This is a companion/sidebar article to a much longer article about Cisco ("Cisco's Display of Strength") in the latest issue of Fortune
With Cisco touting its own approach to unified communications, is there a Betamax-VHS battle looming?
[Bill Gates:] There's plenty of room for both Cisco and Microsoft to be very successful in this space. There will be some ways that our things can work together, because we've worked with Cisco on a lot of the network and security initiatives. But there's very direct competition here too. Cisco has offered an IP phone system for some time, and our Office Communications Server uses Internet telephony to let you track what's going on with your colleagues and makes it easy to set up a screen-to-screen-type call. Cisco acquired WebEx, and that competes directly with what we call Live Meeting, which is our screen-sharing piece that allows people to talk and work on a document at the same time. But I think we should have the advantage, because we can create the overall user experience.
See the article for more Q&A
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