NEW ORLEANS -- As the head of product for Facebook Messenger, Stan Chudnovsky is responsible for one of the most popular consumer products in the world. And yet, despite Messenger’s 1.2 billion monthly active users, he’s convinced that the app can continue its growth and add more functions if users and business embrace the app as a channel for business-to-consumer communications.

More than 60 million businesses have a presence on Facebook and at least 20 million are active on Messenger today, but Facebook continues to develop APIs, bots and other means to expedite connections between people and business, Chudnovsky said this week at the Collision conference. “We need to make it obvious that you can make a connection between people and businesses,” he said.

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Microsoft has for decades owned the intersection of collaboration, productivity and communication. However, as these services shifted to the cloud, it opened pathways for greater competition and flexibility in how organizations deployed applications for their workforce. Through G Suite, Google has stretched its resources and refined its family of apps for enterprise. The market is far from locked up, however, and analysts see at least some room for new players to emerge to challenge Google and Microsoft.

Could Amazon be the dark horse of enterprise collaboration? The company has a dominating position in cloud-based infrastructure, but its moves in the application market, albeit reserved, have yet to deliver similar impact. But what if it decides to focus on the collaboration market?

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Google continues to gain share in the education market at Apple’s expense. Chrome OS powers almost six out of 10 computing devices shipped to K-12 schools in the United States last year, according to a new report from research firm Futuresource Consulting.

[ Related: How Google overtook Apple in education ]

A growing number of inexpensive Chromebooks are making their way into U.S. classrooms while iOS -- and to a lesser extent MacOS -- devices are losing considerable share. Google’s Chrome OS comprised 58 percent of the 12.6 million units shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States last year, up from 50 percent in 2015 and 38 percent in 2014, according to the report.

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In less than a month since being sworn in as the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump has struck an emotional chord with tech companies, generating an unparalleled unifying force of opposition. The Trump administration’s executive order banning all people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from the entering the United States has created a rift between political and business interests, and one that many technology leaders consider a threat to their very existence.

A group of 127 technology companies last week filed an official friend-of-the-court brief in the lawsuits opposing the administration’s executive order in Minnesota and Washington. Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Snap and Twitter are all on board, but there are some conspicuous absences. Enterprise leaders IBM and Oracle haven’t joined the effort and all of the major telecom and cable providers have held out thus far as well. Amazon was asked not to join the filing because it’s a witness in the original lawsuit, according to Mashable.

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Google today bolstered its G Suite of productivity apps with new controls and tools for IT professionals. G Suite administrators now have more access to control security key enforcement, data control with data loss prevention (DLP) for Google Drive and Gmail, and additional insights by connecting Gmail to BigQuery, Google’s enterprise data warehouse designed to enable SQL queries, according to Google.

All of the changes, which are live today, are designed to elevate G Suite for the enterprise, especially among companies that need more confidence in the controls they can maintain over corporate data, according to Google.

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Facebook and Google closed out 2016 with a near duopoly in popular mobile applications. Both companies' mobile apps expanded their dominance of the 10 most popular mobile apps in the United States by significant margins, according to research from Nielsen. The media measurement firm calculated the average unique audiences for apps between January 2016 and October 2016 and provided year-over-year percentage changes for the 12-month period that ended in October. 

A Facebook and Google world ...

Facebook makes the two most popular mobile apps in the United States, Facebook and Facebook Messenger, as well as Instagram, the second-fastest growing app and the No. 8 most popular app, according to Nielsen. Facebook's average unique audience on mobile during the period grew 14 percent year-over-year to 146 million users. Facebook Messenger's audience grew 28 percent from the previous year to 129.7 million users. And Instagram jumped 36 percent from 2015 to 74.7 million users, Nielsen says.

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Social media had a big 2016. The medium and all of the leading social companies reached new heights of influence … but not without consequence. These are the stories that shaped the conversations and intrigue around social media during the past year.

Social media and the 2016 presidential election

The American public is still grappling with all the ways social media shaped the 2016 presidential campaign. However, CIO.com uncovered how social media brings out the darker side of digital introverts and often amplifies slanted views or political biases. During the final weeks of the 2016 presidential election it became quite clear that social could not be more powerful or dangerous.

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