Productivity applications run at the desktop. That seems pretty obvious, and it's been true ever since the PC became the productivity tool of choice. But until recently, VOIP (voice-over-IP) applications for the desktop were plenty scarce because developing them was a major integration headache. That's about to change for several reasons.....(full article)


Bill Gates 2002 WinHEC Conference Keynote Address

BILL GATES: Well, good morning. I enjoy the yearly opportunity to talk about what’s happened in PC hardware and software and the opportunities the industry has there.
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Well, to show you some of how concretely we see these productivity advances let me ask Mike Van Flandern to come on up and step through some of the things we’re doing to see with this evolving PC client.

MIKE VAN FLANDERN: Thanks, Bill.

All right, our vision for the future is that the PC and the telephone will be tightly integrated and that’s going to enable people to be more productive. One example of that is users will be able to reach people by their name rather than using phone numbers.

Now, I need to call Dave Williams and traditionally what I would have done is look his name up in my rolodex and then enter it in my dial pad. I could, if he were online, send him an instant message using my buddy list.

Instead, what I’m going to do here is use my buddy list in my Windows Messenger to initiate a PC to cell phone call.

So I right-click on Dave’s name and I say Make a Phone Call and Dave’s phone number is right there for me. This is a phone number that Dave’s maintained with his profile. So I could click on that PC but because handsets are a familiar device for using voice telephony or voice communication I’m going to use a USB handset for this demo. And I’m just going to press send here on the handset; I could do it on the PC as well, and initiate a call.

And the important thing when integrating a PC and a telephone is that you integrate the signal.

DAVID WILLIAMS: David Williams?

MIKE VAN FLANDERN: Hey, Dave, it’s Mike. I just called to let you know you’re up next.

DAVID WILLIAMS: Yeah, I’ve got everything ready for the demo.

MIKE VAN FLANDERN: All right, thanks. See you in a few.

DAVID WILLIAMS: See you in a minute.

MIKE VAN FLANDERN: Now, the important thing again is that the signaling be integrated and it’s possible for the phone and the PC to coexist. In this particular demo I used a USB phone for the audio input, the Windows Messenger client as my session initiation protocol client or SIP client and Windows Messenger being included in XP there are over 17 million users for the SIP clients. And then lastly we have a phone gateway on the back end. Windows has relationships with several telcos, Windows Messenger has a relationship with several telcos, including Telus, Telstra and Voicestream, with more relationships on the way.

In this particular demo I used the PC as the end point for the voice. If you do that we need to address things like quality of the audio input on the PC, reliability and availability of the PC, which means possibly looking at watchdogs for the client, addressing boot time and recovery or wake on ring.

Now I’m going to address some inbound call scenarios. For this I subscribe to a notification service so that when an inbound call comes I receive an instant message notification on my PC.
Here I can see Dave Williams is trying to reach me, so I’m going to click on his name and it brings up the Outlook call journal or my Outlook log, and this has a list or history of all of my interactions with Dave, and it automatically adds the current call to the log and I can even choose to record it, if I want to.

Now, the key point here is I could have just as easily associated that incoming call notification with other functionalities such as routing or filtering, say I’d like to have all my mother-in-law’s calls go directly to voice mail, for example. (Laughter.)

Now, let me summarize the power of integrating the PC with the phone. Today we believe they’re going to be integrated. Today we’re doing this demonstration by having the phone be the device on the PC. In the next couple of years your desktop phone is going to be tightly integrated with the PC. If you use your work PC as the end point for voice, we need to improve the reliability and the availability of the PC, as well as the audio input system.

Well, with that, Dave should be ready so I’m going to turn things over to him.

DAVID WILLIAMS: Thanks, Mike. (Applause.)
What’s the interesting thing is a real call from the PC out over the Internet live to a phone back stage; now they can track you down anywhere.

So what I’d like to talk about in productivity advances is actually some research that Microsoft or the Microsoft Research Group has done around multi-monitor and productivity gains we can get around that. It’s also an attempt on our part to see how much screen real estate we can actually display at WinHEC.
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The focus on the innovation I think is very healthy right now. People are really thinking about things that are good, long-term contributions, a lot of cooperation with the industry understanding that this is what it takes to get growth going, some tough architectural challenges in the areas of the trustworthy computing but again a key element to bolt this together.

And so for all of us in this industry it takes a long-term view to do these tough things but the payoff both in a business sense and the impact we have is really quite phenomenal.

So I thank you for your efforts and look forward to the cooperation that will come out of these initiatives.