August 18, 2021 Microsoft has hired former Uber Chief Product Officer Manik Gupta to give its Teams consumer business a fresh boost. Gupta will serve as the new corporate vice president for Teams Consumer, Skype and GroupMe, reporting directly to Jeff Teper, corporate vice president of Microsoft 365 Collaboration.

Gupta will begin on August 30 and will be based in the Bay Area, according to an internal memo from Teper announcing Gupta’s appointment.

In addition to his previous role at Uber, which ended in 2020, Gupta also worked for Google for seven years until 2015, when he was Director PM for Google Maps, working as an early-stage investor and adviser to technology companies.

Microsoft is in the process of integrating a Teams Chat button into the taskbar of its upcoming Windows 11 operating system to encourage more Teams users to try out the Teams consumer features that the tech giant introduced last May.

The Teams Chat button will replace the Skype Meet Now button that Microsoft added to the Windows 10 taskbar. Company officials said that users of Windows 10, Meet Now using Skype will continue to be available as long as Windows 10 is supported, or at least until 2025.

Microsoft officials have said that Skype will not be removed anytime soon, but have not given many details about Skype’s role as Teams Consumer grows in share.

Microsoft’s Teams Consumer, also known as “Teams for Life” is part of the tech giant’s overall consumer growth. Officials recently announced that Teams now has 250 million monthly active users, but did not provide specific information on how many of them work with Teams consumer features.

For more information, read the original story in ZDNet.