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As part of Microsoft’s UC strategy, the company is introducing several endpoints—aka phones—which I wrote about in an in-depth article, entitled “Microsoft’s Unified Communications Strategy and Office Communicator Enabled Devices”. In the article, I and my co-author and colleague, Peter Santeusanio (okay, Peter did most of the work), note that Microsoft has succeeded in reaching one of their main goals—to create a new user experience. Microsoft has a bunch of really smart guys working on the project, including Dawson Yee, who runs the program, and Gurdeep Singh Pall, the visionary for the development team. While I question some of their decisions, they have certainly changed the way we contact one another.

Microsoft is introducing several new endpoints, including Tanjay, Catalina, and Orca. Tanjay runs WinCE and has a “lightweight” Microsoft Office Communicator client inside of it, allowing it to incorporate a user’s presence information and take advantage of Communicator’s capabilities. Tanjay has a modern look that most people either love or hate—I like the “Bang & Olufsen” style; Peter, well, he feels differently. Tanjay operates like a regular phone, with a keypad, handset, built-in speaker phone, and a combination of hard keys and a touch-sensitive display, but offers much more functionality, such as presence awareness, message and calendar displays, call handling rules, etc.

The Catalina is a USB phone that makes me scratch my head for one main reason: While it has no display (which I can deal with), it also has no keypad (which I can’t deal with). This may be OK for phones in the future (seven to 10 years out), but it’s hard to believe that over the next one to three years, people will be okay with that. I question how long it will take for people to give up dialing a number on a phone’s keypad to make a call. Catalina appears to have jumped a few generations, but the market expects a more gradual evolution.

Several factors influenced Microsoft’s design decision. I applaud Microsoft’s philosophy that we should connect to a person, not simply dial a number and hope someone answers at the other end. This is consistent with Microsoft’s whole approach to UC—check the presence of the person you want to communicate with and act accordingly. This is key for gaining the improved productivity and ROI that investments in UC require.

In addition to the philosophical rationale, Catalina is a USB device and is dependent on the PC to operate; the phone won’t work if the PC is turned off or locked-up. Microsoft doesn’t want users to try to make a call from a device connected to a PC that isn’t turned on or operating, and then blame the phone for not working. Moreover, the current release of Office Communicator doesn’t support DTMF signals from the phone—remember, the phone was specifically designed without this capability so users can connect to a person, rather than just dialing a number. Microsoft is expected to add DTMF support in the next release of Office Communicator and OCS.

For the most part, I get where Microsoft is coming from regarding these new endpoints. There’s one, however, that I just don’t get. In recent presentations, Microsoft has been demo’ing a USB wireless device, Orca, touting its mobility capabilities and enhanced features such as subject field display. What Microsoft fails to point out, however, is that the Orca phone has no keypad—that’s right, you can’t make calls from the device. Phone calls can only be made from the Office Communicator client on the PC. Orca is a mobile wireless device, but only for calls placed within arm’s length of the user’s PC. The lack of a key pad would be fine if the device offered speech recognition, but it doesn’t. In short, Orca is a really cool device, but missing a very critical component.

Bottom line: Microsoft wants to change the way we communicate, and it is headed in the right direction. But, I think the company evolved its endpoints several generations beyond what the market is ready for today. What do you think? Drop me a note at jburton@ctlink.com or here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Jim Burton
CT-Link and UCStrategies.com

Posted in User Devices, Market Trends, Jim Burton, Unified Communications |

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