Microsoft renaming Office 365 to Microsoft 365, bringing Teams to everyone

Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley joins Seana Smith to discuss Microsoft's big changes to its Office software on Monday.

Video Transcript

- Also, Microsoft was out with some news today in a bit of, I guess, happier news there from them. They were announcing several new products today, amongst them was a consumer version of its Teams product, which is similar to Slack if you have used that before. Dan d Haley is digging through this announcement for us. And Dan, Teams is a product that many people are using now as we have more and more people working from home. What are the details of this new announcement?

DAN HALEY: Yeah, this comes as Microsoft kind of tries to rebrand its Office suite. They're changing it to Microsoft 365 rather than Office 365, kind of trying to shake off the old and stodgy feeling of the Office brand and bring it more into the personal space, make it more hip and exciting, similar to a Slack if you will. Teams now is going to be available to everyone, not just to corporate users. It'll be available to consumers.

And that's a big deal because they want to position this as a means to bring together all the disparate apps that help to organize your life under this Microsoft 365 plan. And so using that Teams software, you'll be able to do things like share calendars, photos, chat, do video, anything you can think of that you may need to keep in touch with your family right now. And that's especially important now as we start to see these kinds of apps really ramp up as far as usage with more lockdowns. I think it's 30 states have at least some lockdowns in place at this moment.

So this is the type of software that's needed, almost serendipitous, if, you know, you can say that, for Microsoft to announce this at this time. It's obviously been something that they've been working on for a while. Outside of that, they also announced that Skype had seen a 220% increase in the amount of Skype minutes used by users. So obviously, that site, as well as the likes of Slack, Cisco's WebEx, and many others you're seeing huge increases from people trying to stay in touch with each other.

- It is interesting like you just mentioned the increase that we've seen, that the 220% increase in Skype. There was also a recent report out from JP Morgan that caught my attention. It had to do with Zoom. So one of Microsoft's competitors out there just in terms of its Teams product and also Skype. So Zoom [INAUDIBLE], JP Morgan was saying that they expect it to continue after this pandemic that we are currently in. Is that something that you think is, I guess, echoed by many [INAUDIBLE] just in terms of the fact that these tech companies are having more and more people sign up for their products, people that maybe haven't used their products in the past that will likely, I guess-- according to JP Morgan if you agree with them-- they'll likely stick around and use their products in the future?

DAN HALEY: I think this is something that now has to become a standard contingency plan for a lot of large companies. And so they will continue to offer this kind of software if they haven't already. Even small and medium businesses will need to do something along these lines so that people can stay in touch, video chat, collaborate, things along those lines.

So I do think there will be a small drop off once people are able to go back to work and physically be in the same space as each other. But I think a lot of businesses will also use this again as a contingency plan. Once they see something like this, they realize it is possible, and they will continue to have those kinds of subscriptions that they'll continue to re-up.

- All right, Dan, [INAUDIBLE].