Microsoft to Unveil Software

Oct 16, 10:42 AM

Current Headlines: By John Markoff

For Cisco, Nortel, Avaya and the other companies that make telecommunications equipment, Tuesday is a sort of D-Day.

Bill Gates plans to introduce Microsoft's invasion into their business, with a new line of software for what the company calls "unified communications." That means it is meant to integrate all the ways that people talk to each other: voice, video, instant messaging and more elaborate forms of online collaboration.

If successful, this software will accelerate the shift of communications from specialized devices and networks onto Internet- based networks, desktop PCs and microprocessor-based servers. And that, in turn, could challenge the economics of the remarkably profitable telecommunications industry.

Microsoft is opening a new front in its software strategy that mimics its Windows and Office approach to desktop and corporate computing.

On Tuesday Gates and his lieutenant, Jeff Raikes, will focus on marketing three software packages: Microsoft Communications Server 2007; a client software application dubbed Microsoft Office Communicator 2007; and a collaboration program, Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

Now, he argues, the economics of the microprocessor and the Internet will alter the way we communicate.

"As more and more of our communications and entertainment is transmitted over the Internet thanks to e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, and the emergence of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), and other protocols, a new wave of software-driven innovations will eliminate the boundaries between the various modes of communications we use throughout the day," he wrote in a memo that will be distributed as part of his presentation in San Francisco on Tuesday.

As he has done previously, Gates holds out the hope that in this new converged communications world software will protect us from constant interruption.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

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