My friend Paul Kapustka wrote this over on GigaOm:

Microsoft's long, slow, road to VoIP

If it makes so much sense to embed voice into productivity apps, why is it taking so long for Microsoft to offer a compelling VoIP product? Tuesday’s announcement of a private beta planfor some selected enterprise shops — not starting until after the 2007 baseball season will already be underway at best — is an underwhelming statement of progress.

As Paul points out, everyone got excited when Steve Ballmer "made VoIP a priority" in a speach in Tokyo recently, but since then, nothing from Redmond of any note. Paul's not the only one watching Microsoft. I headed over to the my own RSS feed for unified communications and found these recent items:

There are several stories about HP and Microsoft. The underlying thrust I got from looking them over is Microsoft is talking about customers wanting to partner with vendors. HP talks about solutions.

Q&A: Company Leaders Discuss New Alliance to Offer ’HP & Microsoft ...
HP, Microsoft launch enterprise alliance
Microsoft Joins HP in New Enterprise Blitz
Microsoft and HP Team on Enterprise Strategy

We can easily leave the HP alliance and move to Nortel.

Nortel outlines roadmap for Microsoft partnership

The telecoms and networking equipment vendor will also turn its MCS5100 SIP application server into the high-end conferencing server to accompany the software giant's Office Communications Server (OCS), according to Paul Rowe, head of Nortel enterprise solutions marketing for the EMEA region.

These and several other technological developments are the result of the partnership between Toronto, Ontario-based Nortel and Microsoft, the official name for which is now the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA).

This looks like all Nortel doing the talking. Doing the work. And taking the risk. I may have expected that in the Nortel/Microsoft relationship. Microsoft absolutely needed Nortel to shore up their credibility with some actual understanding of telephony, since there hasn't been much of that in Redmond. Nortel is starting to teel a reasonably good story here. Microsoft isn't saying much.

Then again, Microsoft splashed the news:

Microsoft releases beta of unified communications hub
Microsoft releases Office Communications Server 2007 into private beta.
Microsoft's goal to provide a unified communications infrastructure for the enterprise moved forward with the release of a private beta of software it sees as its communications hub.

The company released Office Communications Server 2007 to about 2500 IT professionals in a private beta, says Paul Duffy, a group product manager at Microsoft.

It's the first time Microsoft has offered software for making voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) part of integrated communications services alongside corporate instant messaging, e-mail, video conferencing all running on one IP network, he says.

2500 hand picked users in a private beta? How very un-Microsoft. And the reaction from everything I've seen as been ho-hum.

See also
Private Beta Begins for Voice Server 2007

Microsoft releases unified communications hub for testing

Microsoft Opens Private Beta of Office Communications Server 2007

Some of you may be asking why the Microsoft thoughts. It's because I read a fascinating blog post today by Jevon MacDonald entitled 2007: The Year of Enterprise 2.0?. If you follow Web 2.0, Voice 2.0 and all other things 2.0, I highly recommend it. But here's the excerpt that triggered me to add Jevon's feed to my news reader - one of his predictions for 2007:

Microsoft will, as announced, bundle a wiki product with Sharepoint. This may be bundled into all of their versions of Sharepoint, or Sharepoint 2007 Gold Wiki Edition(tm) will become the 10th version of the sharepoint product line. This wiki functionality will NOT integrate nicely into other platforms, and when installed will probably languish unused.

That is perhaps the most lazer sharp, at the target prediction for 2007 I've seen. And I'll wager it's a bullseye.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, HP, Nortel, Unified Communications