Well, I'm heading to the AZ Tech Council's Byte Night this evening. Steve Ballmer is the keynote and I'll be anxiously awaiting his "victory lap" as Microsoft begins their domination of corporate voice communications…
Microsoft announced last week that they intend to make billions on the corporate transition from legacy voice networks to VoIP. Of course the main selling points were not quality, extensibility or interoperability… but lots and lots of office integration.
Given that office (and outlook) macros/embeded vbscript are a hackers best friend… how many corporations are going to plug MS in as thier communicaitons backbone? I can not wait for the first virus that results in a IM/Voice/Video session being set up with every person in the Global Address List.
In all seriousness, Microsoft (Avaya, Nortel, etal.) are again missing the point. Voice over IP and the subsequent internet standard protocols for session creation enable multi-vendor environments to an extent that was just not feasible with traditional telephony. Why would anyone select a closed, non-open standards, vertical solution that only fully works with itself?