Microsoft's Unified Theory of Conquest

I have now read about 15 reviews of Microsoft’s big Unified Collaboration press event, including the ones from Elliot Gold and company. It seems, from everyone’s description, to be classic Microsoft – all style and no substance. This is exactly what they did in the CRM market a few years back. They come out and announce their vision, freezing the market while everyone stands around and waits to see what they’ll come out with. It could be grand. Or it could be much ado about nothing.

On one hand, they seem to have finally found a unified vision of what they’d like to accomplish. They now control business desktop software. They want to control business communications. They are going to start where business desktop software meets business communications – rich-media desktop collaboration. Makes sense to me.

But, as with most interesting things in life, the devil is in the details. And Microsoft knows that they’re going to have to find some partners to bring this vision to life. Specifically, big telecom infrastructure partners like Siemens and Cisco and Polycom. They can do the software and server stuff, but they still need the pipe layers to get the rich media (read audio) to the desktop. There are a lot of things/relationships/partnerships that could go sour in there.

Also, they’ll be under fire from the consumer (read Skype and Vonage) side of the telecom house. They’ll have to fend them off while they’re realizing this vision.

As for business conferencing, it’s been my experience that businesses are very practical. They’ll use whatever tool helps them to achieve their own strategic goals. While Microsoft may want to “give away” desktop collaboration in order to maintain their dominance in that space, businesses will stick to methods that help them achieve successful communications and successful meetings.

I didn’t see or hear anything in the MS announcement that says that they can do that better than existing conferencing/collaboration service providers. Cheaper, maybe. Lots of bells and whistles, certainly. Actually more productive – hmmmm, I wonder.

I certainly believe that the market will continue its move toward verticalization - with the mass-market, low-hanging (and low-margin) conferences handled internally on hosted equipment. IP and VoIP will help to drive this. But specialized verticals will continue to exist. The need for publicly attended webinars will continue. The need for large mixed media IR calls will continue. The need for instantaneous, right-now-or-never group calls will continue. The expanding roll of wireless will continue.

We’re nine (9) years into the era of the CPE on-premise collaboration server era (starting in 1997). Overall minutes of conferencing use have continued to grow dramatically (while margins have shrunk). Over that timeframe, end-user systems have account for an average of 28% of all ports shipped (29.8% in 2005, down 15% from 2004). This tells me that businesses are continuing to outsource their collaboration.

MS says that is all going to change and that they’ll enable that change with LCS and Communicator. Maybe. But it’s further than 3-5 years. LCS takes a literal “collection” of MS server applications installed in order to use it, and Communicator requires LCS. It’s sort of an all-or-nothing proposition.

Collaboration is about working together to achieve a goal. “Working together” is not something that MS gets accused of very often. And I am not a MS basher. I like my Windows machine and my Office application. But I mostly like them because there is no compelling alternative.

I think that we (the collaboration industry) provide a compelling productivity and economic alternative to MS’s new unified “vision” of the future of business communications.