Many of Microsoft’s employees are working at home and Nadella says he wants Microsoft to be at the forefront of using technology to tie people together during these troubled times. The email sent by Satya Nadella was also posted on LinkedIn. Titled “Coming together to combat COVID-19”, the CEO explained how Microsoft’s services have become fundamental in the fight against coronavirus. “During this extraordinary time, it is clear that software, as the most malleable tool ever created, has a huge role to play across every industry and around the world. Our responsibility is to ensure that the tools we provide are up to the task,” said Nadella. “We’re seeing organizations of all sizes in every sector adopt Teams and Microsoft 365 to enable their employees to work remotely, while staying productive, collaborative, and fostering a sense of community,” Nadella added. Microsoft Teams was expanded earlier this month too open more features to users with the free version. Even back in February Microsoft said the COVID-19 outbreak had resulted in a surge of Teams users. That has continued into March and last week the platform had over 44 million daily active users. It is worth remembering it was only six months ago Microsoft was pleased to announced 22 million active users.
Furthering Research
Aside from growth of services, Satya Nadella says Microsoft is working to further research into COVID-19. He says the company’s technology is being used in healthcare and research.
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) March 23, 2020 On Twitter, he announced a partnership with the Center of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Microsoft and the CDC have developed a Coronavirus Self-Checker tool powered by Microsoft Azure. “We are collaborating with research institutions to create an open, machine readable dataset of all scientific literature on COVID-19. Our hope is the content will help researchers develop deeper understandings and approaches to addressing the pandemic. We are expanding our existing partnership with Adaptive Biotechnologies to map the immune system’s response to COVID-19 and will make the data set freely accessible to speed development of treatments,” Nadella said. “We are all in this together as a global community. For me, the best way I’ve found to get past this anxiety is to focus on what I can do each day to make a small difference. Each of us, wherever we are, has the opportunity to do the same – take an action driven by hope, a small step that makes things a bit better. And if everyone does something that makes the world a bit better, our collective work will in fact make the world a lot better, for the people we love, for our communities, for society,” the Microsoft CEO added.
