Work-from-home tools such as home office chat will get really good as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Judged at end-2021. TRUE: evidence shows that remote-work tools (video conferencing, team chat, collaboration software such as Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams) improved substantially in features or quality and grew sharply in adoption during 2020–2021, and that the pandemic is credited for this. MOSTLY TRUE: large growth in adoption plus some product improvement, but the improvements were modest or gradual rather than a marked leap. MIXED: usage boomed but there is little evidence the tools themselves got better, or improvement is documented only for a few niche tools. MOSTLY FALSE: only small changes in adoption or quality. FALSE: remote-work tools did not improve or grow meaningfully in that period.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Nadella: Microsoft Teams Users Nearly Doubled Since Start of Pandemic -- Redmond Channel Partner Redmond Channel Partner (Scott Bekker's Blog) · 28 April 2021

   “The real-time collaboration platform with video meeting capabilities vaulted from about 20 million daily active users in November 2019 to 75 million DAU by mid-March of 2020.”

2. E2 Nadella: Microsoft Teams Users Nearly Doubled Since Start of Pandemic -- Redmond Channel Partner Redmond Channel Partner (Scott Bekker's Blog) · 28 April 2021

   “We are accelerating our innovation, adding over 300 features over the past year, including more than 100 new capabilities so far in 2021.”

3. E3 Microsoft Teams reaches 115 million DAU—plus, a new daily collaboration minutes metric for Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Copilot Blog Microsoft · 28 October 2020

   “This growth reflects the continued demand for Teams as the lifeline for remote and hybrid work and learning during the pandemic”

4. E4 Microsoft Annual Report 2021 Microsoft

   “providing technology and resources to our customers to help them do their best work while remote”

E1 reports that Microsoft Teams daily active users grew from about 20 million in November 2019 to 75 million by mid-March 2020. E3 credits this demand to remote and hybrid work during the pandemic. E2 quotes Microsoft saying it added over 300 features in the past year, which points to product improvement. However, all of this evidence covers a single tool, Microsoft Teams, and comes from Microsoft or reports of Microsoft's own statements. It does not show a broad, marked leap in quality across remote-work tools, so the evidence supports mostly true rather than fully true.