Underwhelmed on the Road to Instanbul, Oct 22

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?

Comments

[dale johnson]

Well MS will not combine the databases for simple reasons. licensing and revenue. You can combine say Sharepoint, Exchange and Im into one database (Cause all the databases are really the same). You can put them all on a large rack of drives, allow for (sad to say) clustering of the systems and have 1 large messaging/collab system for each company.

What a great idea! I love it! It will never happen!

[Carl]

I can't argue with this:
"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. "

That's why 2 years ago, we chose to allow people to store their Sametime chats into the Outlook journal:
http://www.instant-tech.com/instant.nsf/root/itm.htm/$file/archive.jpg

If tiny little Instant can do it 2 years ago, why can't big old "innovative" Microsoft do it?

[Carl]

I think the issue of doing away with the IM client is a tough one, the reason being that people have mixed environments, so some may have outlook email and Sametime IM, or Notes mail and LCS IM, by removing clients you are asking customers to become more tied into a single vendor (so maybe Microsoft will do this when they have more share for enterprise servers). Really what Microsoft should do is open up the interfaces from the desktop apps that speak to the Microsoft client to be open, then any IM client can be used. The desktop apps are currently all using the MS Messenger client as the server for providing presence and awareness information.

[peter]

@Michael,

You are hard to impress :-)
You're right in stating it is not revolutionary. It is simply evolution, but in a pace clients can comprehense and adopt infrastructure and process wise.

The revolutionary stuff you write about will happen, but not in this phase. Compared to other solutions out there Microsoft is not doing all that bad.
The key exciting part of Istanbul is that Microsoft is finally making some steps on the VOIP path.

Become a Beta user and help Microsoft improve is my motto.