What's Old Is New
Some of us remember writing about this more than a decade ago. This magical beast was to make all of our incoming communiques—voice mail, fax, e-mail, smoke signals—available to us from one easily accessible place: our mailbox. From there we could view speech-to-text converted voice mail, or listen to text-to-voice-converted e-mail. Oh joy.
Somehow, this never took off. But now, Microsoft is back at it with its promised Exchange Server 12. Never mind that it will ship—next year or the year after—without the perpetually promised relational store Microsoft has talked about for years. But, it will have unified messaging that will work, says Redmond.
The Exchange folks last week talked with great glee about how E-12 will enable even the smallest companies to deploy automated voice-mail attendants. The immediate response from some to that is probably that the one thing the world needs less of is automated voice attendants. Perhaps sensing this ambivalence, Mr. E-12 jumped in fast: “It&'s OPTIONAL!” he noted.
Microsoft ain&'t alone in this journey back to the future.
Get ready for IBM to mount a retreat from its Workplace branding at Lotusphere next month in (hopefully sunny) Florida. You remember Workplace—it&'s the name change/product that threw the already-beleaguered Lotus Notes/Domino constituency into total chaos.
Instead of the already-problematic IBM WebSphere/ Lotus Notes confusion, IBM threw a whole other monkey wrench in with Workplace. Nice job, fellas.
As one pundit said: “Don&'t be throwing out new names. Just tell people the truth, that products evolve.”
The word “evolve” may be an understatement when you talk about moving from a nonrelational to a relational store, but what the heck.
Videoconferencing, like the year of the LAN that was promised 10 years before it ever happened, looks like it&'s for real now with VoIP. The gap between mouth movements on video and actual sound bites is getting shorter.
And finally, isn&'t this whole service-oriented-architecture (SOA) schmear just IBM&'s system application architecture (SAA) in heterogeneous sheep&'s clothing?
Discuss among yourselves and get back to me at (781) 839-1223 or via e-mail at [email protected].