And the future is here
The 5G era will bring unprecedented and transformative opportunities across industries. As a leader in enterprise mobility, T-Mobile for Business experts weigh in on how next-gen networks are accelerating breakthrough innovations.
During this unprecedented time when more people than ever are working from home, the response to the coronavirus has also become a grand socioeconomic experiment.
Developers for major technology firms are learning to cope with overcrowded last-mile connections as they commit code remotely. Finance professionals are installing enterprise networking at home, juggling calls to support lines in corporate IT and private ISPs as they get up and running. Households are learning to balance the shared networking needs of dual working parents coming to grips with teleconferencing and multiple children experiencing distance learning for the first time, under the same roof. As we integrate our home and work lives like never before, connectivity and mobility are proving essential, letting us work and learn wherever and whenever — trends that are likely to define the future of work.
According to a September 2019 Bureau of Labor Statistics report, only a small percentage of U.S. workers — just 2 percent — had telecommuted full-time the previous year (almost 24 percent, according to the BLS, worked at home occasionally). Mostly professionals, ranging from developers and accountants to project managers and writers, this small group has become the vanguard for a much larger transition.
Acting out of caution or in compliance with shelter-in-place orders, 88 percent of HR executives responding to a Gartner survey in March reported encouraging or requiring employees to work from home as part of their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The response to this pandemic represents, according to a McKinsey report released in March, “an imminent restructuring of the global economic order,” rapidly accelerating a nascent transition towards flexible work and telecommuting on a large scale, and in the process reshaping the ways many of us work and live, in unforeseen ways.
“CIOs will have to continue thinking about how to help employees and customers weather the crisis and adapt to new ways of working and engaging with products and services.”
As millions more Americans now work from home, broadband usage has spiked, with major providers reporting data traffic up more than 30 percent since March 1 of this year. ISPs in major municipalities have so far been up to the challenge, with some local slowdowns, but by and large providers have responded by eliminating data caps and raising speeds in order to better serve business customers working from home.
Categories: Business, Business/Marketing, Economics, Economy, Future, Microsoft, Self help, The Muslim Times
But, what happens to the other half of the world which is not so developed nor the citizens of the developing world have access to this kind of technology?
As it is, the children of this world (who are in the majority), are missing out on their education due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The gap between the haves and the have-nots will increase even more. What happens then….? How do they catch up with this transformation to make their lives better and earn a decent living?
Places, like the country I live in where even electricity leaves a lot to be desired let alone affordable access to the internet and access to devices that use it.
When New York City’s education department ordered teachers to stop using Zoom videoconferencing for classes in April, because of security concerns, Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.27% seized the moment.
A team of 50 Microsoft staffers worked around the clock with administrators and teachers across New York’s school district, the nation’s largest, to convert them to Microsoft Teams, the company’s rival conferencing and collaboration software. Microsoft also gave the district expedited access to features that made Zoom so instantly popular, such as the ability to show more people on the screen at once and a raise-your-hand button.
Microsoft counted more than 110,000 Teams users inside the district a month later, when the department allowed Zoom access again.
The pandemic has supercharged a battle over the future of business computing, pitting Microsoft against a growing list of rivals. More is at stake than chatting over video calls. Chief Executive Satya Nadella has hailed Teams as critical to Microsoft’s future, in essence, a new operating system that would serve as a hub for the company’s more famous products such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Years of market-share jockeying have been compressed into months with so many white-collar workers operating from home. Tens of millions of additional people are now using Teams and other products from companies including Zoom Video Communications Inc., Slack Technologies Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-aims-to-dominate-technology-at-work-starting-with-those-video-calls-11591108757?mod=hp_lead_pos5