The Jeff Pulver Blog: Guest Blogger: Blake Irving, Corporate Vice President, Communications Services, Microsoft

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March 13, 2006

Guest Blogger: Blake Irving, Corporate Vice President, Communications Services, Microsoft

(Blake Irving will be giving an Industry Perspective at Spring 2006 VON on Thursday, March 16th. Blake is a long-time member of the VON community and was amongst the group of people who were at our first VON event, Spring 1997 Voice on the Net (VON) in San Francisco in April, 1997.)

What's really wrong with voice calling today for consumers? It's reliable and works all around the world, setting the bar for what high quality means. Our research shows that consumers won't tell you they think voice calling is really broken. Consumers will tell you it could be cheaper, or their cell phone could be reached in more areas, but that's not really innovation from a consumer's perspective. That's just pricing and coverage. Even if you throw in call forwarding and a bunch of other Class 5 features... it's not really "breakthrough" in consumers' minds.

So what would really move the meter? What customers can tell you is that they have too many disassociated ways to communicate. They have email, instant messaging, a home or work phone, a cell phone, their Blog or their "Space" -- and they can tell you that while these disassociated communications tools work by themselves, they tend not to work together. They have an email address book, they have an IM buddy list, they have speed dials on their work phone, home phone, and cell phone, and if they change one of them, they don't get changed in the others. The lack of connection between the lists, the contacts, and the experiences, is very frustrating and any consumer can tell you this. The younger the consumer, the more hardened their opinion that this is completely broken. Most 20 something's or teens use more of these communications tools than most 40 something's - so the problem, to them, is even more acute.

Over the past years I've held a somewhat unpopular view in this forum that VoIP, aka talking and listening, is just another verb that hangs off your contact list. It's an important one to be sure, but it isn't the end all. However, talking is perhaps the most important enabler of the other verbs (sharing, learning, finding, gaming, viewing etc) on which you can take action on line, and I think that is something that causes voice to rise above in many ways. At MSN and within Windows Live Services we are architecting voice with this vision in mind. If you think about Xbox Live and the use of voice, it complements game playing, if you think about Messenger and voice, in more cases than not, it complements video. In fact, in January 2006, MSN Messenger customers used our voice or video capability for 1.9 billion minutes. Roughly 1.1 billion of those minutes were in video, with voice. The other 800 million minutes on Messenger were voice in a regular IM session usually accompanied by another activity, be it sharing photos, surfing web sites, or Text IM..

Our investments in VoIP over the coming years from a services perspective will be along the lines of what I'm describing here. We will be integrating voice into experiences (those verbs) that users spend time doing on line. Buying, selling, trading, searching, playing games, taking care of each others PCs, scheduling events, planning vacations -- all of these things are made better with VoIP and we will be investing heavily there.

We will be ensuring that these great experiences move seamlessly across devices with a single connected contact list, so if you update one of your contacts in one experience, that record is updated everywhere. In fact, we've architected this ecosystem so if one of your contacts updates their contact record, it updates for you and you never even have to think about it. Of course we'll continue to invest in improving voice quality as the industry has improved to ensure that there is no barrier to adoption there.

Sure, there are many who look at VoIP as an application all by itself, and this perspective is as valid as mine, but from where we're sitting, the real richness is in unifying all the things you do online around the people and information you care the most about. That's what we're building as a Key Component of Windows Live Experiences and that's the vision we're using as our architectural foundation.

Tags: voip, von, Microsoft, Blake Irving

(c) 2006 Jeff Pulver. All Rights Reserved.
(This blog posting is copyright protected by Jeff Pulver. Portions of this blog posting may be quoted or abstracted if attributed.)

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