Microsoft Teams might be launching across the world today, but the app started off on a fruit farm in Hawaii and a hotel room in Las Vegas. These unconventional work locations formed the foundations for the Microsoft Teams chat app that thousands of businesses will start using this week. “We really wanted to experience being close together and get the team much more close-knit so that we could model how we really make Teams more close-knit in software,” explains Brian MacDonald, head of Microsoft Teams, in an interview with The Verge.

Brian MacDonald worked on the original version of Microsoft’s Outlook email app, and was tasked with creating a concept for the company’s new chat software. Microsoft had tried, years ago, to convince…

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