dogloose

As Facebook chases business and enterprise customers[1] for its popular instant messaging and voice calling app WhatsApp, Microsoft[2] may have just beaten the social juggernaut to the punch. On Wednesday at an event in New Delhi, the Skype[3]-owner launched Kaizala[4], a messaging app designed to 'get work done' that has already garnered interest from several state governments and businesses in India.

A messaging app in 2017 ought to do more than just enable a few friends talk to each other. This is essentially the pitch of Kaizala, a made-in-India, mobile-only app available on Android[5] and iOS[6].

One of the major limitations of WhatsApp[7] has been its inability to handle large groups of people. First, there is a cap on how many people you could add to a group (256, to be precise). Then there is the major challenge of making any sense of the conversation that ensues between those tens of dozens of people.

In effect, Microsoft is tackling those two challenges. You can add as many people in the group as you want. If that wasn't enough, you can then add those groups to other groups, the company says. Second, the app offers the ability to create polls, documents, and surveys that could be created from within Kaizala app and then shared to the group to get response from the masses.

If these features don't strike a ring, it's because they are not really meant to make conversations between two friends any more convenient. And that remains one of the most interesting pitches of Kaizala, which had its origin as a Microsoft Garage[8] project. The company wants to serve to customers who...

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