As the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is currently affecting businesses and individuals around the world pretty hard, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had an encouraging message to share with employees this weekend. The exec sent an email to all Microsoft employees on Saturday, before sharing it on LinkedIn in a post titled “Coming together to combat COVID-19.”
“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. Microsoft Teams is one of the apps seeing unprecedented growth this past couple of week, with now more than 44 million daily active users as of last week.
“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 explained. Microsoft technologies are also seeing increased usage in healthcare, with Nadella giving the examples of Swedish Hospital and other local hospitals in Seattle using Power Apps and Power BI to manage their bed count and inventory of critical supplies. Microsoft has also teamed up with the CDC to create a Coronavirus Self-Checker tool powered by Microsoft Azure.
We're partnering with the CDC to make its Coronavirus Self-Checker available to all. In addition to helping users self-assess using CDC's protocols, it will free healthcare workers to provide critical care to those who need it most. https://t.co/i9G9Et6DyS
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) March 23, 2020
“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.
If the effects of the coronavirus outbreak will likely be felt for many more months, Nadella concluded his email with a message of hope. “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 wrote. We invite you to read is full emails to employees on LinkedIn.
