FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Cisco and Microsoft on collision course

Timely Financial Times reality check 

Could the latest threat to Microsoft’s desktop software ambitions come not from Google, or some other online rival, but from Cisco Systems?

That is the question being pondered by some technology analysts in the wake of Cisco’s $3.2bn deal to acquire WebEx, a web-based conferencing and business collaboration company.

They may have started from different ends of the technology spectrum, but over the past few years, Cisco – the world’s biggest maker of data networking equipment, and Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company – have found themselves increasingly on a collision course in the burgeoning market for corporate telephone, teleconferencing and other “unified communications” services.

Source: FT.com / Companies / Media & internet - Cisco and Microsoft on collision course