July 18, 2006
Microsoft's Showing Strong Interest In VoIP
Microsoft is showing its intense interest in VoIP lately by partnering up with not just Nortel but Yahoo as well.
Microsoft and Nortel are working on a new project focusing on unified communications, which the MS press release says includes e-mail, IM (Instant Messaging), telephony, and multimedia conferencing. Take the latter to mean WoIP - Video as well as Voice over IP.
Nortel has proven itself to be an innovator in telephony hardware and software in the past. This is also a great step forward for Microsoft in the VoIP market. Can they do the unthinkable and make this unified communications thing open? You never know.
They're at least trying to unify MSN Messenger IM with Yahoo! Messenger - both of which now have VoIP capabilities - in a new alliance. Between the two IMs, that's about 350 million users. Now what's the chances that they'll switch to SIP, thus making themselves compatible with true VoIP IMs such as Gizmo Project and Sightspeed? [Note: despite an earlier post about finding VoIP plans, Sightspeed is in fact SIP-based.]
Additional sources: Microsoft [via FierceVoIP].
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