Microsoft decided to improve the memory management of Teams, its collaboration software.
Microsoft Teams, like other videoconferencing services has experienced a real explosion in the number of users over the course of 2020. Obviously the coronavirus has had a lot to do with this, but the truth is that both online meetings between family and friends, as well as the huge advances in the field of teleworking that seem to have come to stay, tell us of a future in which we will continue to use these services. Perhaps not as frequently as today, but certainly more so than in the past.
Their success, however, has also meant that these services have come under enormous scrutiny from the community, which has led to situations such as Zoom, which instead of being able to celebrate its 2020 numbers, has had to spend much of the past year resolving its many problems and trying to clean up its image a bit. The situation of Microsoft Teams is not remotely comparable, that should be made clear, but the truth is that Microsoft’s service has also received some criticism, most of them related to resource consumption.
We are talking about the RAM memory of laptop and desktop systems (it does not seem to affect the Android and iOS versions), and according to what can be read in the Microsoft Teams feedback forum, there are users who see the software RAM use exceeds 1GB (in the first comments we can see the case of a user in which 1.6GB were reached).
If you have opened the Microsoft Teams feedback page you may not have noticed a detail, because it is not too obvious… until you see it. I’m referring to the WORKING ON IT label, highlighted in green and dated just yesterday, January 26.
In other words, Microsoft has acknowledged receipt of this problem and, as far as we can deduce, has either started working on it or has added it to the to-do list. Microsoft has acknowledged receipt and is already (or will be) working on it.
How are they going to solve it? When will the changes arrive? At the moment none of the questions about it has an answer, we only have the acknowledgement from Microsoft that they have to do something about the memory consumption of Microsoft Teams, something quite important in desktop systems, but that becomes even more important if we talk about laptops in mobility scenarios, since a higher RAM consumption translates into a higher power consumption and, therefore, a shorter battery life.