There’s no doubt that most of us across the Puget Sound region are anxious to put the difficulties of 2020 behind us. As we approach the end of December, we look forward to the new year with a mixture of optimism and concern – optimism about spreading vaccines and concerns about the serious challenges that will unfortunately follow us into the first months of 2021. Covid-19 cases are on the rise and we feel it in our hospitals, our homes and in the local economy. Schools remain closed across most of Washington state, and despite the heroic work of educators, research tells us that distance learning can’t replace in-person instruction. This is creating a troubling learning loss. While these challenges are daunting, every day at Microsoft we see successes around the world that give us hope. We believe that our region can and should continue to pull together, support our neighbors and pursue a path that restarts the activities that fuel our economy, develop our children and enrich our daily lives.
As our community heads into the 10th month of Covid-related shutdowns and restrictions, we must move swiftly to reignite the local economy and ensure the safety of those who are key to the region’s recovery. As part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to the community that we call home, today we are announcing an additional commitment of more than $110 million towards our region’s recovery and, when the current Covid surge is under control, the safe reopening of its schools.
Here’s what we’re pledging today:
We will continue to support our hourly workers impacted by Covid-19. In March, we announced that we would continue to pay the hourly service providers on our campuses their regular pay even while their full services were not needed. Since that time, Microsoft has spent more than $110 million in Washington state to pay these wages.
As we head into the holidays, we want these workers and their families to know that we will continue to stand by their side. Today, we commit that we will continue to pay all our onsite vendor hourly service providers their regular pay until they can return to our campuses. In Puget Sound, this includes individuals who staff our lobbies, run our cafes, drive our shuttles, and support our on-site tech and audio-visual needs. We estimate that between Dec. 1, 2020 and Mar. 31, 2021, this will provide locally more than $50 million of additional wages.
We currently expect that it will take until early July 2021 for our campuses to return to a full presence. Regardless of the exact date, we will provide these onsite hourly workers their full wages until the date of their return.
We will continue to provide expanded support for nonprofits in Washington state. Even in the best of times, non-profit organizations play an indispensable role in supporting the social safety net and every other aspect of local communities in our state. The Covid crisis has made the role of these organizations even more critical. So far this year, Microsoft has provided more than $98 million of assistance to nonprofits in Washington state, including roughly $67 million in cash and $31 million in technology, in-kind support, special discounts and our Covid-19 response school lunch program.
We commit today that we will sustain this high level of support for nonprofits in our state. This will include ongoing cash grants and in-kind support. We currently project that we will provide roughly $60 million of additional support for local nonprofits between Dec. 1, 2020 and Jul. 15, 2021.
We will provide technology and in-kind support to help safely reopen the local schools in 2021. As the Covid crisis reaches into its 10th month, the toll on our state’s students far exceeds what most people anticipated when schools went to remote learning in April. The learning loss for students is substantial and now well-documented, with some groups losing a significant portion of a year’s progress in reading and math. School-based relationships promote the social and emotional well-being that are key to learning. The challenges for younger and lower-income students are especially pronounced.
As serious as the impact on students is the effect on many other parts of our communities. Covid-19 has provided a powerful reminder of the importance of our state’s teachers and the indispensable role that our schools play as central community institutions. They are essential in meeting family support, nutrition and childcare needs. The continuing closure of schools increasingly threatens the ability of working parents – especially mothers – to remain in the workforce.
At the same time these impacts have grown more dire, advances in understanding the science of Covid-19 have shown that it is possible, with the right precautions, to reopen schools safely, especially for the youngest learners. While this week with high infection rates is clearly not the right moment to restart in -person learning, the science now tells us that it is the right time to accelerate the planning for kindergarten through 5th Grade classes to reopen in February, if the correct safety measures are put in place. This requires a concerted effort across the community, and we will take new steps to help:
Microsoft will provide a technology solution that will enable Washington state schools to better track and report Covid-19 related testing data within their district boundaries. This solution will be free and made available to all Washington state schools districts. This will ensure that schools can report to parents and teachers alike current information about testing and infections, thereby providing the transparency needed for the community to remain well-informed about critical health information.
This solution builds on an application we created for the state of Washington to track PPE and beds for all 104 hospitals across the state. It also builds on our work with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the country with approximately 700,000 students.
While we help schools to reopen, we will also continue to support classes that interact online. We’re committed to providing the best possible products and support to help teachers engage with students remotely, including support and products that are available to all schools in Washington state.
Microsoft will donate PPE and cleaning supplies to schools that need additional resources to reopen safely. It is critical that we reopen our schools in line with state guidelines. This will complement the state’s newly announced $3 million set-aside funds to implement health and safety protocols. Microsoft is prepared to donate PPE and cleaning supplies to help any school district in our state that needs additional supplies to re-open. These will be distributed through the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).
We support the Washington Department of Health’s updated Covid-19 guidelines for in-person learning announced by Governor Inslee on Dec. 16. These updated Covid-19 health standards for reopening schools keep pace with advances in the scientific understanding on case numbers, hospitalization rates and capacity, and Covid-19 case positivity test rates. We are also pleased to see the test positivity goals are now in line with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). These new goals also build on the learning from research at the Institute of Disease Modeling that show that schools can reopen safely, especially at the K-5 level, even when there are more positive tests in a community, if they follow the right precautions.
We support prioritizing vaccines for teachers. We recognize that Governor Inslee and the leaders at the Department of Health will need to make the critical decisions about the precise order of who can be vaccinated and when. It remains vital to prioritize critical healthcare workers and other people who are especially vulnerable as the state distributes the first 400,000 vaccine doses in December. But we believe that if teachers, school administrators and staff in higher risk categories at the K-5 level were eligible to get a Covid vaccine in January, it would help these schools take a critical step towards reopening more quickly.
Today’s commitments bring Microsoft’s hourly worker commitment and local nonprofit support amounts to approximately $250 million in regional support – part of a decades-long commitment to our region that will continue. We know we are not alone in these efforts and we acknowledge the hard work and difficult choices made by parents and teachers, school administrators, and public health and other government officials.
In addition to continued action from our state’s elected officials, Congress needs to do its part. We will continue to advocate for a robust federal stimulus funding bill that includes initiatives such as wage relief and help for small businesses.
Washington state was one of the first to be impacted by Covid-19, and we acted quickly and decisively to respond. We now need to come together once again to chart a clear and unified recovery path that advances the shared economic opportunity and future of our region. We stand ready to partner with government leaders, school districts and the business community to start the new year with a clear plan of what we can do together.
This week, I was thrilled to take part in Envision, our brand-new digital series for senior business leaders, which we’re co-producing with our close partners Accenture and Avanade.
Hosted by Stephanie Mehta, editor-in-chief of Fast Company magazine, our first episode featured dynamic speakers and a conversation that centered on thought leadership topics such as digital resilience, the future of work, and how individuals and organizations alike can find purpose and drive momentum.
We also aired localized versions of the program, which allowed leaders to discuss business news and topics relevant to their region, such as the impact of COVID-19 on local industries.
To kick things off, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked with Stephanie about the evolution of the workplace, what it takes to create a resilient and agile business culture, and Microsoft’s embrace of “stakeholder capitalism” to serve not just shareholders but a broad community of stakeholders.
Satya was followed by Accenture CEO Julie Sweet and Microsoft Executive Vice President Judson Althoff, who shared the five questions that organizations need to think carefully about to transform in a post-pandemic world. I had the privilege of interviewing Christophe Beck, President and Chief Operating Officer of Ecolab, to learn how his company is bringing together technology and people to address the world’s biggest sustainability challenges.
In addition, Mitra Azizirad, Corporate Vice President of AI and Innovation Marketing at Microsoft, described why successful organizations make innovation a top priority and how to treat innovation as a platform. Finally, Avanade CEO Pamela Maynard spoke with psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais and Microsoft Chief Diversity Officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre about the mindset required to succeed and how to use purpose to change things for the better.
I hope you’ll join us for Episode 2 on Feb. 16, when we’ll look at five areas in which global challenges are driving exciting innovation. Speakers will include Microsoft Executive Vice President Jean-Philippe Courtois; Caroline Fanning, Chief Human Resources Officer of Avanade; our Chief Environmental Officer Lucas Joppa; Accenture Chief Leadership and Human Resources Officer Ellyn Shook; and Julia White, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft researchers pursue the big questions about what the world will be like in the future and the role technology will play. Not only do they take on the responsibility of exploring the long-term vision of their research, but they must also be ready to react to the immediate needs of the present. This year in particular, they were asked to use their roles as futurists to address pressing societal challenges.
In early 2020, as countries began responding to COVID-19 with stay-at-home orders and business operations moved from offices into homes, researchers sprang into action to identify ways their skills and projects could help while also making personal and professional adjustments of their own. In some cases, they pivoted to directly address the pandemic. A team from Microsoft Research Asia developed the COVID Insights website to promote scientific analysis and understanding of the disease, while the Socially Intelligent Meetings program expanded its work in telepresence technologies to include the Meetings During COVID-19 project. From responses provided by employee volunteers, these researchers are piecing together the effects of taking meetings almost entirely via screens.
“When a major crisis strikes the world, science and technology research is almost always of paramount importance in response, rehabilitation, and—ultimately—creating resilience for the future. Today, the people of Microsoft Research are proving to be critical in dealing with climate calamities, such as famines and major wildfires; global health threats, such as that posed by the COVID-19 pandemic; the weakening of democratic institutions posed by misinformation and insecure voting infrastructure; wildlife extinction caused by pollution and illegal poaching; and more. While our main mission continues to be grounded in fundamental, long-term research, contributing to societal resilience is also a growing element in how we ensure a good future for all.”
Peter Lee, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research & Incubations
Meanwhile, research started before the pandemic feels increasingly significant. In April, two papers with implications on workplace well-being and hybrid scenarios, respectively, were presented on the conference circuit. Researchers from the productivity group developed models that leverage digital activities and other data to suggest appropriate times for workers to switch tasks and take breaks, while researchers in the United Kingdom and Canada built a two-way telepresence system to enhance collaboration among remote and local individuals. In December, Eyal Ofek shared how advances in virtual reality could be used to maximize our workspaces—wherever they may be—during a Microsoft Research webinar.
And while a lot has been said about work in these unprecedented times, research into the dynamics of epidemics themselves moved forward. In September, it was announced that Microsoft Premonition, a system leveraging robotics and genomics to track pathogens responsible for widespread disease, is being made available to additional partners.
Microsoft Premonition researchers worked to create scalable monitoring solutions for early disease detection. In a trial in Houston, Texas, they used smart traps to capture and monitor mosquitoes, and then data was analyzed in the cloud with a goal of spotting new transmission patterns. To learn more, explore the news article.
While research relevant to the pandemic has been of the highest importance this year, Microsoft researchers took their research in a broad range of directions—progress in AI, healthcare technology, and security advanced rapidly. Below is a selection of highlights that came out of Microsoft Research in 2020.
Scaling AI for better performance and real-world applications
This year saw significant breakthroughs for creating AI that is substantially more powerful, scalable, and readily integrated into Microsoft products. The AI at Scale initiative, born from a cornucopia of work in the area in 2020, combines large-scale models, AI supercomputing, and teams of researchers and product engineers working together to implement AI in a variety of Microsoft products and infrastructure.
Helping to power large AI models, the DeepSpeed library with Zero Redundancy Optimizer (ZeRO) also underwent major transformations since its introduction in February. The library initially included support for training models up to 100 billion parameters in size, but by the end of the year, the library was capable of training models up to 1 trillion parameters while also introducing new methods to train models with lower resource costs. On the testing side of natural language generation and understanding, researchers released XGLUE, a benchmark dataset for gauging models’ zero-shot cross-lingual transfer capabilities across 19 different languages.
In the realm of vision and language pretraining (VLP), Microsoft researchers released OSCAR (Object-Semantics Aligned Pretraining) in May, leading to a novel framework with state-of-the-art performance on six different vision-and-language tasks. In October, researchers collaborating with Azure Cognitive Services created VIVO (Visual Vocabulary Pretraining), which resulted in a framework for novel object captioning that achieved state of the art and even surpassed human performance on the novel object captioning (nocaps) benchmark.
Technologies like Microsoft Floating Point, used in the Project Brainwave architecture, are helping to lower the cost of deep neural network (DNN) inference. Improvements like this allow Microsoft to power large AI models on the scale needed to empower Microsoft users around the world. Head over to the AI at Scale page to learn about some of the many other projects undertaken at Microsoft Research to advance large-scale AI this year.
Building AI responsibly by pursuing safety, fairness, interpretability, and accessibility
As AI techniques have made leaps and bounds, researchers are undertaking the crucial task of examining responsible practices in AI, which include accessibility, fairness, and interpretability. Methods for understanding and explaining what AI does, as well as assessing fairness at all stages of development, are big trends in this area.
“Building and fielding AI responsibly is a challenging, cross-disciplinary research area. Our progress over the last year builds on insights from previous years with an emphasis on applying our research and learnings to developing usable methods and tools that can help engineers design and develop trustworthy AI systems. We’ve made strong progress, but our journey is far from over.”
Eric Horvitz, Technical Fellow and Chief Scientific Officer
Responsible AI requires that the talent, knowledge, and experiences of those developing it are as diverse as the people using it. Microsoft is committed to clearing a path into the industry for underrepresented groups, including sponsoring and participating in events like the Black in AI, Queer in AI, and Women in Machine Learning NeurIPS workshops and creating professional and academic opportunities through Microsoft Research. To have your work supported or to join the Microsoft Research team, see our Academic Programs—such as the Dissertation Grant for PhD students from underrepresented groups (proposals will start to be accepted in February)—and open research positions and internships.
Practical and theoretical advances in cryptography and security
As technology becomes more embedded in and essential to people’s lives, creating new technologies for 2020 and beyond demands deeper consideration of people’s privacy, security of the web and internet-connected devices, and safeguards on human rights. This year, researchers introduced ElectionGuard, a system that applies homomorphic encryption to both secure people’s votes—so that no one else can see how they voted—and allow voters to verify their votes are properly counted. The system was piloted in Fulton, Wisconsin, in February, where election officials tested machines running ElectionGuard; the final tally was gathered through traditional paper ballot methods. The code for ElectionGuard was made open source, and Josh Benaloh presented on the technology in a webinar in April.
Cryptography was also explored from a post-quantum angle. Future quantum computers could decipher even the most secure current cryptographic techniques, so researchers in this space have begun to investigate new methods for making the cryptography of the future equal to the task of protecting people’s privacy and information in a world where quantum computers far exceed the power of supercomputers now. These methods can also keep information more secure in the present computing landscape. To learn more about the world of post-quantum cryptography, check out webinars from Craig Costello and Christian Paquin below.
In late August, researchers announced a method for biomedical NLP pretraining that could enable researchers to stay up to date with the continually increasing amount of new scientific knowledge in the field by using NLP to quickly identify and cross-reference important findings. Their model, PubMedBERT, obtained state-of-the-art results in several biomedical applications.
As medical and mental health professionals adapt how they provide care for people in the 21st century, researchers intend to continue to create technology that complements experts’ skills.
Bringing reinforcement learning into the real world
Reinforcement learning—a framework in which ML systems learn via interactions with their environment—has long been an active area at Microsoft Research, and the drive to advance RL has increased thanks to the approach’s success in Microsoft products and services. Researchers are tackling RL both empirically and theoretically, and their enthusiasm and efforts were on full display in 17 NeurIPS-accepted papers that pursued a variety of promising avenues.
Two papers designed methods for leveraging existing logged datasets in an area of RL that uses past experience to give agents a leg up prior to deployment, while separate work brought strategic exploration to the popular gradient decent–based approaches for RL. Other work highlighted a trend in learning good representations for agents’ observations. In their respective papers, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Devon Hjelm, and their coauthors incorporated auxiliary prediction problems to discover representations that simplify downstream learning tasks. Earlier in the year, researchers deployed Transformers in several ways to develop Working Memory Graph, an RL agent capable of more efficient learning when advanced reasoning is involved, such as future planning in the game Sokoban.
On the winding road of this year in technology research, it’s only fitting that we loop back to AI, which researchers sought to optimize from multiple perspectives. One perspective considered how AI has evolved alongside the game of chess. In the last few decades, AI has advanced to a point where it can spar with and succeed against the best players in the world. This led researchers to shift their focus from how to make AI better at chess to how chess-playing AI can be refined to better match human playing styles and skill levels. As a result, researchers created Maia, a Leela Chess Zero–based engine that matches human play more closely than previously achieved.
Computer vision moved forward on many fronts in 2020. Researchers created a visual question answering (VQA) evaluation score in their work to understand the connection between visual understanding and neuro-symbolic reasoning. The score betters prior evaluation methods by isolating reasoning from perception in VQA models with a differentiable first-order logic framework. Researchers also investigated how two concepts integral to human reasoning, locality and compositionality, can help to enhance zero-shot representation learning.
Finally, researchers are looking at a future AI landscape that is increasingly multimodal and interactive. However, engineering AI that uses multimodal streaming data in real time is time consuming because programming infrastructures in this area are lacking. Researchers built Platform for Situated Intelligence to provide an open-source framework for experimentation, development, and research in this area.
Continuing a tradition of research with real-world impact
The above research represents a small portion of the great work that was enthusiastically pursued by dedicated researchers at Microsoft Research in 2020, and even if we were to consider all the work produced this year, it would still tell only part of a bigger research story at Microsoft.
In a new series of posts this year, we began connecting the dots to provide an overview of how the individual contributions of researchers and their collaborators are coming together to have a profound impact on customers and society at large. Our collection on responsible AI shows how researchers are upholding and advancing the Microsoft commitment to AI grounded in principles that put people first and benefit society, while our collection on reinforcement learning recounts the history of work in the field and its application to Microsoft products and services. Visit our collections archive for more.
2020 has been a year like no other, underscoring the importance of the relationship between research and resilience. As we look to the future, researchers are an important part of answering the big questions that will shape the direction of society. We have been inspired by the research community’s continued commitment to technological advancements—those in direct response to these unprecedented times and those keeping research on all fronts moving forward. We wish you and yours a safe and healthy new year.
Sara Lerner was fired up and ready to jump into the fray on an imaginary bus.
The Microsoft senior program manager was exploring diversity and inclusion and chatting with her peers about a hypothetical scenario: What they would do if a bus rider made a cruel comment to a passenger who was transgender. Lerner started envisioning how she might confront the fictional bully.
Until a colleague who is transgender weighed in with a surprising twist.
If it happened to them, the person said, they wouldn’t want anyone to angrily defend them, potentially heightening tensions and causing backlash they’d then have to deal with. Instead, they’d wave, smile and ask if the other rider had any questions, trying to provide a positive interaction that wouldn’t shame the agitator but might open a dialogue instead.
Sara Lerner, a senior program manager for Microsoft (Photo by Dan DeLong)
It was an encounter Lerner was still reflecting on when Microsoft introduced its global allyship program last year. The course was offered to all employees, aiming to broaden Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella’s push toward a more inclusive culture. But amid the global chaos of 2020 — including a pandemic requiring remote work and making relationships more challenging, acts of hate toward those with Asian heritage stemming from false rhetoric about the virus, widespread protests against racial injustice following violence against Black and African American people, and increased political tensions — the company made the introductory sessions virtual, and mandatory.
The goal is to give Microsoft’s 160,000 employees worldwide the language they need to discuss different viewpoints and difficult things in a way that offers empathy and inclusion to all, says Chief Diversity Officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre. The program merges employees’ increased enthusiasm around advocacy with the well-known “growth mindset” platform Nadella adopted from psychologist Carol Dweck. And it adapts that from the work-performance arena to address the culture of the company, where leaders have been trying to break down silos and address bias, intolerance and discrimination.
“So much around allyship is putting the growth mindset into action, learning how to empathize with and advocate with someone else,” McIntyre says. “I’m not saying advocate for. It’s not a badge or cape. It’s a practice that we’re trying to embed so people can engage in conversation to learn from one another how to support and help one another.”
While many companies have programs to foster diversity and inclusion, Microsoft worked with neuroscientists for two years to develop a new approach.
The Microsoft Allyship Program consists of 10 segments using various media to appeal to different learning styles. Employees can take online, self-paced classes, watch video scenarios with actors portraying and discussing various work situations, and participate in facilitated sessions focused on building skills and practicing behaviors. The program teaches that there’s no limit to who can benefit from a focus on greater inclusion — everyone has an opportunity to be an ally, and everyone needs allyship in some form.
Rich Neal, a senior director at Microsoft
Rich Neal vividly remembers a meeting early on in his career with his manager and other leaders when he was the only African American in the room — not a new thing then, or now, he says — and someone made an inappropriate comment. Three seconds felt like 30 minutes while Neal contemplated what to say, when he suddenly heard his manager ask what the colleague had meant. The meeting turned uncomfortable, but Neal’s shoulders dropped with relief.
“I felt like this person checked in part of their privilege, part of their fraternity, for me,” Neal recalls. “And the next month, when I got there, it was just different. My boss had created a new reality for everyone in that session. That experience taught me that it doesn’t have to be this huge, Herculean effort to show up for other people.”
Years later, as a senior director at Microsoft, Neal was asked to attend an event for LGBTQI+ employees. There he met a woman who talked about her privilege, as someone who was white and Ivy League-educated, and challenged him to extend his privilege to others — a concept he says he’d never considered, having “correlated the word ‘privilege’ to ‘white male.’” Now he mentors and coaches people of all different ages, career stages and disciplines.
Microsoft Chief Diversity Officer Lindsay-Rae McIntyre
Members of majority communities often are portrayed as either offenders or saviors. But opening the aperture of the conversation to reflect topics such as mental health, age, disability and faith shows how everyone benefits from greater inclusion, McIntyre says.
Rather than shutting people down for offenses, the allyship program encourages employees to learn, grow, make mistakes and get better.
“Allyship isn’t perfect,” she says. “You’re going to fail sometimes. But we hold each other accountable for what we’re aiming for. We show people what good and bad looks like so they actually understand some of the well-intended behavior doesn’t land the way they want it to. And ultimately we’re giving people the skill sets to deepen their connections” — and improve their work performance as a result.
The two are inextricably linked for Steve Chu, an account executive on Microsoft’s state and local government team in Kansas City.
Steve Chu, an account executive on Microsoft’s state and local government team in Kansas City
Chu grew up in Alaska with a mother of German descent and father of Chinese lineage. He says he experienced “a lot of harsh racism” as a child and denounced the Asian-American half of his heritage, at one point telling his parents he wanted to change his last name. But while taking the Microsoft course last year, Chu began exploring ways to be more authentic to his whole self. He ended up having the most successful year of his career.
“That really changed everything for me, to embrace both sides of my heritage,” Chu says. “It’s freed me up. I don’t expend energy anymore on covering the Chinese aspects of my personality, so I can focus that energy on more meaningful efforts.”
“If we want to make sure our products are created for people around the world, we need to make sure those varied perspectives are represented, heard and acted upon,” says Diana Navas-Rosette, who leads strategy and innovation on Microsoft’s Global Diversity & Inclusion team. “So we need to have the space and the right behaviors in place for people to be able to speak up and to respectfully challenge each other and have conversations about different perspectives, views and values.”
Diana Navas-Rosette, who leads strategy and innovation on Microsoft’s Global Diversity & Inclusion team
Recognizing that Microsoft’s data-driven workforce would respond best to a science-based approach to allyship, Navas-Rosette’s team worked with New York University’s Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging and with the NeuroLeadership Institute to identify what prevents people from acting as allies and how to move them from fearful bystanding toward empathetic action. The institute partners with doctors, neuroscientists, researchers and educators who help create a scientific yet practical way to improve leadership effectiveness, sometimes hooking people up to various scans to watch where the blood flows in their brains and to measure cortisol and heartrates as they’re put into different situations.
Discourse about privilege can divide people and make them feel threatened by each other. And the brain processes social threats, such as exclusion and rejection, much the same way it processes physical pain, says Katherine Milan, the institute’s senior vice president of client experience and product.
So the group’s work connects well with Microsoft’s growth-mindset approach by emphasizing collaboration instead of competition, to lower the threat and encourage engagement, Milan says. While many allyship efforts urge people to muster up the courage to confront those who speak or act in a non-inclusive way, Microsoft’s program aims to create a shame-free learning atmosphere for everyone.
Katherine Milan, the NeuroLeadership Institute’s senior vice president of client experience and product
And Microsoft’s culture seems to be shifting since the first workshop in July 2019, with surveys indicating employees are feeling more safety and comfort in speaking up even when conversations are difficult, Milan says. But it’s a journey, she says.
“You can’t just take one workshop,” Milan says. “It’s a muscle that you stretch and grow and build every day, and you have to practice repeatedly.”
The pandemic has changed personal interactions in many ways, and some displaced teams have even managed to find greater unity by being more deliberate.
“At the office, there can be dozens of short interactions throughout the day, bumping into people in the halls and cafeteria and having quick conversations,” says Parul Manek, a director of program management for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud division. “That doesn’t happen now, so you have to be a more intentional ally. Yesterday I observed someone in a meeting who just didn’t seem like themselves, so I reached out afterward and discovered they had issues working from home and were overwhelmed, and I was able to help them with some strategies to cope.”
Parul Manek, a director of program management for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud division (Photo by Dan DeLong)
Manek became acutely aware of how it felt to be excluded when she moved with her parents to England from India. Since her family hadn’t had the privilege of learning English before immigrating, she felt she didn’t belong in her new home. New friends were intentional about helping her fit in, though, and now she’s spent a lifetime similarly on the lookout for anyone who might be struggling and in need of help.
Manek says she’s seen a clear impact in her work from Nadella’s focus on empathy, even though it’s not an obvious element in a company where employees are so focused on excellence. But she’s noticed that empathy encourages humility and understanding without judgment, which promotes personal connections and, accordingly, workplace collaboration.
*Due to COVID-19, Mr. Kringle is unable to greet children at the Macy’s flagship store in New York City. At some malls, Mr. Kringle must sit behind plexiglass to hear Christmas wishes. Mr. Kringle’s elves are carrying disinfectant wipes. Mr. Kringle’s elves are now called “Santa’s Sanitation Squad.” Mr. Kringle is still consulting virologists as to whether he can consume cookies and milk while in your home.
Like almost every other 2020 holiday, Christmas won’t be quite the same. But there’s one custom we can still count on: Santa and his sleigh will navigate from the North Pole to your rooftop to drop off your gifts (while he wears a face mask).
We know this thanks to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Spring, Colorado, NORAD keeps constant watch over U.S. and Canadian aerospace via global satellite and radar systems. And the same good people have monitored Santa’s journey every Christmas Eve since 1955.
Two U.S. service members field Christmas Eve phone calls from kids at Peterson Air Force Base in 2019. (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Jeff Fitzmorris/DVIDS)
On Dec. 24, NORAD will again offer its beloved Santa Tracker, revealing up-to-the-second whereabouts of Saint Nick and his sky-high reindeer team as they circle the planet. Anyone can follow the route via a special NORAD website that’s maintained by Microsoft engineers and hosted on Microsoft Azure.
The website also features games, holiday music, movies and more. It’s available in eight languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Chinese. In addition, NORAD will use its new, Santa-tracking app and its social media channels to post updates throughout the evening.
And for curious kids who need to know more than the ETA of Father Christmas, NORAD on Thursday launched a new chatbot to respond to timely questions, like: “Is there a big drum of hand sanitizer on board the sleigh?” Answer: “Santa is taking all of the necessary precautions to keep everyone safe as he delivers presents.” NORAD deployed the chatbot by using Azure Bot Service.
“It’s been a tough year and everyone’s looking for a bit of good news,” says NORAD spokesman Preston Schlachter. “We realize that. We want to offer a fun experience for everybody and maybe take their minds off what 2020 has been like.”
The soul of NORAD’s Santa Tracker has long been its Christmas Eve call center, a festive hub usually staffed by some 1,500 headset-wearing volunteers – a mix of civilians in holiday sweaters and service members in full camo.
Every Dec. 24 for years, the group has packed into several conference rooms at Peterson Air Force Base, filling two-hour shifts across a 20-hour day. The work is fast. Each volunteer typically fields about one call per minute from a child somewhere in the world anxious for Santa’s approach. Some volunteers know that excitement personally – as kids, they once called NORAD’s tracker hotline.
Santa-tracking volunteers staff NORAD’s call center on a recent Christmas Eve. This year, on-site volunteers will be fewer and all will be masked. (Photo by Dennis Carlyle/DVIDS)
To maintain safe distances this year, NORAD will host fewer call-center volunteers and wearing a mask will be mandatory, Schlachter says. Callers who can’t reach a live operator via 877-HI-NORAD (877-446-6723) will hear a recorded update on Santa’s location.
But for one long-time volunteer, Christmas won’t be the same unless he’s on the base, answering those urgent calls.
“I absolutely can’t miss it,” says Jim Jenista, a NORAD employee and former Navy pilot and bombardier who has spent nearly 20 Christmas Eves in the call center.
In fact, it has become a Jenista family tradition – and an occasion to dress for the moment.
Since the early 2000s, Jenista, his wife, Karen, and their six children have volunteered for the NORAD phone bank. They arrive in Santa hats and handmade T-shirts, each emblazoned with a specific reindeer. The kids are now grown and live far away. This year, it will just be Jenista and Karen bedecked in their “Cupid” and “Vixen” shirts.
Jim Jenista, right, and his wife, Karen, prepare for their annual night at NORAD’s Santa tracking operation. (Courtesy of Jim Jenista)
“It is so rewarding. That night embodies the innocence, the expectation and the excitement of the holiday and the giving season,” Jenista says. “It’s also the fastest two hours of your life.”
In many ways, Jenista represents NORAD’s unique duality: sober security meets joyful wonder.
The organization was built during the Cold War to help defend North America against missile strikes. Today, however, many kids know NORAD for its softer side: following and safeguarding Santa’s long ride.
Jenista once flew A-6 Intruders and F-14 Tomcats, was on duty at NORAD on 9/11, and he currently helps coordinate U.S. military training exercises. In his free time, however, he hosts a YouTube channel as “Grandpa Silly,” reading from children’s books in his animated style.
“Our motto at NORAD is, ‘We have the watch,’” Jenista says. “That means while you go about your life, just know that we’re here, ready to deter those who might want to do us harm.
“NORAD Tracks Santa is a unique opportunity to share additional mission information with the people who depend on us,” he adds. “We get to talk about radars and intercepts and infrared and satellites – all the equipment and procedures we have to protect the population.”
In both worlds, Jenista says, NORAD seeks to help people sleep better at night.
Jenista speaks with another young caller curious about Santa’s arrival time during a recent Christmas Eve. (Courtesy of Jim Jenista)
And there’s one more similarity between the two endeavors: Operating the Santa Tracker is also a year-round mission.
“It’s not something that just gets started and implemented in December,” says Schlachter, who leads NORAD’s preparation. “As soon as the program is over on Christmas, we are talking about lessons learned and how we can make changes for the following year.”
To sustain and continually reinvent its Santa Tracker, NORAD relies on a large roster of volunteers, from tech companies like Microsoft to local businesses in Colorado Springs that provide call center operators with coffee, water, sandwiches and snacks.
“All of our partners have approached NORAD wanting to be a part of the program, and they all provide those services gratis,” Schlachter says. “We could not have this program without their generosity.”
At Microsoft, more than 25 employees worked on the Santa Tracker website and chatbot throughout the year. That includes Azure and Bing engineers, plus engineers from the FastTrack for Azure team, a technical enablement program that helps with rapid design and deployment of cloud solutions.
In 2019, the Santa Tracker website racked up about 15 million pageviews.
The NORAD Santa Tracker website.
Earlier this year, many of those same employees were busy helping Microsoft customers and partners shift their companies to remote work. Against that pandemic backdrop, Microsoft engineers continued to collaborate with NORAD to update the website and build the chatbot, says Susan Sullivan, a Microsoft senior program manager in Azure engineering.
“The worry might have been: How does a program like this, not on people’s minds in March, April and May, get the traction it needs when everybody is totally distracted?” Sullivan says.
“But individuals saw the Santa Tracker program and enjoyed taking a deep breath of something fresh. It was a nice respite from all of the craziness going on,” she adds.
Sullivan leads Microsoft’s Santa Tracker efforts. That includes holding weekly meetings on Microsoft Teams with Schlachter and others at NORAD. Amid those months of planning and designing, news of the pandemic infused the team with extra urgency to deliver a website that was both memorable and fully reliable, Sullivan says.
It was as if they were protecting a precious piece of Christmas for kids around the world.
“There is an even bigger spirit behind the work this year,” Sullivan says. “I do imagine kids being more engaged online, more interested in the uplifting aspect of Christmas, and families taking the time to really make it special.
“Everything does feel like it’s more important this year,” she adds. “It feels like there’s a bigger opportunity to bring joy.”
Once the developers had created that simulation framework, the AI algorithm learns through trial and error as well as feedback from operators – a process called reinforcement learning. In the simulation, the AI solution can simulate a day’s run in a mere 30 seconds.
That means the AI solution has easily gone through more simulated runs than an operator could see in many lifetimes. And its computing power means it can come up with the right option far faster. Plus, it learned from the company’s most skilled operators and Cheetos experts, so it’s monitoring the fluctuations in quality and productivity from the highest level of experience.
The AI solution “could encapsulate the knowledge and skill of the best operators, then apply that through other facilities,” says Jayson Stemmler, a technical project manager at Neal Analytics who worked on the PepsiCo pilot project. “This solution reveals interactions and relationships that might not be intuitive to operators but that exist in the data. Without the manual measurement process, PepsiCo’s engineers are able to be more efficient with their time and focus on breakthrough innovation.”
A few bad Cheetos?
After the solution spent some time in its simulation proving ground, it was time to take it to a test plant in PepsiCo’s Plano facility to see how it did with the real thing, which means testing it with some imperfect Cheetos.
“To develop this technology, we need to be able to make product that’s not good, so the AI can learn to take the product back into spec,” says Sean Eichenlaub, a senior principal engineer at PepsiCo.
Personally, I don’t see how any Cheetos could be “not good,” but I understand PepsiCo is going for perfect.
With the computer vision system continually monitoring and sending data to the Project Bonsai solution, any variance from that ideal can be fixed ASAP.
“With faster corrections, we can avoid the potential issues of going out of spec, such as having to discard product, or problems with packaging and waste,” Eichenlaub says.
I, for one, am all for a bag full of perfect Cheetos. And while the company prepares to use this Project Bonsai solution at a production plant, it’s also looking into using it with other Frito-Lay products, including the even-more-complex tortilla chip.
Leah Culler edits Microsoft’s AI Blog for Business & Technology.
“Initially, there was a fear among healthcare staff that these would replace face-to-face meetings, but if we can use digital and virtual as a precursor to in-person sessions, we make the in-person sessions so much richer and more valuable.”
The success of this remote provision of healthcare has led the Trust to roll this out across the network and use the technology in other fields.
Also, neonatal and maternity units across the UK are using a service called BadgerNet that enables midwives to record notes on maternity patients in real-time, whether they are in the hospital, the community or at home.
Digital midwife Victoria Mustafa
“Previously, we had to write up our patient notes onto three separate systems,” says Victoria Mustafa, a digital midwife at Epsom and St. Helier NHS Trust. “Through recording notes in real-time, tasks that previously took us an hour now take us just five minutes. It’s really been transformational for our team. As we have the woman’s whole journey at our fingertips, from any location, at any time, the level of care we can offer to expectant and new mothers is exceptional.”
Mustafa says giving patient care teams a single view of maternity information has also allowed them to reduce the time new mothers stay in the hospital, freeing up beds and allowing nurses to spend more time with patients who need extra care. She estimates the BadgerNet system is saving the Trust around £100,000 a year through efficiencies.
In Denmark, Emergency Medical Service Copenhagen has been using Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot service to help screen people for potential COVID-19 infection and treatment. It is also being used to arrange an average of 90.000 tests a day at national level.
Powered by Microsoft Azure, the service is now developing artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technology to help organizations create their own bots — in which the data is owned and solely accessible by the organization — to respond to inquiries and free up doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals so they can provide critical care to patients who need it. Since March, health organizations have created 2,311 COVID-19 self-assessment bots based on the Microsoft Healthcare bot service, reaching 75 million individuals.
Freddy Lippert, CEO of Emergency Medical Services Copenhagen
“Our emergency hotline is almost back to normal, as with the help of the bot, most inquiries are routed to other solutions and the respective departments taking pressure off our nurses and freeing up valuable time,“ says Freddy Lippert, CEO, Copenhagen Emergency Medical Service. He adds: “We can translate the benefits into many other areas of emergency care. If we bring AI into the interviews we have with patients calling our emergency number and combine it with the data we already have, such as medication, previous admission, diagnosis, etc., the quality of the consultation goes up, allowing us to do a risk profile for the patient in no time. It will revolutionize dispatch systems and decision-supporting systems – with only 90 seconds to dispatch the right resource, having all the data at hand significantly supports the team to make the right decision.”
The healthcare chatbot brought relief to the team of Emergency Medical Services Copenhagen
This message is echoed globally, as healthcare providers across the world are using data to help make life-saving decisions. St. Luke‘s University Health Network in the U.S. launched several new applications, including Teams, Power BI and Dynamics 365 that focus on connecting the clinician to the patient. This has involved collecting data from patients of COVID-19 to determine what the patient volumes are, and how quickly they are increasing, so management can pull the right resources together across the network to manage patient spikes. This solution gives clinicians the necessary patient data at their fingertips to help them make more informed decisions with patients and their families.
Acute care nurse practitioner Charles Sonday
“Technology supports clinicians to improve, innovate and accelerate evidence-based medicine,” says Charles Sonday, acute care nurse practitioner and network medical director of provider informatics, St. Luke‘s University Health Network. “This is about breaking down barriers to knowledge, data and resources, while always keeping the patient at the center of health care innovation.”
In this atypical year, many of us have discovered a new sense of appreciation for our computers as critical tools to get work done. Now more than ever, we are all looking for new ways to be productive on our laptops and desktops. At Microsoft, we are committed to delivering great Microsoft 365 experiences that help our customers work easier and faster on their favorite devices. With this in mind, we want to share some of the latest Microsoft 365 innovations that can make you even more productive on a Mac.
Universal app support for Macs with M1 is here
We are excited to announce that starting today we are releasing new versions of many of our Microsoft 365 for Mac apps that run natively on Macs with M1. This means that now our core flagship Office apps—Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote—will run faster and take full advantage of the performance improvements on new Macs, making you even more productive on the latest MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The new Office apps are Universal, so they will continue to run great on Macs with Intel processors. The apps are not only speedy, but they also look fantastic as they have been redesigned to match the new look of macOS Big Sur. Here is a peek at Outlook on the new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
If you have automatic updates turned on, you will start to receive these updates today. Otherwise, you can go to the Mac App Store and click the Updates tab, or with Microsoft AutoUpdate, you can go to your Office app’s Help menu and choose Check for Updates. Plus, find more commonly asked questions on our support page.
With more than 115M daily active users, Teams has become a critical part of the way many people are navigating the current situation. Teams allows you to meet, chat, call, and collaborate all in a single app. And, when people work in Teams, they all get the full breadth and depth of Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams is currently available in Rosetta emulation mode on Macs with M1 and the browser. We are working on universal app support for M1 Macs and will share more news as our work progresses. Download the Teams app for your Mac here now.
Microsoft 365 experiences made for Mac
Over the past months, we have redesigned the experiences in our flagship apps for Mac with a focus on simplicity to improve ease of use. The new Outlook for Mac looks great with a redesign that matches the new look of macOS Big Sur, and an updated Office Start experience for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for Mac that incorporates the Fluent UI design system. This means that Microsoft 365 apps enable you to be more focused with immersive experiences that are easier to use right from the first screen. Experiences that feel both unmistakably Microsoft 365 and include elements that are native to the look of macOS so they are also unmistakably made for Mac. The new Office Start experience will be available next month.
We continue to learn how customers want to use our products through continued feedback. So, thank you to each and every one of you who have shared your experiences with us. Today we are pleased to announce support for iCloud accounts in the new Outlook for Mac. This will enable you to organize work and personal emails, contacts, and calendars together in one app so it is easier for you to stay connected to what matters. We will start to roll this out using the new Outlook for Mac in the coming weeks.
Work your way
Another area of focus is to make our Microsoft 365 apps work the way you do. Through many new innovations on our Mac apps, our goal is to help you get work done in more simple and intuitive ways.
Tell Me is a search box that quickly gets you to the Office tools you need or actions you want to take by just typing what you are looking for in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote for Mac. Microsoft Search in the new Outlook for Mac allows you to type out your query or question using language you use every day to find emails, events, and files—no fancy syntax needed. These capabilities help simplify how you use Microsoft 365 apps to achieve more and are now available to all Mac users.
A commonly used productivity hack is to use your phone to capture images of important information you want to work on. With Data from Picture, you can take a photo of a table directly on your iPhone and turn it into data you can edit in Excel for Mac. This handy new feature uses Continuity Camera on your Mac and is also available now.
Voice input is a growing part of our digital lives and can be a great way to simplify your workflow. A new dictation toolbar with voice commands for creating content with your voice is coming to Word and Outlook for Mac. In addition, to help you check spelling, correct grammar, and get writing style suggestions, we will enable Microsoft Editor in Word for Mac. We plan to make these updates available to customers with access to Microsoft 365 for Insiders in early 2021.
New ways to work together
The shift to remote work highlights the need for teams to collaborate with agility, while ensuring sensitive data stays secure and meets compliance requirements. Our Microsoft 365 app teams have been busy getting modern collaboration and compliance capabilities ready so you can work from home more effectively on your Mac.
Sharing your calendars in Outlook with your co-workers helps you manage your time more efficiently. By giving access to participants’ calendars through simplified permissions, planning meetings and events is quick and easy. Based on the Microsoft sync technology and connected architecture, Outlook can provide reliable and faster synchronization of calendar events across Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, and Web, keeping you on track of your time your way. The new Outlook for Mac will support shared calendars for customers subscribed to the Office Insider Mac Beta Channel in the first months of next year.
When creating new content as a team, the ability to collaborate around documents and presentations becomes especially valuable when your team is not in the same location. The new modern commenting experience in Word for Mac enables a contextual view of comments that allows you to focus on your content without missing active comments by contributors and reviewers. Modern commenting also includes improved @mentions in PowerPoint and Word for Mac that make it easier to reply to comments. The new @mentions experience is available now in PowerPoint for enterprise customers. Modern commenting for Word is in the Office Insider Beta Channel now and coming to Current Channel Preview in February 2021.
Have you ever collaborated with someone in a worksheet and suddenly your view changes and you are unable to finish your work? This can often happen when an active collaborator adds filters or sorts the data in a table of a shared worksheet. Excel sheet view is a new way to create customized views to sort and filter your data without disrupting what others see. This capability is an example of customer-driven product improvement and is now available on Excel for Mac.
Last, but certainly not least, Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels allow you to classify and protect your organization’s data with minimal effort through manual and automatic content labeling. Manual labeling is available on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook for Mac. Automatic labeling is coming to these same apps for Microsoft 365 E5 customers in early 2021.
We are excited about the Microsoft 365 innovations we are delivering for our Mac user community and would love to hear your feedback about your experience using our latest features. If you want to try out new Office features first and make a difference in the products you use every day, please join the Office Insiders and check out the Mac channels.
Before COVID-19 disrupted the education journeys of more than 1.5 billion students around the world, higher education institutions were already exploring ways to grow enrollment, reach more students, and better engage the “digital natives” of Generation Z. Though the need to move online created challenges, it also inspired solutions that will have long-lasting effects on higher education. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), educators believe the pandemic has accelerated the evolution of virtual education by ten years. “We’ve been entering a new paradigm for the last decade and COVID-19 has just expedited this progress. It provided gasoline to trends that were already underway,” said Michael Horn, co-founder of Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
In an effort to better understand the impacts of the current dynamics on higher education institutions, staff, faculty, and students, Microsoft Education partnered with the EIU on a new paper: “Bridging the Digital Divide to Engage Students in Higher Education.” The EIU conducted surveys and interviews with faculty and students in the US, UK, Australia, and Germany, as well as with global higher education experts.
Insights indicate that rather than being a short-term solution, remote and hybrid learning are likely to be a future operating model for many higher education institutions alongside on-campus programs. Though more than 80 percent of faculty members surveyed said that less than half of their institution’s courses were online prior to the pandemic, one-third of them report that their institution will permanently add online options for all or most courses moving forward. The expanded availability of virtual learning will require increased investments in technology and additional training for faculty, but these investments, along with more flexible learning programs, could make higher education more accessible and equitable, with learning supported by technology that addresses the needs of diverse learners and flexible programs with schedules that work for students with other obligations. The increased opportunity for remote attendance will serve to broaden institutions’ geographic reach as well, drawing students to the most innovative programs rather than simply the one closest to home.
There is a difference in perspective between faculty and students on preparedness for remote learning. While 85 percent of faculty members surveyed reported that they felt prepared to meet student needs effectively with the resources they had available, more than 60 percent of students shared that they did not feel mentally or academically prepared for the academic year of fall 2020. And almost half of students claim the pandemic has worsened their ability to remain focused and engaged.
Education experts say that the pandemic has caused students to be stressed, anxious, financially challenged, and socially isolated. According to a study carried out by Hope College in July 2020, 60 percent of the 38,000 students surveyed reported experiencing basic needs insecurity.
Douglas Harris, non-resident Senior Fellow, Brown Center on Education Policy said, “The current situation is pushing faculty to realize that at the very least, students are not going to be able to learn in their class if they’re suffering in other ways.”
John Hattie, Professor and Director of Melbourne Education Research Institute, pointed to the sense of isolation and lack of social connection that students are feeling: “One of the biggest factors that influences student engagement and performance is their sense of belonging in their higher education experience. This is what has suffered the most as a result of COVID-19. They no longer have the same sense of belonging that they used to have.”
To foster a greater sense of connection, experts recommend that instructors go beyond simply delivering lectures online, and instead create more opportunities for active learning and engagement. Innovative schools like St. Edward’s University already use virtual anatomy, virtual internships, virtual counselling, and virtual student teaching, says Dr. Rebecca Frost Davis, Associate Vice President of St. Edward’s University. One teacher even set up a virtual crime scene using 3D cameras, allowing students to go places they couldn’t normally go. “The students who had done the simulation first did better because they weren’t distracted by things when they were learning,” says Dr. Davis.
Collaboration tools like Education Insights in Microsoft Teams can help instructors identify students’ needs and adapt their material for maximum impact. Dr. David Kellerman of the University of New South Wales says, “Insights for classroom Teams… has helped me connect with struggling students on a personal level, and to understand the broader trends in my classroom. Every teacher, professor or instructor on Teams has something to learn from Insights.”
Additionally, social activities such as orientations, graduations, and other traditions can be presented virtually to create more opportunities for socialization and connection. Resources such as this e-book and virtual graduation toolkit have ideas and tips for bringing events online. Beyond webcams and chat rooms, there are other creative ways to reimagine in-person gatherings, including building virtual versions of campuses in Minecraft to host in-game meetups and ceremonies.
Today’s higher education students are primarily Generation Z, a generation that is comfortable with technology and who expect it to be a part of their learning experiences—93 percent believe that remote learning will benefit their education. But they are also very clear about what they are looking for: they want their institutions to put their needs first by providing physical and virtual security, and they want to learn skills that will help them succeed in work and in life. “There is a push for higher education in the United States particularly to show greater value and a return on investment. As a result, students are looking for the best value in terms of what they are getting from their higher education and what they will be able to do in the workforce,” says Dr. Stella L. Smith, Associate Director, MACH III Center, Prairie View A&M University.
As higher education leaders work with instructional designers and professors to reimagine courses and fine-tune pedagogy, students and faculty agree that the pandemic is transforming higher education. With cooperation and creativity, this accelerated evolution can enhance student experiences through integration of emerging technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality, and create new revenue opportunities for colleges and universities as they develop innovative options for students to pursue lifelong learning with flexible course schedules or micro-masters from different higher education institutions.
Microsoft’s mission to help every person and organization on the planet achieve more has never been more relevant as people search for new ways to be productive from anywhere. To this end, the Surface team has worked tirelessly to build a diverse set of devices to suit a variety of tasks and workstyles. Just this year, we’ve introduced Surface Book 3, Surface Go 2, Surface Laptop Go, a new Surface Pro X and of course, our first dual-screen device, Surface Duo.
Since introducing Surface Duo in August 2020, people have asked when we would make this product available outside of the US. We’re pleased to share that in early 2021, we’ll be offering Surface Duo in Canada, United Kingdom, France and Germany. We’re excited to share more information at the beginning of 2021, so stay tuned for more.
New enhancements to Microsoft Teams coming in the first half of 2021.
With Surface Duo, we set out to unlock new levels of mobile productivity and reduce the need to reach for a larger screen to complete quick productivity tasks. With enhanced Microsoft 365 apps, productivity can take place across two distinct screens, enabling true multi-tasking. Whether viewing your Outlook Mail and Calendar side-by-side or seeing your colleagues and the presentation simultaneously on Teams, the magic of Surface Duo is the intersection of hardware and software in the palm of your hand.
There is incredible potential in this new device category to push the boundaries of productivity and creativity on a mobile device. We find inspiration in all the ways Surface Duo has sparked the imaginations of our customers and partners. It’s fantastic to see just how this product has unlocked new ways to get things done, and we are honored to see TIME and others recognize Surface Duo as one of the best inventions of 2020. Customers have built productivity workflows with Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook, OneDrive, Teams and Office. We’ve also heard from customers who have built their own App Groups to immerse themselves in their passions. View your ESPN Fantasy sports teams while simultaneously tracking scores in the NFL app, or take that Duolingo course while jotting down common phrases in Microsoft OneNote. We’ve heard from customers who open their Surface Duo as soon as they get in their car, with Spotify playing on one screen while Google Maps guides them to their destination on the other. There are numerous possibilities for personalizing your Surface Duo experience. We encourage you to explore these scenarios or create your own.
Enhanced TikTok app available now in the Google Play store.
Customers love what Surface Duo allows them to accomplish with existing applications, and our partners are doing amazing work to optimize their experiences across two screens. At launch, we showcased Amazon Kindle and the incredible work they’ve done to allow you to read a book like a book on Surface Duo. Spotify has embraced dual-screen capabilities to improve music discovery. We’re excited to share that TikTok has released an enhanced app that brings entirely new experiences that light up on Surface Duo. Optimized for two screens, you can discover videos customized for you while, at the same time, exploring relevant hashtags, the latest trends and more.
New enhanced app experiences are just one way in which Surface Duo keeps getting better and better.
Over these past few months, we’ve delivered app enhancements, software and Android security updates, and improvements to the Android platform at-large. Microsoft is the third-largest Android ISV in the world[1], and we’re proud of what we’ve been able to deliver since August. Customers have enjoyed hundreds of improvements to our first-party Android apps, benefiting anyone using Microsoft applications on Android. This ensures a healthy future for this dual-screen category and a stream of improved, delightful experiences for Surface Duo customers.
We love hearing from you and working with you to chart the course for Surface Duo. As we reflect on this past year and look ahead to the next, we see even more opportunity, and we’re excited to see how you bring your own experiences to life with Surface Duo.
On behalf of the entire Surface team, we wish you happy holidays and a happy, healthy new year.
