are now moving back into Studio D or the other three nearby studio buildings. I understand Xbox Game Studios chief Matt Booty is still based in the same Redmond town center buildings where Halo Infinite developer 343 Industries and Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10 Studios are located.
The hope from some Xbox employees is that having everyone under one roof again will help the company get some of the pre-pandemic energy back. Josh Stein, a senior social media manager at Xbox, posted on X about returning to Xbox Studio D this week: “7 years of memories in these walls and feels good to call it home again.”
The pad:
- Microsoft is removing ads from Skype. A new update to Skype makes the app ad-free in the channels and chat sections. It’s a surprise move that Microsoft says is in response to feedback. Let’s hope that the Windows team is listening to the feedback around malware-like Bing prompts, ads in the Start menu, and the tricks Microsoft keeps pulling to keep people using Edge.
- Reddit CEO says Microsoft needs to pay to search the site. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay up if they want to scrape the site. Reddit has been blocking AI web crawlers in recent months, leading to Reddit results disappearing in Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Reddit struck a deal with Google and OpenAI, but Huffman says Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity have refused to negotiate. “We’ve had Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity act as though all of the content on the internet is free for them to use,” Huffman said. “That’s their real position.”
- Discord on Xbox will soon let you watch your friends’ streams. Xbox Insiders can now try out a new Xbox dashboard feature that lets you watch streams from Discord users on your console. While you’ve been able to stream your gameplay to friends over Discord since last year, you’ll soon be able to watch your friends’ streams whether they’re streaming gameplay from a PC, a mobile phone, or an Xbox. Microsoft is also enabling the ability to call Discord friends directly.
- Microsoft’s cloud revenues rule again in Q4, as Surface and Xbox hardware continues to dip. Microsoft reported its Q4 fiscal 2024 results this week, with its cloud business performing the best overall. Windows OEM revenue was up, but devices revenue (which includes Surface but not Xbox) was down 11 percent. On the Xbox side, content and services revenue is up 61 percent, mostly thanks to Activision Blizzard, and overall gaming revenue is up 44 percent. Overall gaming revenue at Microsoft would have been down 4 percent if the company hadn’t acquired Activision Blizzard, though. Xbox hardware revenue was also down a massive 42 percent this quarter.
- TikTok is one of Microsoft’s biggest AI cloud computing customers. The Information reports that TikTok was paying Microsoft almost $20 million per month to access OpenAI’s models earlier this year, making up nearly 25 percent of Azure OpenAI revenue. I heard the same thing from a source earlier this year, as Microsoft was looking into how exposed its AI revenues might be if TikTok was banned in the US.
- Microsoft employees are getting a one-time “cash award.” Microsoft employees are getting an extra bonus that will work out to between 10–25 percent of the value of their regular annual bonus, according to an internal memo seen by The Verge. The additional bonus comes just over a year after Microsoft stopped employee wage raises. It sounds like those wage increases are back this year, though. “In addition to funding our traditional merit, bonus, and stock awards, we are also giving a special one-time cash award,” says Microsoft HR chief Kathleen Hogan in the memo.
- Microsoft’s new Xbox controller is more translucent than ever before. There must be more Xbox controller variants than Xbox games at this point, but I’m still a sucker for translucent ones. Microsoft announced a new “Sky Cipher Special Edition” controller this week, which includes a translucent blue design that lets you see the inner workings of the Xbox controller. The controller also ships in new environmentally friendly Xbox packaging.
- Delta wants compensation from CrowdStrike and Microsoft. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian isn’t happy with Microsoft or CrowdStrike. In an interview with CNBC this week, Bastian calls Microsoft fragile and asks, “When was the last time you heard of a big outage at Apple?” Delta was significantly affected by the CrowdStrike update that downed 8.5 million Windows machines, and Bastian wants compensation for the estimated $500 million Delta lost due to the outage.
- Microsoft wants Congress to outlaw AI-generated deepfake fraud. Microsoft is calling on members of Congress to regulate the use of AI-generated deepfakes. Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith is calling for urgent action from policymakers to protect against fraud, abuse, and manipulation. Microsoft is calling for a new legal framework to prosecute against AI-generated scams and abuse.
- Microsoft calls for Windows changes and resilience after CrowdStrike outage. I wrote last week that I expected the CrowdStrike outage would spark a conversation about security vendors having access to the Windows kernel. Now, Microsoft has dropped several hints that it wants to revisit the conversation about moving security vendors out of the Windows kernel. Microsoft also released a technical deep dive about the CrowdStrike outage, with some suggestions for limiting security vendor access.
- Windows 11 will soon add your Android phone to File Explorer. Microsoft has started testing a new feature that makes it easier to access files from an Android device. Windows Insiders are now able to test this new feature, which lets you wirelessly browse through folders and files on your Android phone.
- Microsoft’s big Xbox holiday quarter is getting slightly smaller. I’m hearing that Obsidian is about to announce an Avowed delay to early 2025. Obsidian accidentally revealed earlier this year that it was targeting a November launch, but with Xbox exclusive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 delayed to November, things are getting stacked for Xbox games in the all-important holiday season. I understand Avowed is in good shape, this is more a matter of wanting to give the game breathing room outside of a very busy period for Xbox Game Pass. We’re still waiting to see if Bethesda’s Indiana Jones game manages to make its planned December release, too.
Thanks for subscribing and reading to the very end. Now that August is here and summer is in full flow, I’m keen to hear reader questions about anything Microsoft. I’d love to include some of your big questions in a future Notepad issue. You can reach me via email at notepad@theverge.com.
If you’ve heard about any of Microsoft’s secret projects, you can also speak to me confidentially on the Signal messaging app, where I’m tomwarren.01. I’m also tomwarren on Telegram if you’d prefer to chat there.
Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.
