My eye was caught by this quote over at Corante from Paul Haverstock, Architect, Real-Time Collaboration Business Unit at Microsoft:
RTC Vision: to enable information workers to work together in real-time to solve business problems more effectively and rapidly by providing software and services that provide
* presence-based multi-modal collaboration, in context, with seamless transition to non-real-time [slow-time]
* easy to use integrated contextual extensible end user experience
* a server-service continuum providing universal availability
* servers integrated seamlessly...
* enable same place, remote attendee, and mixed collaboration
[...]
Q: SIP/Simple
Paul: Yes, Microsoft has built on SIP/Simple, and we are committed to moving forward with it.
Now he doesn't mention voice explicitly, but it's clear that voice is part of the plan. Just look at first generation tools like NetMeeting. I can tell you now that the telco I'm sitting in isn't even beginning to see this for what it really is: a pitch to replace telephony as current performed. Goodbye clunky conference calls. Goodbye unusable voicemail systems. Goodbye voice service revenues.
People often say that voice calling is just an application that runs on a general-purpose packet transport. But from Microsoft's perspective they're wrong. Voice isn't even an application -- it's just a feature of a collaboration suite. The exchange of presence data and synchronization of a collaboration over time is where all the action is. Talk of creating business advantage in legacy telcos by integrating wireline and wireless PSTN service is hilariously naive in the face of the challenge that Microsoft presents.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:30 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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