Most of your interactions with Microsoft software probably aren’t fun.
The company is best known for is business tools, like Microsoft Word and Excel, which are heavily geared toward creating documents and tinkering with numbers. But Microsoft has noticed that the way people communicate is changing. Conversations are more informal, shorter, and don’t always include words.
Brian MacDonald, who leads Microsoft’s office instant messaging service, Teams, says that instant messaging has allowed a new form of communication at work that borrows heavily from the culture of visual communication between friends and family.
“A key thing that I saw that kind of blew me away, and we changed a lot of our relative future investment on, was watching two Japanese people using Line [a popular instant messaging and phone app like WhatsApp] and communicating back and forth,” he says. “They’re having a conversation, but it was only in stickers. This wasn’t just like, “Oh, I’m sending you a laugh out loud cat sticker and you send me back a funny cow in a pasture. It was a conversation in stickers, and that just kind of blew my mind.”
That experience led MacDonald to start thinking about not only how people of different generations communicate differently, but also how the very idea of a message need no longer limited to the traditional keyboard. The transmission of information could be more amorphous and nuanced, since now you could send sentiment or subtext.
Eventually Microsoft decided to integrate Giphy, a website for searching and embedding GIFs, into its Teams product.
What’s most stark about this position is not that GIFs are being used in the workplace, but that Microsoft management is starting to situate enterprise products around cultural shifts in communication. Not only that, but MacDonald talks about GIFs as a place where Teams continues to invest its money, and spends more on GIFs than any other Microsoft product.
MacDonald says that he’s even realized how using nonverbal communication has influenced his own management style.
“Someone had typed up a new feature in one of the channels and it was just a horrible idea, something I truly hated,” he said. ” And you know, the classic Microsoft manager in me would want to have to type back, ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of in my life.'”
But instead of typing that out—or talking to the offending idea-haver in private—MacDonald chose to respond with a GIF.
“I did a search in Giphy for ‘No’s,’ and found a very prissy-looking Paris Hilton. And I put that in—no text—and sent that off. That person came by my desk later and says, ‘Gosh, I guess that really wasn’t the most thought through idea I’ve ever had in my life.'”
MacDonald said the resulting conversation was constructive, and the GIF was an effective way of diffusing a situation that might have led to contention in a previous paradigm within Microsoft.
“I really believe that the right investments in this kind of thing, it changes the interpersonal dynamics in the team, and they get closer,” he said.