Me Too, Me Also, Me Copy

Andy Abramson has a story about Microsoft having a story on “presence enabled” communications. Andy Abramson is a little late on this one… I wonder why reactive experts are only blattering about the visible. And why above all, do they have hair thin memories.

The actual brilliance is not in Parus for using the phone call result as an indicator. Not using a dial tone when you are in the phone business would be a crime. The brilliance is not in Iotum for adding a web interface to a server based preference store and filtering the call session requests. I have explained in earlier post why I have always believed presence to be the next dial tone, and why Iotum is still short of providing the expected value. Citing these players is only a justification for a post about Microsoft being a little heavy on the dinosaurs scale. But everyone knows this, so much for the Me Too.

What Andy is missing about Microsoft is that they presented their road map and they are just executing on it. Everything about “presence enabling” communications and office application was written down when the “Real Time Communication” server was unveiled a few years ago. At the time, I agree, Microsoft was not making a great innovation. It was just building up the ideas laid down by the PAM (Presence and Availability Management) forum on how to leverage presence states and user based rules to derive an “availability”. That may not have been brilliant, but it shows that someone had picked up the idea and seen the potential. Andy did not, as far as I recall. That Microsoft execution time may be longer than in other companies, and that in the end the innovation has become a “dead ringer”, this is not a scoop. So much for the Me Also.

Andy is also missing the final point: Microsoft flawed execution will make it to every corporate America’s desktop. And that is brilliance. Not on technological innovation, but on human behaviour understanding. Lesson to be learned for a marketing professional?

Indeed, if imitation is the highest form of flattery, many out there will be thanking Andy for bashing Microsoft without constructive arguments. Maybe after all is it easier and more comfortable to “join the crowd”… So much for the Me Copy.

Technorati Tags: XMPP, SIP, VoIP, Presence, Antecipate