Steve Ballmer said yesterday in Tokyo that MS will include a unified messaging solution into Windows Vista. As usual this led to quite some sarcasm among the not so few Microsoft haters. (see e.g Heise Online comments) This announcement was not news, though, but had been published a year ago with Microsoft's acquisition of a VoIP company from Switzerland: MediaStreams. The company founders are ex-Siemens PBX people from Switzerland who had enough of big company politics and started their own venture, worked very hard for many years, struggled to stay alive but always found some more money from investors and then were super happy to be bought by Microsoft - another small company...

Well, I don't want to be too sarcastic now, also because we saw the product about two years ago and were quite impressed with the integration into MS Outlook and MS Exchange, the overall performance and in particular the useability. Not sure what they have done now since end of last year since the product was completely finished. At least their pay checks will now come on time. What the product does is summarized here:

• Works with Microsoft Outlook.
• Incoming calls show up like e-mails and can be organized the same way. (e.g. copied or forwarded). They can also be stored.
• The MS address book can also be used to make calls or to derive phone numbers from incoming calls - when available.
• The architecture does not require a separate IP-PBX but works as a distributed solution where two clients in the LAN establish a point-to-point connection between each other.
• The calling feature set is extremely rich and is reminiscent of a high-end PBX, which shows the background of Mediastream's founders (PBX world). Advantage now is that those functions can be accessed and used from Outlook.

Since we are not using Outlook but Thunderbird and use Skype for VoIP calls we won't use their stuff. But I can see that many folks will like the VoIP functions. This time the Open Source community has already arrived with Asterix and will soon have its usual enemy - Microsoft - to motivate them to be better.

That VoIP business is getting a tough one, as shown by such actions as the recent "Skype China plot". It is becoming incredibly difficult to differentiate by saying "save money with cheap calls". Now Jahjah (Israeli company with headquarters in Mountain View, CA) is trying a new marketing coup by offering FREE calls between phones. How does that work? If you and your to-be-called party are both registered with Jahjah, then calls are for free in the Zone 1 and Zone 2 areas.

The new thing now is that calls are set up between your phones and not your PCs, since most users prefer to talk through their phones. So you can do a call from your cell phone to someome else's cell phone or landline phone. They also have some plugins/support for Outlook, Firefox, Mac address book and Plaxo.

The business model/strategy is obviously to get a critical mass of subscribers quickly and then make money with premium services and probably with ads. If this does not happen fast enough they will use up their money and shut down (or sell) I assume.
Truly entrepreneurial, I must say. I assume if you still want to succeed in the VoIP space you have to do such things. That alone deserves respect I think for Jahjah! Good luck, guys. We will try it now too.