I'm underwhelmed by "Instanbul", Microsoft's recently announced real-time collaboration client. Some of the capabilities sound very helpful -- eg, indicating what type of device other people are using, the consolidated address book, and telephony integration. It appears to be an staid evolution of Windows Messenger, but that's all. I was hoping Microsoft would pull off something revolutionary. For example:
- Kill the idea of a separate client for displaying presence and doing instant messaging, and tightly integrate all of those features directly into Outlook. Why force people to have two clients for communication and collaboration? Or three, once the browser for SharePoint access is added. I don't like the idea of separate clients for separate servers, especially when the clients are facilitating the same paradigm: enabling human communication through text and document exchange.
- Unify the data repository for storing emails and IMs. Given its evolutionary design, users will still have to manually cross-reference a communications history split between email messages and instant messages. Sure, knowledge workers have been forced to do this for years, but ... it's time for a productivity jump through the merging of these two mediums.
In all the arm waving and trumpet blasting associated with this announcement, the reality is that this will impact only a small slither of the market. Firstly it's focused on corporate customers, because they are the only segment that will install and deploy the two additional backend servers to enable Instanbul. Secondly, in order to get the best experience out of it, a fork-lift upgrade is required of desktops (to Windows XP), office applications (Office 2003 System), and the server room (Windows 2003 Server, Exchange 2003, Portal Server 2003, LCS 2003, etc., etc.,). That market will grow over the next 5 years, but it will be very small mid-2005.
Did I miss something?
