Microsoft Is Ready to Supply a Phone in Every Computer

Microsoft Is Ready to Supply a Phone in Every Computer: "'Microsoft is going to suck the value out of the telecommunications companies,' said David Isenberg, a former Bell Laboratories researcher who has written about the impact of the Internet on traditional communications networks. 'Microsoft is going to do end-to-end Internet telephony, and they're going to do it right.'"

I was reminded of this 2001/06 NYT article recently by all of the Skype-related threads. While Windows Messenger certainly hasn't "sucked the value out of telecommunications companies" yet, given firewall and NAT traversal challenges, I think the integrated PC telephony scenarios are still going to come to fruition much faster than most people expect.