Bill Gates Presents the One (Really Big) Ringy Dingy

From The New York Times - For Cisco, Nortel, Avaya and the other companies that make telecommunications equipment, this Tuesday is a sort of D-Day.

That 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 it is 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. | Read full article