Microsoft added the Teams “Together” feature during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to help employees feel as if they were working together in the same space. Now that everyone is mostly back to the office, the company is doing away with the feature and steering users toward Gallery. The move will reduce implementation complexity while boosting video quality, Microsoft explained in its Insider Blog.
Microsoft justified chopping Together mode by saying it “increases cognitive load for users” and “adds implementation complexity across platforms.” It also suggested that the mode can create a choppy video experience on mobile and other “modest” devices that lack processing power.
Gallery mode, by contrast, will allow “smoother video on modest devices,” via the adaptive video tile counts that prevent machine overload. It will also simplify the meeting interface and resources that can be put toward improvements like “super-resolution, denoising and improved color accuracy,” Microsoft said.
A big elephant in the room is that Teams is widely disliked by users. One of the main reasons often cited for that is performance issues and another is that Teams is overly complex. Ditching Together could help with both of those issues, provided Microsoft redirects resources toward making the “foundational video improvements” that it’s promising.