Carl Tyler's Blog

Category None
Jim Hu of CNET wrote an article today "Microsoft is all business with IM", no prizes for figuring out where you have already seen products that can do this. In fact they let you do this with Office 2000 and later, no costly upgrades or additional server deployments if you're using Sametime (IBM Lotus Instant Messaging), although the Microsoft positioning is probably seen as being stronger as it is from a single vendor. It's also typical Microsoft strategy, by building usage of a weaker product by bundling with the stronger one. Microsoft Outlook was doing nothing against Domino until they bundled it "free" into Microsoft Office. You still need to buy a Microsoft LCS license to use their IM product within Office etc. just like you need to buy a mail CAL to use Outlook, but their customers always seem to forget that.

I believe presence and awareness within applications is going to become more and more important, anyone else have any thoughts?